Recently, a 4th-grade teacher posted a video to social media of her telling her students, to their shock and disbelief, that she has a girlfriend because she is a lesbian.

You’ll see in this segment of the video that the children aren’t horrified by the revelation, but they’re truly shocked by it. Some of them refuse to believe it. Is it a problem that this teacher is sharing these things? Why is or isn’t it? Take a look at this clip, and then I’ll get into my thoughts.

Quiet part out loud: She actually sounds like a good teacher to me, considering her tone, her control of the room, and the kids’ connectedness to her.

Loud part a little louder, from a direction no one else seems to be covering: What’s wrong with this picture? It isn’t that she’s gay, and it isn’t that she’s a teacher. It’s that she’s sharing her lifestyle and relationship with 4th graders—a relationship that shouldn’t be presented as “just another option” among many.

Would this be a problem if she were straight and talking about her husband, or about how she recently got engaged to her boyfriend? No, right? But why not?

It’s fair and honest to ask “Why is it a problem in this case, and it wouldn’t be if she were straight?” She appears to be a good teacher, with a good relationship with her students who obviously care about her. What should it matter that she is talking about her girlfriend?

Before I go on, I have to make this absolutely clear: I’m not homophobic in the least. I come from media, and I’ve worked with and befriended a lot of gay people in the creative industry. To me, they’re just people and I take them as they are. I truly admired some of them, and there were a few of them that I deeply disliked—not because they were gay but because they were deeply unlikable.

I’m going to say some things here that are a little bit combustible in today’s culture, but they are things that need to be said rather than hidden. I don’t want any of this to be interpreted as “extreme right-wing,” I don’t believe gay people should be thrown in jail for being gay, and I don’t believe gay people should be the subject of violence. Everyone should be cared for and cared about equally as creatures made in God’s image. That’s not lip-service, it’s what I truly believe. But we shouldn’t be blind to the ways in which certain classes of persons are equal in dignity, but not equal in kind. We shouldn’t equally make space everywhere to accommodate or even indulge some of those fundamental differences.

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The thing that changes the situation is that her relationship is with a same-sex partner, and that isn’t something children should be conditioned to see as nothing more than “just another kind of relationship”. It isn’t.

Same-sex relationships—even between two nice people—are not relationships between two complimentary genders (not just bodies, but also minds, temperaments, and dispositions intrinsic to each of the genders), ordered toward life and building a family.

This is not something children should be taught to see as natural, normal, or merely one option among many [I’m skipping the crash course here on what “natural” and “normal” actually mean.]

Everyone who sees something wrong with this situation has to be able to argue why it’s wrong. And unless you’re basing your argument on something objective, there’s no argument to make. She seems like a good teacher. She seems like a lovely person. She doesn’t seem eccentric or extreme. So what exactly is the objective argument to make? The relationship she’s talking about is a break from a child’s development and natural dispositions regarding gender, relationships, and family.

That’s not something liberals will argue because many of them have a disfigured view of these things. But if you think it will be the conservatives to the rescue, you’ve got another thing coming.

“Just keep it in the privacy of your own home” and “love is love” are both lies

The core issue with conservatives, particularly modern conservatives, is that they, like their liberal counterparts, have stopped calling certain things unnatural or unacceptable. “Just keep it in the privacy of your own home” and “love is love” are both lies, and both are foolish positions to take.

Today we accept everything, even the unacceptable. We pretend that live and let live should be a guiding principle of civilization and the human order. I’m not suggesting we criminalize same-sex behavior. I just think there needs to be an acknowledgement that certain behaviors and lifestyles are not normal, even if they’re normative, and they’re not natural, even if people freely choose to live the way they live.

It’s normal and natural to protect children from things that can cause them harm or that threaten their natural development toward their personal excellence. When we start calling abnormal things normal and unnatural things natural, we remove the guard rails that used to guide and inform how we protect our children and what we protect them from.

Care to get al little deeper?

A gay couple in the UK was recently convicted of sexually assaulting a toddler they had adopted.

The toddler died from wounds and injuries associated with, or resulting from, that abuse. When did same-sex parenting become normal? When it became acceptable for gay couples to adopt and form children. Sexual abusers come in all shapes, sizes, and sexual orientations, but if we’re saying it’s no more likely for a gay couple to abuse their adopted child than it is for a straight one, we’re just kidding ourselves and lying to each other.

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I’ve been hearing the same charge lately. Not from everyone . Usually it comes from people who already disagree with me, which I expect, but every now and then it comes from other Catholics. The charge is that I’m uncharitable.

I want to take it seriously, because I take charity seriously. But I also want to be honest about what’s actually going on, because I think most of the time the people leveling this accusation have a warped understanding of what charity is.

Here’s the thing I keep running into. When the object of your words is the correction of someone else, people tend to read boldness as cruelty. Confidence gets read as contempt. If you say something plainly, with conviction, and it happens to point out that someone is wrong, a certain kind of person will immediately file that under “uncharitable”. Not because of how you said it, but because you said it at all. The mere act of correcting becomes the offense.

That’s one error. There’s a second one that goes in the opposite direction, and it’s just as bad. Some people including, plenty of folks in Catholic media, have convinced themselves that as long as they’re telling the truth, they can be as nasty and as contemptuous as they like. They treat the dignity of the person they’re correcting as irrelevant. They’re right, after all, so what does tone matter? That’s not charity either. Being correct doesn’t license you to be cruel.

So you’ve got two ditches on either side of the road. On one side, the people who think any correction firm enough to land is automatically a sin against charity. On the other, the people who think being right excuses everything. Both are wrong, and both are doing damage.

But I want to spend most of this letter on the first error, because I think it’s the more common one in our moment, and the more corrosive. We have allowed ourselves to be gagged. The accusation of “no charity” has become a tool. It’s sometimes a deliberate one, used to shut people up and to shut them down. And it works, because most of us don’t want to be seen as unkind.

Here’s what that produces.

Someone has something true to say. They start to write it. Then they think about how it might hit, so they soften it. Then they soften it again. They polish it, and polish it, and round off every edge that might catch on someone’s feelings, until what’s left is so smooth and so qualified that it no longer says anything at all.

Truth has to be conveyed in a way that makes it receivable, don’t get me wrong. But it shouldn’t be filed down to nothing. If making it receivable means the Truth is obscured or changed then we’ve gone too far.

The 2000s have been plagued by a culture that expects truth to be chiseled down to something unrecognizable, and they call the result charity. It isn’t. It’s cowardice wearing charity’s coat, with Apologetics’ hat

Real charity wills the good of the other person. And sometimes the good of the other person is to hear plainly that they’re wrong. A father who lets his son walk off a cliff rather than risk an uncomfortable conversation doesn’t love his son more than the father who grabs him by the arm. He loves him less. He loves his own comfort, or his own image as a “nice” person, more than he loves the boy.

This isn’t a novel idea I’m inventing to defend myself. It’s old. It’s the consistent voice of the Church.

Augustine put it about as clearly as anyone could. In his commentary on the First Letter of John he writes: “Love, and do what you will... if you correct, correct out of love.” Notice what he’s actually saying. He doesn’t say don’t correct. He doesn’t say correction is the opposite of love. He puts correction right alongside silence, giving, and forgiveness as one of the ordinary expressions of charity. The question is never whether to correct. The question is the root. If the root is love, the correction is charitable, however firm it is.

John Chrysostom went further, and he had no patience for the idea that staying quiet is the safe, loving option. On the duty to speak up against sin he said: “It is an oppressive burden to remain silent. For this silence makes you an enemy to God.” Read that again. He’s saying the silence we congratulate ourselves for—the silence we mistake for gentleness—can actually be a betrayal. Not always; there’s a time to hold your tongue. But the reflexive silence that comes from not wanting to make anyone uncomfortable is not a virtue. Chrysostom thought it could make you God’s enemy.

And then there’s Gregory the Great, who saw exactly the dynamic I described above, the endless softening, fifteen hundred years before any of us. Writing about pastors in his Pastoral Rule, he warns about those who, “fearing to lose human favour, shrink timidly from speaking freely the things that are right.” He compares them to watchdogs who won’t bark and shepherds who run when the wolf shows up. Their silence isn’t kindness. It’s a failure of nerve dressed up as prudence, and Gregory says the people who might have been helped are instead left in their error.

That’s the whole problem in one image. The person who softens and softens until nothing is left thinks they’re being gentle. Gregory would say they’ve abandoned the flock.

So here’s where I am. I’ll own my faults gladly and I’m sure I get the tone wrong sometimes. If I ever cross from firmness to contempt, that’s my failure, and I own it. Dignity matters. The person on the other end is made in God’s image, and no amount of being right cancels that out. I take that side of it seriously too.

But I won’t accept the premise that boldness and clarity are the enemy of charity, or that the loving thing is always the softest thing. It’s modernity, it’s bullshit, and I reject it.

Sometimes love is gentle and sometimes love grabs you by the arm. The measure isn’t volume or comfort. It’s whether you actually want the good of the person in front of you and whether you care enough about the truth to say it while it still has a shape.

That’s what charity is. The rest is just chiseling.

Language is beautiful to me, and what we’re able to do with sounds, letters, words, scripts is incredible. It shows the work of the hand of the God who made us in His image, it truly does!

I’ve loved music since I was very young and it’s one of the reasons why I love poetry. I like the musicality of it; the rhythm of the words and phrasing, and the word selection that reads like a melody.

I wrote this poem with that in mind, long and many a year ago. It’s a rare piece because it’s one of the few poems I’ve written that actually wrote it self. I was so moved in this moment that it was almost like I didn’t write it at all, it just poured out of me. I focused on what I was feeling, discerned its rhythm in my spirit, and came to the right words and sounds that could manifest it on the page—that could make it happen in the world as it existed in my heart. Much the same way that we happen in the womb as we exist in the mind of God.

This was a heartbreaker, this moment! But what I was writing about, I think I’ll keep to myself. As I read it now, I see it’s a little hard to interpret without knowing what inspired it, and it drifts a little here and there. But I hope you at least enjoy the music in it. I present it tonight as I wrote it then.

It’s called “Farewell to Harmony’

Farewell to Harmony!
No more will your tones my spirit sooth.
Nevermore will beauty be sung to me
in the dark of my solitude
Haunting silence shall now my soul pervade

Through my years you’ve brought peace to my ears
In the terrible night you would spite my fears—
bringing order to the chaos of my broken heart.
With timeless song; sweetly sung, Harmony

As a child I met you.
Through my years I have known you.
As a man I have grown in loving you.
But now that music must sadly, sadly die!

The death knell is ringing, ringing out your countless names
And I hear you crying out in the distance;
Clasping the mighty ages
which now must settle in their graves.

Now the child who said hello to you
Must chin-up, dry his eyes.
And the man who grew to love you
Must somehow say goodbye

But now without finale
without one last love-swelling phrase
I will love you now and ever
beyond the closing of my days.

And fade to silence. Good night, my friends
-TJ

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A good Catholic attitude starts with the humility to accept correction and to at least consider that your conclusion may be wrong, or may need adjustment.

I’ve lived my life according to this, and I know it to be difficult, and occasionally interiorly painful. I don’t do it perfectly. Sometimes I have to try again—revisit and reconsider whatever it is that’s challenging what I think I know. (

Video clip is from episode, “Catholic Attitude”)

As fallen creatures we seek the least resistance, and we avoid what brings pain or discomfort. But if we want to be saints, we have to act in opposition to our fallen desires and tendencies.

Believe it or not I’m not interested in being right, I’m interested in being correct. When people correct me, I’m better off. I’m not saying it’s an easy attitude to master but it’s what we should all strive to achieve.

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I’ve been involved in evangelization and apologetics since I was a young teenager. My disposition was that of a defender of my fellow Catholics. It wasn’t about defeating “the opponent” it was about making a display of my opponent’s inability to make a superior argument, because I wanted other Catholics to be confident about being Catholic. It was about them not about me.

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I’m not saying that’s the best reason to get into apologetics and evangelization, but it just happened to be what got me involved in it. Anyway…

Things have changed a lot since those younger days. Had you told me that one day I’d be constantly put on trial by other Catholics for standing up for the Truth—for the Church, the Magisterium, the teaching from doctrine and scripture—I would have thought you were writing an episode of The Twilight Zone, not telling a story from my future reality. But here we are!

(The original Note is linked below, followed by the full text)

So it’s time to bring Rod Serling back to life for a moment and have “him” open this episode of my life in his classic voice. Imagine this…

Fade in, closeup on Rod Serling…

“Portrait of a man—a Catholic man—who has committed no crime, broken no rule, and stirred no rebellion. His offense is far more subtle, and far more dangerous in the eyes of his peers: he believes what the Church teaches, and stands firm with its teaching body.

For this transgression, he will stand trial… not before skeptics, atheists, or the ghosts of history, but before fellow Catholics who see fidelity as a threat, and obedience as a provocation.

In a moment, he’ll step across an invisible threshold into a place where clarity becomes confusion, where loyalty is called suspicion, and where the simple act of standing with the Magisterium places him squarely in the dock. The court is now in session… and the verdict waits for him in a strange little jurisdiction known only as—The Twilight Zone.”

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“Psycho” (1960)

This Alfred Hitchcock thriller is about a young woman on the run who checks into a lonely roadside motel run by the nervous, soft-spoken Norman Bates and his unseen mother. What begins as a story of theft and guilt quickly turns into a terrifying exploration of identity, repression, and madness.

My Take

Though Hitchcock—himself a Catholic—wasn’t trying to give a theology lesson, “Psycho” is about the disintegration of conscience and the corruption of the soul through secret sin.

Norman Bates’s split identity isn’t a moral struggle between good and evil, but a psychological reflection of what happens when the conscience is corrupted.

His “Mother” persona represents a warped moral voice—conscience turned tyrant—that destroys rather than guides.The film becomes a dark parable about guilt festering without grace, and how the absence of repentance leaves a person divided and dehumanized as sin and guilt lead to corruption of the mind and soul.

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“Dracula” Universal Studios, 1931.
Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye, Edward Van Sloan. Directed by Tod Browning

Beneath its Gothic horror, Dracula is a story about the corruption of life, the loss of the soul, and the triumph of light over darkness. It dramatizes the Catholic understanding of evil as being parasitic and unable to create. Evil can only corrupt and consume.

Catholic lens

Evil Cannot Create — It Can Only Feed

Evil as parasitic: Dracula mirrors the devil, and evil itself. He has no life of his own and must feed on the living, as the devil has no “life” (he is damned) and preys on those who are promised eternal life. Dracula’s immortality is a counterfeit of resurrection, sustained by theft rather than grace.

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The inversion of the Eucharist: The vampire drinks blood to sustain himself; Christ gives His Blood to give life. Dracula’s act is a blasphemous parody of the sacrament.

Faith as defense: Crosses, holy water, and consecrated hosts repel him. They are not superstitious trinkets or magical props, but sacred signs bound to the victory of Christ. In the Catholic imagination, evil does not fear decoration; it recoils from what belongs to God. These objects matter because they point beyond themselves to grace, the Cross, and the Lord whose life is stronger than death.

“It’s a reflection of how sin enslaves the will when it consents to evil.”

Corruption of the will: Victims like Lucy or Mina lose not just life but freedom. Dracula does not merely kill; he possesses, bends, and gradually remakes the person according to his own hunger. It’s a reflection of how sin enslaves the will when it consents to evil. First by fascination, then by surrender, and finally by bondage.

Continues below

Christ’s Victory: The hero’s weapon isn’t violence alone but faith — a stake through the heart is symbolic of restoring death to oneself and defeat of our lower desires (vices). What began Dracula’s real downfall? He didn’t subscribe to Stoking the Embers when he had a chance to choose the Good instead of ultimately being consumed by evil.

Did you enjoy this one? Let me know by commenting, Liking, and/or sharing it. God bless you, guys!

Lonesome Boulevard

Sad and lonely after my girlfriend at the time had left for the Midwest to return to school, I wandered the streets late on a Friday night, looking for a bit of solace in a few moments of urban solitude. I enjoy a walk when I need to ponder, reflect or process. I especially like walking at night when the world is more quiet and still, and just alive enough to be interesting enough to be in the midst of for a while.

Along a side street I came across an old book store that I’d never noticed, despite being in that part of town a few times before. An old, dusty place that looked like a character in a Chris Morley story. Maybe not a haunted bookshop, but haunting for sure.

“Well this should be interesting!”

Old News

When I walked in, the creak of the hinges that held the weathered wood and glass door, and the “ding-a-ling” of the bell that it slapped as it opened confirmed that I was stepping into something old—something that defies our time by standing steadily in its own.

“And me, leaving the house without my derby!

The place was definitely dusty. The owner was dustier, with a half-folded newspaper in one hand, which he read while sipping from a teacup in the other. Kind of late in the day for a newspaper!

“That’s old news now.” I said, teasingly gesturing toward the newspaper. He bested me with “Older than you!”

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He unfolded the paper revealing the cover page; an issue of the Daily News from 1955. The Brooklyn Dodgers had made history that year by winning their first World Series, beating the New York Yankees 2-0 in game seven, which was a monumental achievement for the Dodgers. The paper celebrated the victory on their front page with the headline “Who’s a Bum!”—kind of a nod to the team’s nickname, the “Bums.” It was a major point of pride for Brooklyn in ‘55, and even ‘in my day’ it still lingered and resonated in Brooklyn culture and lore.

Why he was reading that issue that night, and why on earth he had this gem from ‘55 folded like yesterday’s news is a story for another time.

The Bookshop

As the conversation with the shop owner faded, my attention drifted to the rows of bookcases that called out to me like a familiar blanket. Down two narrow steps, just beyond a worn Persian rug, my adventure continued.

This was definitely a used bookstore. There were no new titles—or new books—but the shelves were organized and filled with both history and history books, as well as philosophy, religion, linguistics, classical literature, and poetry. You didn’t buy books there, you bought a snapshot of the legacy of the culture and knowledge of man.

I browsed around a bit, at first admiring the old shop and the interior of its design and construction, more than the volumes on the shelves. It was all real! Real wood, everywhere. Real Wainscoting along the walls. Those walls were real, too. Solid plaster, not drywall. High ceilings with ornate tin paneling capped this museum of old-time artisanship. Cove molding joined the walls and the ceiling, and wood carved cherubs watched over me from the corners.

Every detail was beautiful and precise—even the details you wouldn’t expect someone to ever notice or care about.

“This place! This was when people still gave a damn…About everything.”

Chapter Markers

Eventually I started to pay more attention to the books than the shop. Many of them were bound in that old-days way when cloth binding was considered more affordable than more traditional leather, but was still more elegant and tasteful than what we do today in most hardcovers

I wondered about the many hands that held these books, and the persons who read from their pages. Each book seemed like a keeper of secrets of many, many readers past. Real story tellers. They might tell you who first held this copy of Wuthering Heights or the highlights of that reader’s life, during the time it took them to come to “The end”?

Was this copy of Huckleberry Finn some young boy’s escape to adventure from the boredom—or hardships—of his real life? “What did you see in his face,” I’d ask “as he came to your most exciting pages? Excitement? Surprise? Joy?”

Now, on to the Poetry section.

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Poetry was less familiar to me than literature. In English classes throughout my schooling we’d only briefly covered poetry. Enough to discover it, but not enough to really explore and appreciate it. As an adult, it was a world of mystery to me so I thought a brief traversal though these shelves would be a more refreshing distraction from my melancholy mood.

The section was a single bookcase of about eight or nine shelves. I was surprised there was so much poetry in circulation, the shelves were so populated. Scanning across the weighty shelves, I came across the most nondescript binding you’ve ever never-seen. It should have been lost in that sea of book spines on that shelf but it somehow jumped out from the shelf, as if it was the only book there. Or the only one intended for me.

It was the Complete Works of William Wordsworth.

“I’ve heard of this guy!”

I drew the volume from the shelf, like calling Lazarus out of that tomb, and began to put it to the test. The first test of a worthy book was the smell test. Does this smell like a print shop, or does it smell like it escaped the Titanic?

“Titanic!”

Should I be grossed out by that smell? Is that mold or just a harmless ‘musty’ smell? I dunno, to me it smells like time and wisdom. It smells like a forgotten world, to the great loss of all civilization. I love the smell of old books—even if they aren’t old by time, but just old by use, and exposure to the world.

Smell test: Passed! Next test, the hunt. This consisted of fanning through the pages while counting a random number, and seeing if what I read on the page I landed on intrigued me enough to want to read more of it. For “The Completed Works…” I think I went with the number seven. Don’t ask me why I remember that.

I shut my eyes, fanned through the pages starting from the back of the book, while calmly counting to seven. When I opened my eyes again I happened to be looking toward one of those cherubs in the corner on the ceiling; its tiny, pudgy hand appearing to point toward the book I was holding, as if to say with excitement “That’s the one!”

I looked down and saw that I had landed on “The World is Too Much With us”.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

“We have given our hearts away!”

I don’t know why that so struck me. The world, too much with us. And we, poor ‘we’, who have given our hearts away. I felt like I deeply understood it, and yet I had no idea. I knew it, and knew not why, like a lullaby I’d met again, many long years later.

I didn’t know the poem. I couldn’t explain it at the time, but somehow I knew what it was saying to me. It happens with poetry, I’ve learned. There’s something spiritual and transcendent about it that we recognize its voice even if we don’t yet understand its language.

“I’ll take it!” I thought. Though as I closed the book and felt its binding between my palms, it felt like it was already mine.

I checked out and took a last look at the bookshop before I left it. I had to take it in and appreciate the beauty of the humanity that went into everything in it. Every craftsman, artist, author, poet left something of themselves there. What they created carried a resonance of their dignity — like an echo revealing the voice behind it; an image of who they were, casting an accusing shadow over the present in unspoken indictment of modern man. “You have given our hearts away, trading the real and the true for the false, synthetic and vulgar.”

‘Head-ing’ Home

While waiting at a bus stop I read The World is Too Much With Us, again and again, thinking about the world and time I was living in. I couldn’t shake the sense that, for all we appear to have gained, we’ve really lost something essential—something vital—in our modern age. If our present is ever put on trial by our legacy, we’d be found guilty of at least one fundamental crime—forgetting. We’ve forgotten who we are, how to be and how to truly live and express the dignity God gave us. We’ve forgotten our heritage; lost our soul and squandered the inheritance left to us by generations that came before us. And so what we do, how we live, and what we create today tells the future generations that we don’t care, have no self-respect, prefer the sensual to the Good, the efficient to the Beautiful, and love neither God, or our fellowman. Show me a creation, and I can tell you about the creator. What will the future come to know about us, from the biographies ghostwritten by the detritus of our culture?

But there’s hope. we aren’t forced to live this way. We can choose to live another way and to be better. That bookshop was more than it seemed. It was a sanctuary and a beacon calling its visitors to remember what has been lost and forgotten. That remembrance can either accuse us—confronting our failure to live up to the dignity of those who came before—or inspire us to strive for something better than what we’re doing. Either way, it urges us to remember who we are, to reclaim forgotten dignity and our collective soul, and to orient our lives and work toward the transcendent; the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Words Worth a Lot

Here’s my interpretation of the rest of “The World is Too Much With Us” by Wordsworth, after many reads and a lot of pondering.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

”This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not

Out of tune! We’re moving too quickly, in too much of a rush to receive what God is sharing with us in the beauty and dynamism of the natural world. We don’t feel the rain, we just get wet. We don’t stop to watch the movement or formation of the clouds, we don’t see how God paints the sky. Really what we see there is something to post to Instagram where the artistry is killed, but lasts forever like a frog in formaldehyde. The artistry consists in the lived moment, not just in the art.

…Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

Would it be better to be a pagan raised on old mythology than be a part of our spiritually disconnected modern world? Though Wordsworth recognized paganism to be “a creed outworn” (obsolete beliefs) he contemplates whether that would be preferable, since the ancient pagans at least had a deep connection to nature.

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Maybe if he were standing in a meadow (“lea”) he might feel less lonely and spiritually lost, because he’d perhaps find God at least in nature.

My discovery of Wordsworth’s poetry led me to other romantics like Coleridge, Tennyson, and eventually other poets. For a time I wrote a bit of poetry, too. I was so animated by the works of these masters. Maybe a little too much, because when I look back on those poems now I see some pretense in them. But I wasn’t trying to imitate the masters so much as honor them. I was deeply inspired by them and I wanted to mirror the style of their prose; to bring it forward, the way that crowded bookshelf did for me that night.

Would you like to see what this episode in my life inspired? Let me close this piece by sharing one of my first poems with you.

Judge me kindly, dear reader. What you’re about to read was written by a starstruck kid who knew what he loved, but didn’t know what he was doing. I was tempted to revise this poem, but I decided to let it be ‘who’ it is—the good, the bad, the flaws and all. It’s honest, if nothing else. It tells the truth (what I wanted to say) , and tells it in Truth (the way I was able to say it). I feel like changing it would be a vulgarity. I hope you enjoy it.

I called this one “New Renaissance”

All at once, some day, we’ll ask ourselves
‘Whatever became
Of all the arts that soothed our smarts
Yet fell off all the same?’

While all the while we nourish
Mindless things for all we can.
And dare to lable ugliness
As some masterpiece of man

What has Art become today
But money, filth and greed?
Yet there is hope Resounding hope
And some might even say
The world’s false prophets follow
While God’s true artists lead.

And art will live within the hearts
Of those few it may choose
Be born again in their works
Their lives,
the paths they choose.

And in some distant day we’ll ask ourselves
‘Whatever became
Of all man’s wrecked, failed intellect
Which Art revived again?’

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