Author: Sal Umana

Sal Umana, a second-generation Sicilian-American, was born in Boston, in 1929, of parents who were Italian citizens, which makes him a de jure citizen of Italy, and therefore of the European Union. He attended Boston Latin School (the oldest public school in the U.S., founded in 1635), and instead of automatically going to Harvard, he went to a seminary and became a Catholic priest. After a varied career of 24 years working in 49 States, in Canada, in Italy, and the Caribbean, he left the active priesthood to become a psychotherapist and author. He is the author of The Midlife Crisis as a Crisis of Meaning, The Day God Died, The Day My Ego Died, and Back to Earth, as the third book of The Twin Towers Trilogy. Now, at age 91, Sal is dying his way into eternity, and learning that "dying every day is already eternal life."

Christmas 2025

~ Sal Umana ~ 3 Comments

For the past 60 years, I have been sending out a Christmas message to as many people as I had addresses for. But now that I am almost 97 and have just moved into Assisted Living at Casa Celeste in Seminole, Florida, I am fighting the temptation to “fageddaboudit,” as they used to say in Boston when I was a kid. Or, as my father used to say during the last few years I went home for Christmas, “Well, this will be my last Christmas.” Then he died at 94.

So, in case this is my last Christmas, I’d hate to deprive you all of the pleasure of hearing from me one more time. I remember well that the first thing my father would read in the daily Boston Globe was the obituaries. How I loved my dad—or “Puppa,” as we all called him. He would be 135 today, and he worked very hard to make this damn country much better than it was when he arrived here at age 14 in 1904. Thank God I.C.E. wasn’t around then, or I wouldn’t be writing this letter. But there was no illegal immigration then. As long as you didn’t have an incurable disease, they let you in, and you built the damn country with your bare hands and a pick and shovel up on the dirt roads of Maine.

Now you can guess where this Christmas message is going. This is a country of immigrants, starting with the Pilgrims, who in 1620 landed in Plymouth—about 30 miles from the pier in Boston where that young kid from Sicily landed. The natives didn’t really like the Pilgrims, who in turn didn’t like the Irish, who in turn didn’t like the Italians, who in turn didn’t like the Poles. But we married each other, and love somehow won—more or less. And their kids are really beautiful. Just look on my Facebook page and laugh your behind off at their names. They are now into the fifth generation, going on sixth, from Seattle to Florida.

I know we can’t have open borders, but why the reckless cruelty in deporting people as if they were animals? Why can’t we put all that money and manpower into creating a legal system that makes people wait in line so they can be absorbed into our society humanely? It sounds naïve and impossible, but Americans have always found a way when they had the will. Do we, the grassroots, have the will? The leadership won’t do it unless we demand it.

Call me naïve, but on Christmas we celebrate the birth of a Palestinian in an occupied country who was later executed by the government for teaching that people should treat each other as if we are all members of the same family, no matter what party we belong to or how much money or power we have.

I’m going to go on praying to Him, and I hope you will join me in praying for all our fellow Americans so we can together solve a problem that is tearing us apart.

Merry Christmas and Peace in 2026 for You and Yours,

Sal and Peggy Umana

AN ADVENT MEDITATION FOR DECEMBER 2025

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

Here is a beautiful piece borrowed from Mirabai Starr of the Center For Action and Contemplation:


Saying Yes to Our Lives


Mirabai Starr recounts how she came to say yes to God in her life as it is instead of how she imagined it should be:
“All my life, I have been enamored of the God-intoxicated ones. Those rarified souls who slip into ecstatic states and spontaneously utter poetry. The ones who exude deep stillness, embody equanimity, listen more than they speak. The initiated and the ordained, the monastics….


I wanted to be one of them. Until I didn’t.


I want you not to want that as well…. I want you to want to be exactly who you are: a true human person doing their best to show up for this fleeting life with a measure of grace, with kindness and a sense of humor, with curiosity and a willingness to not have all the answers, with reverence for life.


You do not need to chant all night in a temple in the Himalayas. You don’t have to be the newest incarnation of Mary Magdalene. It is not necessary to read or write spiritual books. You are not required to know the difference between Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism or memorize the Beatitudes. All you have to do to walk the path of the ordinary mystic is to cultivate a gaze of wonder and step onto the road. Keep walking. Rest up, and walk again. Fall down, get up, walk on. Pay attention to the landscape. To the ways it changes and the ways it stays the same. Be alert to surprises and turn with the turning of the seasons. Honor your body, train your mind, and keep your heart open against all odds. Say yes to what is, even when it is uncomfortable or embarrassing or heartbreaking. Hurl your handful of yes into the treetops and then lift your face as the rain of yes drops its grace all over you, all around you, and settles deep inside you.”

Mary at the Annunciation lifted up her face and the rain of Grace came down as the Word of God became flesh in her.
“Be it done to me, according to your word.”

The Sermon on the Mount is About Life on Earth, not in Heaven

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

Today, Richard Rohr’s meditation stated succinctly and clearly an insight into spirituality that I have been pondering for fifty years, but have never been able to express as clearly as today’s meditation did.

We were often taught that Jesus was talking about: “Blessed are the poor, the meek, those who suffer, those who grieve, etc., etc. BECAUSE THEY WILL BE REWARDED AFTER DEATH IN HEAVEN.”

Here, the meditation clearly states that Jesus was saying that the poor are blessed and fortunate because if they live in the presence of God, they will not suffer from being poor. They will be filled with joy, as Francis of Assisi was.

Blessed are the meek, the kind, the non-violent because they realize that they already possess the earth. It was given to them by their Father in heaven.

This is the meditation that we need to begin and end each day with. Happy Blessings.

“What Does It Mean to Be Blessed? Heaven begins now, for any saints willing to sign up.” —Barbara Brown Taylor, Always a Guest

Spiritual writer Barbara Brown Taylor considers the promise of “blessing” that is central to Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:

“We don’t have to wonder what a blessed life looks like. Jesus laid that out right at the beginning of his most famous sermon, though his description is so far from what some of us had hoped that we would rather discuss the teaching than act on it…. In this life, most of us pedal pretty hard to avoid going in the direction of Jesus’ Beatitudes. We read books that promise to enrich our spirits. We find all kinds of ways to sedate our mournfulness.

“According to Jesus, the blessings of the kingdom are available here and now—and later:

“The first words out of Jesus’ mouth are not ‘Blessed shall be’ but ‘Blessed are.’ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’—not because of something that will happen to them later but because of what their poverty opens up in them right now. ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’—not because God is going to fill them up later but because their appetites are so fine-tuned right now….

“When people who can’t stop crying hear Jesus call them blessed right in the basement of their grief, they realize this isn’t something they are supposed to get over soon. This is what it looks like to have a blessed and broken heart….

“When people who are getting beat up for doing the right thing hear Jesus call them blessed while the blows are still coming, they are freed to feel the pain in a different way. The bruises won’t hurt any less, but the new meaning in them can make them easier to bear. Who knows? They may even change the hearts of those landing the blows, while they bring the black-and-blue into communion with each other like almost nothing else can.

“This is what the Beatitudes have to do with real life. They describe a view of reality in which the least likely candidates are revealed to be extremely fortunate in the divine economy of things, not only later but right now. They are Jesus’ truth claims for all time, the basis of everything that follows, which everyone who hears them is free to accept, reject, or neglect. Whatever you believe about him, believe this about you: the things that seem to be going most wrong for you may in fact be the things that are going most right. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to fix them. It just means they may need blessing as much as they need fixing, since the blessing is already right there. If you can breathe into it—well, that’s when heaven comes to earth, because earth is where heaven starts, for all who are willing to live into it right now.”

The Cherokee Story of the Two Wolves Within Us

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

There’s an old Cherokee tale about two wolves, and I have been thinking about it a lot these days. The story goes something like this:

One evening, an elderly Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside each of us.

He said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”

“The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one that you feed.”

The last line of this story keeps coming to mind as we navigate through these days and weeks. I have always understood the story’s message, but I feel like I am regularly being presented with opportunities to take the wisdom of the story to heart—to ask the question: which wolf am I feeding?

As humans, it is natural for us to experience a wide range of emotions. This is why both wolves reside inside of us. Experiencing some amount of grief, fear, anxiety, or uncertainty, would seem to be both a natural and normal emotional expression of the current situation. However, how much of these emotions do we allow? Do we continually feed them to the point that our bad wolf is dominating?

The tale of the two wolves is a great reminder that we have choice over what we let reside inside of us. Once we become aware of the two wolves, we gain the power to stop feeding the bad wolf and start putting that time and energy towards the good wolf, so that it can thrive.

That doesn’t mean that we will ever completely rid ourselves of fear, worry, or doubt. We simply move around them—towards love, kindness, generosity and hope. We practice keeping our perspective focused on the things that are positive, productive, and beneficial—both for ourselves and for others. This feeds our good wolf.

And this choice can define how we will experience the weeks and months ahead of us.

These cherished words from our native Americans remind me of the Apostle Paul’s admonitions about the fruits of the Spirit from Corinthians and Ephesians: “charity (love), joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, etc.”

According to St. Paul, we are given the Holy Spirit’s gifts to feed the good wolf within us, with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and all of the “amazing grace” that is given to us if we choose to accept it.

On the other hand, we can feed the bad wolf within us with pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth, fear, deception, resentment, rage, and all the human natural urges we are born with. We are free to wallow in our natural instinctual sins, or we can, by honesty and humility, acknowledge them in us while the Holy Spirit is simultaneously offering us the grace of love and kindness and forgiveness.

We saw a perfect example of the good wolf / bad wolf at the memorial for Charlie Kirk a few weeks ago. Erika Kirk accepted the gift of grace and forgave the man who killed her husband.

Right after Erika fed her good wolf, the President fed his bad wolf by saying “Sorry, Erika, I hate all those who want to kill me.” While Jesus gave us the most difficult of all forgiveness stories: Dying on the Cross He said: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Thank you, Pope Francis

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

Saturday, April 26, 2025 will always be a banner day for Peggy and me. We recorded Francis’ Memorial Celebration on two different channels and watched them both when we woke up and were rewarded with an ancient city that still remains in so many ways the center of planet earth. The colors of the vestments, the robes, the dresses and the suits, but especially of the faces, clearly showed the oneness of humanity that gave such a rebuke to the violence, destruction, the suffering and the killing among our brothers and sisters in too many parts of the planet. Pope Francis gave his life in the effort to proclaim our God-given Unity, which we humans have never really accepted. Just one example: the absolute barbarity of war, of brother slaughtering brother, still, after thousands of years of such mindless inhumane destruction. “Where have all the flowers gone? “ Indeed. But for one day, through the life and death of a very ordinary man, as Bergoglio himself said, from the “END OF THE EARTH”, from the tip of South America, as far as you can get from the marble halls of the Vatican, God showed an Eternal Father’s Love for all of us “poor children of Eve” who are mysteriously God’s children from eternity to eternity. Pope Francis, in his thirteen years as Pontifex, ( builder of bridges) tried so hard to bring God’s family together that he made 47 international trips, and flew 291,423 miles. That is 11.6 times around he world.

Thank you, Pope Francis. You asked us to pray for you. Now you have to pray for us: tutti, tutti, ALL OF US !!! Amen.

It is in Dying that we are Born to Eternal Life

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

This was a stunning Easter Celebration with the death of Michael Volpe, a beloved friend whom I met on my first Mission in 1956, not quite 70 years ago. He died on early Good Friday, and left us in mourning until early Easter Monday when Pope Francis joined Mike in eternal life. On TV this morning Cardinal Dolan of New York talked about the Conclave in which they elected Pope Francis. Dolan said that they were told at the beginning that the Holy Spirit had already chosen a Pope among them, and it was their task to pray until they were told by the Hol Spirit who to vote for. I really believe that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a gift from God to us. I also believe that Mike Volpe was a gift of God to us.

We may argue about the miracles of the Bible till the end of time, but I believe the gift of Mike and Bergoglio to us was a miracle. After all, miracle really means “something to marvel at”, “something that seems unbelievable”. But how could you not believe in miracles when you met these men? What a gift they were to us with their kindness, gentleness, above all, quiet overwhelming love?

Pope Francis’s last Encyclical was “Dilexit nos”, that is: “How God loved us” taken from Romans 8. In Romans, Paul says,  “God loved us”, but uses the expression dilexit which means God loved us with delight. God is so glad he made us.

The very first talk Francis made when he was elected Pope in 2013, he addressed the entire world in his urbi and orbi blessing which is every Pope’s traditional Blessing to the “city and to the world”, and he cried out simply, “You are all children of God.” That was an infallible statement.

Now I don’t have to go to Rochester, NY any more to see my friend Mike Volpe, neither do I have to fly to Rome to see Pope Francis. Now by the eternal goodness of God, I can talk immediately to them right now in my heart where they will always remain. So be it.

Yes, Love is Eternal

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

     A month ago, I reached my 96th birthday, and I was surprised how interested I was in how much longer I have to live. For the last few years, I have been obsessed with preparing for death. I want my passage out of time to be smooth and comfortable for everybody concerned, especially for me.

        When the covid pandemic struck five years ago, I even wrote a book about dying called “Entering Eternity With Ease.” I really wanted to name it “Dying Joyfully”, but that title was already taken by the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu in their book on the subject. Deep down, I was really so scared of the passage from life to whatever comes after life, that the book was an attempt to convince myself that dying wasn’t so scary.

        Then, two years ago, one of my best friends, Joe Matthews, suddenly, silently, softly passed away acquajogging in his pool. I had spent ten years playing golf and lunching with him every Friday, and we often talked about our anxiety over dying. While I was writing “Entering Eternity”, I brought a copy of “Me and Kuhbler Ross” the longest Chapter in the book, about the 5 stages of dying that are featured at most “Trivial Pursuits” contests. I know I won one with it. Joe must have made the pilgrimage from Denial of Death to Acceptance of Death, because he left us without a whisper or a whimper, without an “I love ya,” or even a “Bye, bye.”

        I wrote a blog article on “Wouldn’t You like to go like Joe ?”, surely wishing we all had the good fortune to just “pass away” so easily: Entering Eternity With Ease, indeed. But I would also like to say Goodbye and tell my loved ones how much I really loved them. I want them to understand how much I really appreciate every little item in their relationship with me. I want them to taste the joy we shared together, even including the pains that were inevitable, even the hurts that were avoidable. I need to thank them for everything.

        But how can I do this before I die? I have in front of me on the wall, the pictures of at least a hundred people whom I dearly love, and hundreds more, both alive and dead, whom I have known these 96 years. They are relatives, schoolmates, teachers, colleagues, clients, patients, neighbors, friends, and many, many others it is impossible to mention.

        How do I do justice to all the people I have known and loved in my life? To all the people who have known and loved me? It would take me a year to write to or call up just the closest ones. And most of the rest would be too hard to reach. There has to be a way, and it has to be somehow through the Holy Spirit. It has to be beyond this moment, this place, this person. It is endless, boundless, eternal.

Most of the people I loved have already passed away, so how can I tell them how much I loved them? This is where I begin to wonder about eternal love. We have to live forever because we will never be able to say how much we love each other. That is what eternity is for.

        Back in the 70’s there was a novel followed by a movie, called “Love Story”. The famous line was “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”. I’d like to say instead, “Love means never having to say goodbye.” After almost a century of contemplation, I suspect that something as important as love has got to take forever. When I was a little kid, a Jewish immigrant, Irving Berlin, sang “I’ll be loving you, always, not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but always.” I had no idea then what eternity was. I still don’t. But then, in High School English, I read Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” and recognized what I had already deeply sensed, that I was going to live forever.

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar;…….

From God, who is our home.”

        Once we accept that death is not the end but the beginning, or rather the continuation of our life which we have had, in God, from all eternity, then we are relieved of the anxiety to settle our lifetime loves right now before we die. Right now, we must rest in peace in our own hearts, in our own minds, in our own souls. To rest in Peace is to rest in God. I know we say at funerals, “May they rest in peace”, about the dead, and that is good. But I am talking about us the living, especially those of us who approach death. May we rest in Peace, like the Hebrew ‘Shalom’, like the Arabic, ‘Salaam’. They all mean the same: may we rest in God, ‘In whom we live, and move, and have our being’ according to St. Paul.

        To rest in God, is to surrender our helplessness and our hopelessness to God who is Love Eternal. To rest in God is to accept that we exist, as Paul Tillich says, ‘in the Ground of Being’ which is Love Eternal. After all, St. John says God is love, and therefore Love is God. And we come from God, and we remain in God, world without end Amen.  And all of us are in the same Ground of Love forever. So believe that Love is never having to say Goodbye. 

I close this with T.S. Elliott’s words from “Four Quartets”:

“We die with the dying:

“See, they depart, and we go with them.

“We are born with the dead:

“See, they return, and bring us with them.

“Here is where you are and nowhere never and always where

“time has been redeemed and all shall be well and all manner of

“things shall be well. May it be so, Amen.”

An Unhappy But  Hopeful New Year 2025

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

               Welcome to a very unhappy planet. I will be 96 in 2025 and this is the most unhappy world that I have experienced since  World War II, 1941 – 1945. In truth, there were 2.3 billion human beings in 1941, and now we count 8 billion of us. Despite the hundred million or so who were savaged by the wars and political violence of the last century, the good news is that there now 6 billion more of us to love and take care of today.

                But the planet is limping along, not with old age like me, but with a gruesome lack of love for each other, and of our incredible, miraculous, grace filled home, Mother Earth, and of all of her wounded life-forms.

                There are more of us now, and more to fear from climate-caused disasters from heat, windstorms, droughts and floods. There are wars and violence on every continent caused by insane usurpers of power over their fellow human beings. There is almost universal rejection of refugees seeking for a legitimate refuge.

                The above is the unhappy part of 2025. Now for the hopeful part. Two weeks ago, in an Advent Meditation, I was moved by a picture from the Webb space telescope which showed the Big Bang 13 billion years ago at the beginning of the universe. It showed a giant galaxy of galaxies still spinning out to the ends of the universe. As the picture glowed, the first words of Genesis rang out where God says: “Let there be light,” yes, trillions of atomic explosions still happening right now.

                For 13 billion years, the same explosion is still going on because in God there is no time, no 13 billion years, just the “NUNC STANS” of Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century scholastic philosopher, who taught the “ETERNAL NOW” of God.

                In the 2nd picture of the meditation, at the same time the universe is exploding into a galaxy of galaxies, John’s Gospel says “In the beginning was ‘the Word’, and ‘the Word’ was with God.  I like Phillips’ translation which says, “In the beginning, God expressed Himself.” And John goes on to say that everything that God makes is somehow a symbol, an expression, of Himself. He makes each of us as the Bible says, ‘in His own image and likeness.’

                In the 3rd picture, a great star shines over Bethlehem, and Luke says, “Do not be afraid! Listen, I bring you glorious news of great joy which is for all the people. This very day, in David’s town, a Savior has been born for you. You will find a baby, wrapped up and lying in a manger. (Lk. 2: 11-12)’   So, at the same moment that God creates the stars, he also expresses Himself through His Son, who becomes a human being. This is the mystery that we can never understand on this side of eternity: that Jesus is the symbol of God and of all of us as children of God, who existed in God from all eternity with Him. It is not something to understand, but something to wonder about throughout our lifetimes. Faith teaches us that we existed in God before we were born in the flesh, and we will exist, in God, after we die in the flesh.

                This is the thought with which to begin 2025. We need this perspective of eternity unto eternity to face the daily struggles of our present lives. There was a young Jesuit seminarian named Aloysius Gonzaga who died of tuberculosis in the 1500’s. He was famous for saying,  “What is this compared to eternal glory?” There will be many challenges to our love and service to each other, to our country, to our world this year. St. Aloysius had it right. “What is this compared to eternal glory? Amen.”

Where Have You Gone, Freddy Weigel?

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

They don’t call this a funeral anymore. They call it a Memorial, or better still, a “Celebration of Life“ I like that, but I would add “A Celebration of Death“, too.

I think we love Jesus because He taught us how to live, but even more, He taught us how to die. Jesus taught us by His words, but much more by His life, and by the way He died.

I would say the same about Fred Weigel. He taught us by the way he lived, and especially by the way he died.

    We are all blessed for having known Fred Weigel. And we will continue to be blessed if we allow Fred’s gentle memory to remain in our hearts.

    I have known Fred for 81 years. I first met him when he got off a bus at St. Mary’s College, North East, PA., on August 29, 1943. Fred had boarded a train in Hoboken, NJ., and was hurtling at high speed through NY state, heading for Buffalo, when his train crashed. The NY seminarians were in the second car, and ended up sideways next to the 1st and 3rd cars where many passengers were killed. But none of the seminarians was killed. This changed Fred’s attitude toward life—and death. They say “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

    The second time Fred faced imminent death was 20 years later, when he was a missionary in Santo Domingo, on the same island with Haiti. Haiti has many revolutions, but so does Santo Domingo. Fred was sent to protect his Bishop, Raimond McLaughlin, a fellow Redemptorist, who was threatened by the Dictator, General Trujillo.Fred stood at the top of the stairs where the Bishop’s room was. ( I saw the same spot about 10 years later.) The soldiers rushed up the stairs and struck Fred on the head with their rifle butts and he fell down the stairs. But he survived, thanks be to God, and we enjoyed him for another 60 years. (By the way, the Bishop survived, but the Dictator didn’t.)

    Fred seems to have developed a certain, je ne sai quoi, friendship(?) with death. 20 years after the near death experience, he left the Caribbean and came to Tampa and immediately enrolled at USF for a Master’s Degree in Gerontology which includes a good deal about death and dying, because old people have this funny quirk of insisting on dying on us.

    Then, as Fred writes in his own Obituary, he became one of the leaders of Hospice Care in Tampa Bay. Wow ! He spent the next 50 years helping people die, and eventually, learning how to die, himself. When Fred’s brother Richard died, (he was found homeless in NY), Fred called me from Tampa when I was living in Long Island. I went to the wake, funeral, and burial with him. Later, his brother Jack died, who was a very popular Deacon in Massapequa, Long Island. We attended that wake, funeral, and burial together. Then a few years ago, I spent some days with Fred as his wife Jeanne lay dying. Fred was reading a popular new book on dying. We prepared the memorial service for Jeanne together.  

    This was just before the covid lockdown, when I went on to write my book about joyful dying called “Entering Eternity With Ease.” Fred was a big help to me in writing that book. 

    I learned a lot about dying from Fred. Fred didn’t teach me. He did it the best way: by showing me. He modelled dying for me.

    Fred would not like it if I said he was a Christ figure. But Fred was a Christ figure. He still is now, as Christ was and is. Jesus was the greatest teacher ever, but he taught mostly by being the perfect model or example of what he taught. The way Jesus was born, in a stable. The way he lived and worked as a laborer and carpenter. The way Jesus died. The way He talked constantly about dying. The way he kept saying we had to take up our cross DAILY, yes, DAILY. But especially the way He died on a cross.

    Fred Weigel had his own cross. He was disabled for a good four years. It can be a cross to be disabled, to depend almost completely on others. To call an ambulance every time you fall down. I watched Fred do that many times.

    Yes, Fred, you are a Christ figure for me. I need you in my life in your resurrected presence now. Fred would be angry if I called him a saint – but he is definitely a member of the “Communion of Saints”, that Catholics believe in.

    I won’t say: “Rest in Peace” I won’t say: “You are now in Peace”.

I will say: “Stay with us Fred Weigel, we need you to teach us how to enter eternity with ease.”

D-Day | June 6, 1944 -2024

~ Sal Umana ~ Leave a comment

I was 15 years old on the original D-day, and like Pearl Harbor, and 9/11/2001, it made an indelible mark on my soul, like the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation made indelible marks on our souls. This morning I spent two hours watching the Presidents of the U.S.A. and France commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the biggest land, sea, and air battle in the history of the world. As their background, they had the remaining members of the veterans of the Normandy Invasion, most of them 100 years old. And the background of the veterans were the ten thousand crosses of the dead buried there.

I write about entering eternity with ease, but those 10,000 young Americans did not go into eternity with ease, but they did it with courage, love, fear, trepidation, terror, horror, and final resignation, because they had to. Among those buried in Normandy is my Uncle Johnny Castriano, who was killed by a direct hit from a German tank in Southern France in November 1944. Johnny had volunteered right after Pearl Harbor and went to North Africa, then fought through Sicily and southern Italy, and was wounded in the Invasion of Anzio, in February 1944. He was wounded for the second time and received his second Purple Heart, and wrote to my mother that he would finally be coming home after three years of fighting where he was only one of a handful of survivors in his original company. Before the letter ever arrived in Boston,  Uncle Johnny recovered from his wounds, and was sent to Southern France to open up another front against the Germans. All the Americans who died in France were buried at Normandy.

As I said above, there is something different, indelible, about World War II and also the Korean War, that is not true for the rest of the wars we have been engaged in since. It was not because we were “The Greatest Generation”. I am part of that generation, and “we” if you will pardon my presumption, did what we had to do, because it was right. We saw the truth that was plain to see. There were brothers and sisters in Europe, in the Pacific, and Korea, who were begging us to help them. England and France had been our allies for several generations. The Pacific nations that had been aggressively dominated by the Japanese, and the South Koreans who were being bullied by Communist idealogues, were begging for our help. It was not the same with Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. We did not have to send our youth to die there. And the results speak for themselves.

The real casualty in our time is truth. We are not seeing the truth in ourselves, in our neighbors, in other nations, in the rest of the world. We cannot see the difference between humanism and nationalism. What we are doing to the ecology of our planet is the best example of how selfishness is blinding us from the truth. We all have to pause and see what we are doing to our planet. We have to see what we are doing to our own bodies, before we can see the truth of what we are doing to our planet. We have to see the truth of our own individual lives, and the lives of all the beings on the planet in the light of eternity.        Entering Eternity With Ease—-Indeed.