I am always amazed by how often it is that I can’t or won’t do what it is that I know I should do or want to do. I have so often failed my own conscience that it looms larger than life for me.

Only the broken man or the unrepentant sinner understands the true value of what the spiritualists call The Moral Conscience since nothing brings it into clearer focus than the failure to rise to it.

For many years I dreamed of being a saint, even as I drifted farther and farther away from a rational and loving life. In recent years I’ve learned that I don’t need to be a saint to do good and be good, and that has been a truly liberating force in my life. Because I am not a saint and have no plans to be one.

When I figured out who I was, rather than who I wanted to be, I began to understand what a moral conscience is and how I can live with it, and do it some justice.

This isn’t some spiritual mumbo-jumbo this is important, it’s defining. It shapes the way I live.

Recently a woman posted a plea on my blog comments asking me to understand that I was sometimes mean-spirited to people who challenged me.

Another said goodbye to reading my blog when I objected to her trying to sell puppies in the midsts of a piece I wrote about a family trying to raise money to bury their son. Yet another pleaded with me to never poke fun at the Rainbow Bridge Story again, couldn’t I just drop it?

The posters may not see them this way, but I see all of these discussions as being about morality, the right thing, the right way to be, the right thing to say. I know now that I cannot possibly please everybody even by being honest and offering some food for thought. I can’t be nice all the time, is the way I am coming to understand it.

I feel like these people want me to be perfect, but mostly, they just reinforce the truth I am far from perfect. That’s the point of me, in so many ways.

A friend wrote to me asking if I had considered being nice to myself every day, all the time.

No, I said, I hadn’t considered that. I wouldn’t even like me that way.

But at the same time, I am learning to do good more and more of the time.

There is some connection between those two things, but I don’t yet know what it is. I just don’t need to be nice all the time, if I ever did, if I ever could.

And what does it mean to be nice anyway? To be smothered by the whims and likes and sensitivities of other people? I didn’t make me, but my Moral Conscience helps me understand how to live, it’s my compass.

The plight of the Reiss family – desperately trying to raise thousands of dollars so they can bury their son Milan, who succumbed to the ravages of Muscular Dystrophy last weekend – has focused me powerfully and sharply on my idea of the Moral Conscience.

Arguments and pettiness, on my part and other people’s part, seem microscopic compared to what Kevin and Mary Reiss are going through.

What a classic American story this is, begging and pleading to bury a child while the undertaker waits for his money.  In America, this is just the way the world works. Capitalism is our faith, nothing comes before profit, certainly not people.

The Reiss family had raised about $2,750 Tuesday evening, and then the Army of Good jumped into the fray, and as of 2:30 Wednesday, the family had $4,590 on their gofundme page and I expect to be handing Kevin and Mary a check for another $1,000 Thursday morning when I meet them in Albany.

I hope that one day very soon Kevin and Mary will have the $8,000 they need to bury their son Milan, who fought Muscular Dystrophy for most of his life and finally surrendered to it. I didn’t know him and have yet to meet them. To me, this will be a victory of good over evil.

I am drawn to Bishop Maginn High School because the people who run the school are embedded with a deep Moral Conscience. Few of the students can afford to pay the full tuition. No student has been forced out of the school over money in the memory of anyone who is there.

I can testify that that is not true anywhere else in the region.

Today, the school was flooded and the power shut off, the basement filled with water.

When I called to ask her what was happening, Sue Silverstein couldn’t stop talking about the food pantry down the street. What would happen to people if they couldn’t open if their food was damaged?  She kept talking about it all day, even as her own school lost power and flooded. What could they do? How could they help?

They don’t need to remind themselves about their moral conscience, it is their default position. I have to work harder at mine.

We are getting there, the gofundme site data indicates that this project “is rising.” I can’t be sure, but I think we will get there.

We all have our notions of good and evil, but the idea of a family unable to bury their son because the father is a poor teacher and the family has been drained by medical expenses seem pretty close to evil to me.

That’s the dilemma. Nobody seems to want us to be like that, but here we are. It reminds me of me sometimes, the gap between what I should do, and what I do or have done.

My moral conscience was stirred by the family’s plight, I just don’t believe I could live with myself if I didn’t try to help them. Sometimes, you just have to show up.

“With each new experience,” says the Kabbalah, “we grow and become more aware of the inner beauty that lies within us. Ultimately we are truly our own leader. We lead the connection and flow of life that is our inheritance.”

I am my own leader now, swimming in the flow of life while I can.

I didn’t have to create a conscience for myself. I was, like everyone else, born with one, and no matter how much I might ignore it, or fail to live up to it, it seems I can never really silence its insistent demand that I do good and try to avoid evil and do avoid evil.

My conscience doesn’t seem to know how frail and confused and messed up human beings like me are. Be realistic, I plead. Cut me some slack.

No matter how much I’ve denied my freedom and moral responsibility to live a meaningful life, my soul keeps crying out that without the spiritual freedom of knowing right from wrong, I can never be happy.

When I heard the news about Kevin and Mary and Milan, I was surprised and somewhat guilty,  to feel my spirits soar, I felt engaged with the world, even happy. I was rushing into the battle for good, the selfish part of helping others.

I rarely get the chance to do such pure good. I never feel better than when I do.

Why? I wondered, would this sad news lift me up? My Moral Conscience gave me the answer. I had been given an unequivocal, unambivalent and powerful way to be good, what the Moral Conscience is all about.

“The first duty of every man,” wrote Thomas Merton, “is to seek the enlightenment and discipline without which his conscience cannot solve the problems of life.”

We make ourselves who and what we are by the ways in which we address good and evil.  It’s as simple as that and as complicated as that. My conscience and I are never completely at peace with one another, it too often makes a liar out of me.

The struggle really doesn’t matter, what matters is what I end up doing. Nobody cares if I’m a saint or devil, I’ll be remembered for what I did, not what I said.

But if I can’t be the perfect saint and human that people expect me to be, I can sometimes be the person I expect me to be.

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You can help the Reiss family by going here. Also, if you prefer to save the gofundme fee, and get it to the family quickly, you can send the contributions to me here, via Paypal, [email protected] or by check, Jon Katz, The Milan Burial Fund, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.

As long as they last, I’ll send you a signed postcard of me and Red, who died just about the same time Milan did.