STEM needs HALM

    Okay, HALM is not a word. But the words Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics have nothing to do with the word “stem.” I can’t find a word to express what I want to say, so I invent a word: HALM.

    HALM—History, Art, Literature, Music.

    STEM is the fad of the day. STEM is not bad. Science has done wonderful things for us. But STEM is only half of what it takes to live in fully human ways.

    And there is a down side to STEM: it tempts us to think we can control the world.

    There is an old saying: science helps us understand; understanding helps us control.  

    Control can ruin us. The biblical story of the tower of Babel expresses an important human tendency. We can get so enthused about our power to control that we think we are gods, and we replace the real God.

    Science has given us nuclear weapons, which science is warning us are only a few seconds away from destroying all human life. Science and technology and engineering and mathematics are giving us climate change, which is destroying much of the beauty and diversity of life that has surrounded us since evolution produced us.

    We are not in control. The wisdom of many human traditions teach that lesson. The word “Islam” means “submission,” and there are almost as many Muslims in the world as there are Christians. Hubris is the vice of our age. Hubris is STEM gone wild.

    That is why we need to complement STEM with History, Art, Literature, and Music: HALM. Those activities can awaken us to the beauty and value of humility. HALM teaches us that God is important, that we can live fully even with our limitations, that we can be vulnerable to one another, and vulnerability is part of love. HALM reminds us of how our best efforts can go wrong, and how we can recover from wrong.

    STEM tempts us to control. We need HALM to help us be full human beings, enriched by the things we create, not enslaved by them.

 

[published in Muddy River News, August 15, 2025]

A Joe Messina poem from last April

Several of us meet in what we call “Writers’ Circle.” It consists of Terry Riddell, his wife Deborah, Paula Peter, Mary Ann Klein, and myself. Occasionally Mary Ann’s husband, Joe Messina, joins us. Terry, Mary Ann, and Joe have all been full-time English faculty at Quincy University. I am a sociological deviant.

Last March I wrote a poem titled “Ferris Wheel.” It is printed in this blog on March 31. On April 10 Joe Messina offered a poem with my name in the title. I suggested putting it on my blog. Joe just gave me (on August 13) the okay to do that.

Here is Joe’s poem:

 

80^th birthday: In imitation of Joe Z’s minimalism

 

first a baby cries
then it eats

it doesn’t ask
What does this breast want from me?

Before I was
there were two habits,
breathing and eating.

One day, I felt something for the people who fed me.

they didn’t scare me
they didn’t enrage me any more

what was it?

later someone told me about love
what’s that?

If I don’t know what love is
does  that keep me from loving?

Socrates says we don’t know what friendship is
but that doesn’t keep us from being friends.

A pilgrim poet, whose name I forget
cried How far is it to God?

No answer

He didn’t know what else to do
so he kept on going.

Speaking of going
I have to go to the bathroom
Then I’ll get back to it.

To what?

At 80 I can’t tell my living
from my dying.

What’s happening to me?
You’re dying.
Oh.
Well, let’s not make a fuss about it.

I came noisily
but I can go quietly

The air is sweet today
and ice cream is always good

Though I don’t know what good is.

Showing Up

Recently I was at a graduation party for a young woman who had just completed high school. An estimated 60 or 70 people, young and old, showed up for the party.

The party was open-invitation—no reservation required. All you had to do was show up and stay as long as you wanted. You could eat but you didn’t have to.

That event was giving glory to the young woman being honored.

Glory is when people show up to let you know that you mean something to them.

Showing up at worship services gives glory to God.

Church attendance in almost all denominations is way down. In the Springfield, Illinois Catholic diocese, a tabulation made each October of Mass attendance in all diocesan parishes combined shows that in 2023 attendance was half of what it was in 2000.

Why that is happening is surely a complex question, but maybe one of the reasons why people are not showing up for church services is that they have forgotten that the most important thing about church services is to give glory to God.

We live in a consumer culture. We approach things with the attitude, “what am I getting out of this?” Maybe we approach church with the same attitude: what am I getting out of attending a church service?

Clergy, we who have accepted the role of leading worship services, can be rightly focused on providing people with something that is at least minimally rewarding. We can forget that all of us, clergy and laity, are in church because we want to give glory to God. We show up because showing up is meaningful even when a particular service is not especially rewarding. We attend the party because we want to honor someone. Some of our parties are more successful than other ones, because some of us are better at putting on parties than others. But we show up for the guest of honor, not because the food is good.

 Showing up puts us into physical contact with other people. We humans need that, just as much as we need oxygen. No wonder so many people these days are tempted to give up on life. We have been taught that we don’t need other people—we center our lives on consuming. We go it alone, all by ourselves. Trying to live that way can be deadly. 

I live with several other men in what we call a “Franciscan friary.” We show up for each other each day, both in prayer and at meals.

Believe me, at my age this kind of showing up really keeps me alive.

 

Brother Joe Zimmerman, OFM

[published in Muddy River News, June 9, 2025]

Life on Mars

             Love, I have been saying for thirty years, is respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement.

Involvement. Relationship with something or someone outside yourself.

Question: can we humans love totally online, totally without physical contact with other human beings?

Can we be involved with other people respectfully online, vulnerably online, faithfully online?

Elon Musk is said to be determined to prove that human beings can live on Mars. Maybe he thinks that life on earth is doomed, and that Mars is the only place where humanity could survive. But human life there would be so impoverished as to be not life at all.

We live on a big beautiful planet (or, in the universe as we know it, a tiny beautiful planet). We are surrounded, even inside our bodies, with other life forms. We live in a world of plants, and other animals.

Students on my campus here at Quincy University are now allowed to have pet animals in their rooms on campus. Our recently retired State’s Attorney here in Quincy kept a well-trained dog in his office, because he found that the presence of the dog could help calm people for whom contact with the law was terribly stressful.  

Being outside in nature has always been central to my experience of life.

Mars would have none of that. Everything would have to be hermetically sealed against the outside environment, because the human body could not survive otherwise on the surface of a planet so far from the sun.

Is life online a foretaste of life on Mars?

It may not be as bad as that.

People used to write letters. Relationships could flourish with that greatly impoverished form of involvement. But letters weren’t good enough. We want physical presence, physical involvement, if we are to have life and have it more abundantly.

That is a phrase used by Jesus, “have life and have it more abundantly.” When we live a life of physical involvement that is respectful, vulnerable, and faithful, we do live abundantly.

Maybe that is what “eternal life” is.

I fall asleep several times a day (feature of my age, I guess). I imagine that death is just another form of falling asleep. Each time I fall asleep, I may not ever awake again. I am at peace with that. I have had life, and abundant life, most days of my life.

Each time I wake up, I face the possibility of experiencing love once again, and that is life for me. I have been given the gift—and it is a gift—of experiencing what it is to be involved, even in tiny moments, with other people, and even with the plants and animals of my world, respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully.

The community of Roman Catholics I live in tells me that God has “eternal life” in store for me. My reason for accepting that belief is that a God who has given me so much life right here on this earth is not likely to stop just because my body gives out.

I face the fact that there are a lot of people for whom life has not been as abundant as the life I have experienced. All I can say is that I am not God, and God will have to take care of that. The story of Jesus tells me that God can create abundance in tiny moments of time, even in the experience of death.

Back to the basic question: will online involvement replace face-to-face involvement in our human experience? No, I say, online is much too impoverished. Compared to involvement with flesh and blood human beings, life online, I speculate, is little better than life on Mars.

Respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement with other people, in person, with all the power of our five senses in play, is a form of more abundant life.

I think people will come to see that.

They say that the Roman Empire fell partly because the Romans were drinking too much out of earthenware lined with lead, and the lead poisoned their brains. I sometimes wonder if our “civilization” will disappear because online devices can be as poisonous as lead.

The Roman Empire fell, but humanity went on. Maybe humanity went on because those people who believed that faithful, respectful, vulnerable involvement was more important than circuses and wine had an evolutionary advantage.

 

Samaritan Capitalists

 

We Americans love capitalism. We hate socialism because we see it as the enemy of capitalism. 

We also love good Samaritans. Right here in Quincy, we have a fine institution named after the “good Samaritan.” The name comes from a story that most of us have heard.

One reason why we love capitalism is that it is based on competition. Doing capitalism is like being in a game with a competitor, where it is fun to win. In competitive games, we deliberately set up the rules so that each side has a chance to win. If one side always wins, the game quits being fun, and the losers walk away. When players walk away too often, we change the rules because we believe competition is more important than winning.

But we Americans do not love other people. We love our own. We know our own people, and we believe that our people are better than other people. We say that other people are lazy, and they will cheat us if we give them a chance. We think they will hurt us if they can. We are afraid they will mess up our games if we let them play, and there are a lot of them. They are flooding our country. We have to stop the flood. 

The same person who told the story of the good Samaritan also told us that we should not see the speck in our neighbor’s eye when we might have a plank in our own eye. We clearly see the speck in other people’s eyes. They are lazy, and they will cheat or hurt us if we give them a chance. They will mess up our games if we let them play, and there are a lot of them. They are flooding our country. 

We say we are a Christian nation. We should behave more like the good Samaritan. We should quit seeing specks in other people’s eyes when we may have planks in our own eyes. We are a capitalist nation. We want people to play in our games, so we should make sure the rules allow all people to have a chance to win in our games.  

We need a morality that sees our neighbors — all of them — as potential players in our games, and that assumes that any neighbor can play in our games because our neighbors are just as moral as we ourselves are.

 

Brother Joseph Zimmerman, OFM
Holy Cross Friary
Quincy, Illinois

Published in Quincy's Muddy River News, April 23, 2025

Ferris Wheel

 

as the world turns, carries all of us eastward

                like down half of a ferris wheel

                looks like sun is rising

                no, we’re going down

all of us together

me

birds

trees

rabbits, squirrels

                even mosquitos

                all along for the ride.

 

science tells us

                200 million years from now

                ride will end

                sun will burn us up

                                burn everything up

Sad to think about that

                art, music

science, medicine

human “achievements”

woods and forests

                lakes and meadows

                all life

                all beauty

                                all burned up

                                no one left to grieve

 

don’t want it to end

but it will end

                for me

                and for you

                long before 200 million years

so why do beauty?

why do love?

why do anything?          

 

can’t handle this alone

                want others to take my hand

                                others

                not much to go on

 

didn’t have much to go on

                when I left the womb

                couldn’t make it alone then

what makes me think

                I can make it alone

                now?

 

Babel and the Chainsaw

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky.” (Genesis 11:4)

We have done marvelous things, in this, our great country. We have viewed the beginnings of the universe with our space-based telescopes, we have cured forms of cancer that no one thought could be cured, we have kept peace among nations that had a history of killing each other. We have done much of this through the agency of our federal government.

Now comes Elon Musk and DOGE and the chainsaw. Research that has taken decades to develop is being scrapped, people who depended on our country for food are dying of hunger, diseases that we were near to eliminating are beginning to thrive again around the world.

I have grown up and lived my life with the dream of progress leading to perfect outcomes. I had a religious basis for that dream, in the writings of a fourteenth-century Franciscan named John Duns Scotus. He wrote (and I have to put it the original Latin, because that is the way I have always read it): “In processione generationis humanae, semper crescit notitia veritatis.” "In the course of human history, the knowledge of the truth continually expands.”

That statement fits hand in glove with Enlightenment optimism, which has dominated western cultures for the last 300 years.

I went back to the original text of Scotus’s statement and discovered that he made the statement in the context of Christian belief in the Trinity, the idea that God is triune, Father, Son, and Spirit. That puts a different spin on the statement. Because the Christian belief in the Trinity includes the Christian story of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the “Son” of God.

The Second Vatican Council, which shook up Catholic life in the 1960s, had some of the same spirit of Enlightenment optimism. The Council began as a pope, John XXIII, was seen around our western world as a beloved elder, a young Catholic named John Kennedy had just been elected president of my country, and it seemed to me and to a lot of other Catholics that things were really going well. One of my professors said “We’ve got the devil on a rope and it’s a downhill pull.” Then came Vietnam and it took a lot of denial to continue to believe in infinite progress. But we continued to deny.

I was still denying until last November.

The story of Jesus is a story of great love being crushed by human decisions. The story goes on to say that God does not let love stay crushed.

Who knows how far the crushing will go this time?

The German people in the 1930s thought that Adolph Hitler would fulfill their dreams, and the result was the destruction of their admirably scientific world. This time the death and destruction could be far more severe. Suppose someone will unleash nuclear weapons? Those who study that scenario warn us that it will be difficult to restrain the use once it starts, and without restraint, human life on this planet will become impossible.

We have to face that scenario. We can preserve the hope that things will not get that bad. We can say that in the future we will no longer dream of creating the perfect society that will abolish all evil. We will not dream of building a tower that will reach the sky.

We will acknowledge that all of us, each and every one of us, is capable of evil, and that anything we do together can be corrupted. We will need humility and contrition and forgiveness. We will not be able to make everything work right. We will keep on hurting one another. We will not be able to write enough laws to keep us from hurting each other. We will begin to see that we cannot live without forgiveness, without forgiving others when they hurt us, and asking forgiveness of others when we hurt them.

What Mr. Trump’s election has done is to remind us that the machine we were building was an imperfect machine, which was leaving behind way too many people. Maybe, after his enterprise has crashed and burned, we will resume our efforts to do good things in our worlds, but I hope we will resume those efforts without the hubris of thinking we are gods.

We are human beings. We live, we love, we die, and along the way we can do a lot of good and a lot of damage. And we can hope that the story of Jesus Christ is more than a pious tradition.