'Baby your mother':
Children take on responsibilities

		Grand Mom  Audrey  Mettel Fixmer

I clearly remember when I was a very little girl puzzling over a piece of sheet music in the piano bench.

The picture on the cover was a young mother circa 1915 cradling a cute little baby in her arms, and the title, "Baby Your Mother." When I asked my big sister about it, she taught me to sing the song. I still remember some of the words:

Baby your mother, like she babied you

Back in your baby days.

Maybe your Mother is lonesome and blue

Waiting for you and needing you too.

I sang the words, but didn't begin to understand them.

Living long

After I was married and moved away from home, I would go back to Aurora for a visit and marvel at the way my oldest sister, Ione, took care of our mother. Not that it was anything new. Ione, as the eldest in the family, had always taken on enormous responsibilities for our family.

When Dad died, she added on a "mother-in-law room" to her home and had Mother take residence right there where she could keep an eye on her, take her to doctor's appointments, buy her clothes, and even feed her. That's when the words, "Baby your mother" took on a new meaning.

A few days ago, my daughter, Kris, informed me, "You are going back to your cardiologist, you know."

"Whoa!" I said. "When did I become some helpless old lady who has to be taken care of?"

I think of myself as a very competent, energetic, intelligent woman who can take care of myself - usually. I need help with the heavy stuff in the garden, and I don't feel very steady on a ladder any more, and the arthritis in my ankle has slowed me down a bit, but I can still function!

In the past year or so, my daughters have found excuses to "drive me" to doctors' appointments, or any places that are more than a couple of miles away. They try to be diplomatic about it, but I can see through their schemes, all right.

"It's because we love you!" they say when I protest. "We want you to live for a long, long time."

Caring for each other

So they are starting to "Baby their mother." I have to admit that a little of that is pretty nice. I just don't like to be reminded that I'm pushing the envelope. They don't have to rub it in.

I have a friend in her early 80's who tells me that she and her husband are always worrying about one another. If she is in the bathroom too long, he will knock on the door and ask, "Are you okay?" And if he is out mowing the lawn and she doesn't hear the mower for a couple of minutes, she goes to the window to be sure he is okay.

It's like we are aware that we are living on borrowed time already. What happened to middle age? Where did it go? Are we really elderly?

Best friends

One thing is certain. Our relationship with our children does change. I love these years in which our kids are our best friends. We go places together and laugh a lot.

Now, without ever being told to do so our kids are taking on responsibilities that might otherwise overwhelm us. Since Elizabeth has moved home with us, I am very grateful that she has taken over so much of the guidance of our two handicapped children.

Being babied by loving kids isn't so bad after all, I guess.

"Grandmom" likes hearing from other senior citizens who enjoy aging -- contact information.

Science and theology:
What is the relationship?

	Guest commentary  Franz S. Klein

"Is a Christian allowed to think?" asked the Sunday headline of a paper in Vienna, where I was studying German this summer.

This indignant demand sums up the international response to Viennese Archbishop Christoph Cardinal Schönborn's op-ed piece opposing Neo-Darwinistic evolutionary theory in the New York Times on July 7.

Three eminent American scientists (of whom two are Catholic), Lawrence Krauss (physics and astronomy professor at Case Western Reserve University), Francisco Ayala (evolutionary biology and philosophy, University California-Irvine), and Kenneth Miller (biology, Brown University) have petitioned Pope Benedict XVI to clarify "that scientific rationality and the church's commitment to divine purpose and meaning in the universe were not incompatible."

Church and evolution

After Pope John Paul II confirmed to the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1996 that evolution is "more than just a hypothesis," scientists have untiringly reminded us that Catholic doctrine and evolutionary theory are compatible. Nor did the church's acquiescence begin in 1996; Pope Pius XII's encyclical Humani generis declared in 1950 that evolution was acceptable to the Catholic faith as one among many theories. John Paul's 1996 statement certainly gives preference to evolution over other theories, including creationism.

Contrary to the statements of Schönborn's many careless readers, he did not condemn evolution on July 7. Neither will the Vatican ever condemn the theory of evolution. John Paul acknowledged in his 1996 address that evolution has spent the years since the publication of Humani generis moving from scientific theory to scientific fact. And, as the Holy Father said in that same address, "(scientific) truth cannot contradict (doctrinal) truth."

Cardinal condemned Neo-Darwinism

But Schönborn did condemn a branch of evolutionary theory called Neo-Darwinism, which - as he wrote - involves "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection."

If we are the result of random processes, we fall outside the care of a God who not only is creator, but who continues to guide his creation with a sure hand. Either creation is guided or unguided, planned or unplanned, random or under the purview of a provident God. These are the inescapable theological consequences of Neo-Darwinism. These concern Schönborn the theologian.

Shockingly overlooked in the journalistic furor he caused is that Schönborn did not write as a heavy-handed theologian, throwing the admittedly secular readership of the Times doctrinal bones to masticate.

Instead he wrote as a philosopher, whose task it is to remind scientists that neither their own personal theories nor the theories of the scientific cliques to which they belong represent the scientific world as a whole.

More specifically, Schönborn sought to remind the thinking world that the randomness embraced by Neo-Darwinism is a theory, not scientific fact; as such it remains one among many ways to describe evolution.

Intelligent Design

As soon as anyone holds theory to be fact when it is not, he creates - using Schönborn's word - an "ideology." Schönborn's article calls us from the ideology of long-held scientific assumptions and jumped-to conclusions. We have the right to know there is an alternative to Neo-Darwinism, commonly called Intelligent Design.

At the University of St. Thomas two years ago I delved into the work of modern Design theorists with the help of Sandra Menssen, who was working on a book outlining the mathematical probability behind the theory.

I have always appreciated our discussion of the philosopher and scientist Richard Collins. He describes two friends coming upon the name of one of them spelled out with rocks on a hillside. Collins asks whether it be more probable that the rocks acquired by chance this complex pattern, which by chance corresponded with the English alphabet, in turn spelling by chance the name of a person who chanced to be walking by, or if maybe another friend had walked by 10 minutes earlier, placing the rocks as they were.

Now imagine exploring the complexity of the human genome, or the mathematical probability of randomly arriving at the type of environment necessary to support human life. The infinite improbability of chance is a boon of evidence in favor of Design, of an intelligent Guide behind the machinery of evolution.

New developments

Philosophers like Menssen are laboring to bridge philosophy with mathematics and other sciences. The last 25 years have seen incredible new developments in physics and biochemistry. Now more and more scientists are rejecting randomness and speaking of a superior scientific basis behind intelligently designed evolution.

The result has been an uproar in the world of academia. Any scientist who speaks of a general consensus backing Neo-Darwinistic evolution may believe Nixon has not yet resigned.

Scientific heresy?

But to return to the Viennese paper's question, "Is a Christian allowed to think?" Italian astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei demanded the answer in 1616, when he was summoned to Rome for positing the sun as center of the solar system.

Though his work with the refracting telescope provided ample mathematical evidence for his position, the entrenched but weakening ideology of the day held on for a few more years.

Has Schönborn committed scientific "heresy" against our modern-day evolutionist ideologues? Are they going to burn him while he holds the scientific evidence of Design in his hand?

The three U.S. scholars who have petitioned Benedict to approbate Neo-Darwinism can hope for nothing better than the words he spoke in his installation homily: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary."

Any scientific theory of evolution which says otherwise, Benedict will say, may well explain data; but it shall never become scientific fact, since - as John Paul proclaimed in 1996 - "truth cannot contradict truth."

Franz S. Klein is a seminarian for the Diocese of La Crosse beginning his second year of theology studies at the North American College in Rome. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy and classical languages from St. Thomas College, St. Paul, Minn.