COMMUNICATING WITH THE DEAD

Among the ancient questions are: Is there life after death? If so, can the living communicate with the dead?

Anyone who's ever thought about dying has likely cobbled together an answer they can live with. Most world religions have done more than cobble; they've exquisitely designed complex ideas on the matter. Among these is Catholicism's "communion of saints" which asserts that everyone lives on after death to become an enduring community of souls who can relate to one another from both sides of the grave.

OK, lets see how that works....!

If you've taken the time to plumb the depths of the dead, there's an excellent chance you might be able to commune with their ideas. For instance, I intuit that Lincoln would have had some problems with today'sTea Party and anyone else who seeks to crush the role of government in our lives. He once fought with tens of thousands of lives to preserve that very government.

If I try to commune with Teddy Roosevelt, I'm pretty sure his robust trust-busting policies would be saying to today's plutocrats: Enough! It's once again time for you to stop reaping rewards tantamount to rape.

If FDR and I were in spiritual conversation, I'm pretty sure he would remind me how he loved his country so much that even he, himself an wealthy aristocrat, felt obliged to stand up to the "economic royalists" of his day.

Dad and I would surely have a wonderful conversation about the American Dream. As an immigrant, he dreamed it and then lived it. He became what is proudly known as a free enterpriser, only on a neighborhood not corporate scale. I still hear him saying "the business of America is business." Although I figure he would add there's an enormous ethical difference between neighborhood and corporate business.

Mom..? Well, we talk frequently. Just before I slip off to sleep at night. I often ask her -- and Dad too -- what was it like to start life with none of the securities and pleasures they gave their sons? Mom was raised in a gun-toting, turn-of-the-20thC mining town near Indian Territory in Arizona, while Dad grew up in the Chicago ghetto known as Little Sicily. How in the name of everything holy did you two emerge from such origins to become such saints?

They never answer that question, because I imagine they don't accept its premise. They were no more saints than was Lincoln, Teddy, and FDR. But still, I'm terribly happy I can keep in communication with such saintly souls. Who do you commune with at night...?