Loud Cars Bother Me Now | November 16, 2025

In this episode, Monsignor Wolf reflects on his 70th birthday and uses small annoyances to open a larger reflection on civility, hidden suffering, and the danger of loose talk about civil war. History, media literacy, and prayer guide us toward mercy, truth, and peace, with a closing poem on the gifts of age.

• loud noise and fraying civility as signals of respect
• hats in church as a cultural practice of reverence
• grades and metrics failing to measure real life
• living with an unseen disability and fear
• choosing charity because most pain is hidden
• historical lessons on civil war rhetoric and cost
• media bias, sincere belief, and critical listening
• prayer for enemies as the only way forward
• poem “An Odd Plus” on the strange gifts of age

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Chapters

• 0:00 Turning Seventy And Taking Stock
• 2:56 Trivial Gripes With Real Meaning
• 9:40 Respect, Hats, And Fading Civility
• 16:20 Grades Don’t Measure A Life
• 24:50 Hidden Suffering And Healing

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:03

This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time, discovering God's presence in our lives, and finding hope in his word. And now your host, Father Don Wolfe.

SPEAKER_00: 0:19

Welcome, Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Monsignor Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. And on this last September the 14th, on the same day as the Pope, I turn 70 years old. It's startling for me to say that out loud. Seventy. In any context and at any of the ages of humanity, those are advanced years. What does the psalmist say? Our span is sixty or seventy for those who are strong? I don't know about strength, but even the Bible denotes my years as being on the outer edge of life's span. I thought about that as the calendar came round to the 14th this year, and I denoted that I had completed my 70th year. One of the thoughts I had was that having seen this much of life, I should make a list of those things I've noticed during these years. Things I've not actually spent much time writing down or obsessing over, but that do matter to me. When I started my list, I realized that some of these items are things I've just started thinking about. They never really mattered all that much until just lately. But now that I'm 70, the notion of right now has taken on a new kind of gravity. Why shouldn't I take into consideration those things that have begun to matter to me? So here are a few things I've thought about, beginning with the most trivial and ascending to what's more important. First, I've become offended at loud cars and motorcycles. I'm especially resentful of the cars and trucks that are loud on purpose. As much as anyone, when I was young, I could groove to the sound of horsepower and muscle when I heard a car rev and screech on the streets. Personally, none of the cars I've ever had did such a thing, but I was never really bothered when others did. Now I find it offensive and bothersome. Were I emperor for a day, I'd outlaw all of the pickups, cars, trucks, and motorcycles that put a premium on making noise. I know it's ironic since I'm older and have more trouble hearing clearly, but maybe that's the impulse that's necessary. It's more offensive to be surrounded by the noise that makes hearing difficult when hearing is difficult. Getting older is no fun. And speaking of being emperor, I echo a suggestion made by the actor John Cleese in a humorous article he did, what, almost 10 years ago. In it, he suggested that any self-respecting total authority who had all power would demand all charge cords to be the same for all electronic devices. No more options for charging. One sole cable and connection type is enough for anybody. And I agree with that wholeheartedly. And to round out the trivial, hats. Over the years, I've become more and more infuriated at men who wear hats indoors. At least among the Hispanic population, there's an understanding about the sacredness of church and the conventionalities of respect and awareness when you walk in. Men should take their hats off as a sign of respect. If there is ever a young man who forgets as he comes into church, all I have to do is catch his eye, gesture as if I were touching the brim on a hat on my head, and he gets the message. But this awareness seems to grow dimmer every day, especially among those who are less religious. Several times I've had to endure young men who come into church and sit through an entire wedding or funeral or quincinera with his hat on, sitting in the pew as notable as if he'd had a rotating light on his head. I know our sentiments about men wearing hats are purely cultural. There's nothing inherent in head coverings making them bad or in say disrespectful, but it is in fact a cultural artifact that we do understand and that it ought to be observed. The more and more men that never seem to have learned this fact, or if they have, have chosen to disregard it, creates a grave feeling of frustration in me. Of all the things that can go wrong, as thousands gather at mass, kids crying, adults shifting around, kneelers crashing onto the floor, people looking at their cell phones, and teenagers heading to the bathroom, hats seem like a pretty small problem. But knowing the conventions of civility are slipping away, that bothers me. I don't like it. Call me old fashioned. There are a couple of serious aspects of life I become aware of as my years mount up. The first of these is my awareness of the complications and hidden dimensions of the lives of those I encounter. Now that may sound blindingly obvious to everyone else, but the truth of a man's days as it lies among the roots and weeds is not always easy to spot. My first hint of this came to me almost 30 years ago when I was applying to the Graduate School of Philosophy at OU. I had endeavored to begin studying for an advanced degree in philosophy following up my bachelor's degree that I had earned in the seminary. I had to, as a matter of course, get a copy of my transcript in order to make the application. So I wrote off to the seminary and they sent it to me. And there it was, my life laid out in courses and grades, stark and simple. Looking at the pages there, I had a curious feeling. For most of my life in school, the measure of life was what we did when we took tests and answered questions and matriculated through the classes. It was all straightforward for me. Grades summed up what I was doing. Truthfully, I'd never had the occasion to wonder about the complications that may have surrounded those classes and grades. They were simply the signposts or the mile markers of where I was and what I was doing. I never gave them a second thought. But as I looked at them from the remove of about 15 years, I was struck by how thin they were. They didn't measure much of anything of my real life other than the narrow results of having gone to class. I wanted to append an explanation to them, letting the people who would look at them know what they really described. I wanted to say, for example, that those grades there through that one semester was when I wore a body cast after an accident. They weren't a full measure of all that went on during those months that year. Or there was that one semester when I was putting my life together after my father died. Another couple of semesters were marked by my preparing to teach a class every week in a language other than English. Not teaching the language, but the subject. That took just about all my time. And on and on. The stark grades there in column on a piece of paper were hardly the measure of my life in any real way. As a yardstick, the lines were uneven and crooked. No one should be judged by them. I realized then how easy it was for me to have judged my classmates who struggled when we were in school together. I'd always done well and was proud of what I was able to do in class. It had never occurred to me that the grades they earned may not have been much of a measure of their lives. I was never fully aware of the hidden parts of their lives. I was content to measure them in the least important ways possible. It took the hard measures of my own life to teach me that the world presents itself hidden and obscure. We often don't know what we see or who's speaking to us. Our challenge is to invest in what we're seeing so as to see what's there. This last year, for example, I developed a torn retina. It was a terrifying experience as my vision in my left eye slowly disappeared in a rain of obscure clutter until in just a few hours I couldn't see anything out of that eye. That night was filled with an extra measure of darkness as I wondered if I would ever be able to see out of that eye again, and if this was a foretaste of what I could anticipate for my other eye as well. Blindness seemed to be around the corner. But no one can tell when you can't see out of one eye. I looked more or less normal, and I didn't want to walk around telling everybody I was blind there. So I passed several months with diminished capacities, a truth unknown to everyone besides those closest to me. And even they could only imagine what I was going through. They had no idea what it felt like. My tear eventually healed, thanks to the therapies we now have for such things. I can see just fine out of my left eye, and I'm not clumsily bumping into things when I reach for them with my depth perception ruined. I'm back to normal. But I haven't forgotten what it was like to carry my secret with me. Now I know that this is what the whole world experiences. Every person's life is a drama of unknown proportion and hidden truths. Most of the time, those we meet are carrying the darkness of their lives in the silence of their hearts. They're not eager to share all they suffer since there's nothing anyone can do about what they're living with. And they're not upfront about the disability they experience since there's no relief from it. So they simply go on as best they can, making their way through their days with the limitations and damages they've suffered, unknown and unappreciated. It's incumbent on us to understand them and their challenges, even though they're invisible and unknowable in the silences they keep. There's more to life than the simple measures that we most often opt for. Life is complicated. Everyone deserves to be known for more than the easy marks on our common yardsticks. Complications and obstacles, most often unknown, because they are invisible to the rest of the world, mark all of us one way or another. Another aspect of what I've noticed these days also fills me with impatience when it doesn't fill me with dread. And that's the drumbeat of commentary about civil war that I hear on the news and from opinion pieces. I don't know how many times you may have heard this or that policy or reaction will, quote, lead to civil war, unquote, or is actually the expression of, quote, a civil war already begun, unquote. It's foolish and destructive. It has to stop before it propels us into unthinkable violence. About five years ago, I reread Bruce Catton's works on the Civil War. I began with his first book, The Coming Fury, which I had not paid much attention to when I first tackled his collection. It details the politics leading up to the shelling of Fort Sumter and the outbreak of conflict in 1861. When I was younger, I was impatient to get to the description of the strategy and the battles that so much defined the struggle. I was a lot less interested in the details of the speeches and rhetoric that the politicians used as the frustrations and accusations with one another increased across the political boundaries. But as I returned to this series, I came back with many more questions about how it could have been the case that so many leaders had decided open conflict would solve the problems they faced. In the wake of the war, it seemed hard to imagine the country had found its obstacles so immovable, many of its people preferred to fight in the open field. And yet they did. And they did not arrive at this conclusion by accident. They were led there. That's the fearful part of this legacy. The sides were implacable, that's beyond question. Certainly they had a long history of dealing with the issues that they wanted to adjudicate. But in all the political struggles they engaged, eventually they decided it would be more decisive and more preferred to appeal to armies to settle the differences rather than votes and laws. Even more frighteningly, once the idea of war burrowed into the rhetoric of the time, it seemed to take over the machinery of deliberation. Just as a virus can hijack the DNA of a host's cell to reproduce the virus's own destructive presence, so the deliberative powers of Congress and the decisive power of elections were used in the Republic to actually further the prospects of war. And once it began, the language used became more extreme, more inflammatory, and more destructive. In the wake of the war, everyone recognized how fanciful the ideas were. Imagining war could be easy, or that ideas are crushed by rifles and cannon, or that somehow battle is an efficient way to settle anything. All these were seen for the deceptions that they are. Nothing more destructive could have been imagined than the great war that resulted. Any other result than battle would have cost fewer lives and less treasure, not to mention less sorrow and many fewer tears. Civil wars are fought between those who have more in common than what they hold to be different. In the Civil War, there were literally brothers who fought brothers and families who stood on different sides. Ulysses Grant, who was given charge of the armies of the Union, had brothers-in-law who fought for the Confederacy, and on and on throughout the disposition of the armies and amongst the families of the time. There's hardly anything more destructive than this type of conflict. And the war was comprehensive. It touched almost every part of life in almost every part of the country. My great-great grandfather was a soldier in the Missouri Home Guard, a formation of German-speaking settlers in northern Missouri organized to preserve the state for the Union against the Confederate presence in the southern part of the state. There were a few minor clashes, a couple of skirmishes here and there. They hardly make for footnotes in the accounts of the war. Yet there were years of assassinations, robberies, assault, and mayhem that rearranged the lives of tens of thousands, including that of my great-great-grandfather and his brothers and his sons and daughters. It was war on a small scale that, like all of the important but tiny elements of everyday life, never made it into the history books. Suffering and uncertainty were the mark of the war for years there in northern Missouri, even when it was only fifty men at a time looking for farms to burn and crops to spoil. When the leashes are unhooked and chaos and pain follow, nobody becomes better off. As Bruce Catton concluded his books on the Civil War with Silence at Appomattox, he, along with the other great popular author of the war, Shelby Foote, draws the reader's attention to the fact of the end of the war. When Grant and Lee met at Appomattox Courthouse to accept the surrender of Lee's army, this effected only the end of their battles with each other. There were still Confederate and Union armies in the field going after one another, hammering tongs. It was only Robert E. Lee's insistence that the cause was lost and the whole Confederacy defeated that brought the war to an end. As the author insisted, it could have sputtered out for much longer at a much greater price to be paid by both sides. The country could have suffered even more than it did. As Thucydides pointed out 2,500 years ago, it's a lot easier to start a war than it is to end one. The civil war could have been even worse. It's destructive to hear people throw the term about civil war as if it were nothing, as if it were the logical conclusion of implac of implacable political points of view. It makes me suspicious of anyone from any political perspective who begins to point to our problems and concludes with talks of armed conflict. Their words could be a rhetorical flourish, but even such dash needs to be constrained by good sense. At worst, their foolishness is power enough to pitch us into the cauldron of violence in which all good we have accumulated over our entire history could boil away in untold misery, interrupt the arrangements of our society, and we could suffer in ways almost no one now can imagine. We should pray it never be so. When I was ordained, I was looking through the Roman Missal at the various options for prayers and themes for masses. I looked to the index at the prayers to be said during civil strife or in time of war. From behind the barricades of the Cold War at that time when I was first ordained, when the Soviet Union and the U.S. and its allies were drawn into fixed positions, with neither side willing to take on the other, those prayers seemed to have come from a different age. I reflected then on how historical it was that we as the Catholic Church in the United States had inherited a book of prayer so much influenced by the past, it included options for what we would never find again or never have to submit ourselves to. Now I know, in the expanse of my years, those prayers are perennial. They never go out of date. May we never submit ourselves to the test in the mistaken notion that options for violence is the only one available to us. I continue to pray it never be so and it never be promoted as so. I pray it never be so even by the foolish voices and facile commentators who are interested mostly in their ratings and their contracts, rather than the health of the country or the possible outcomes of their words. I've begun to wonder at the journalists who fill up so much of our time these days. While we trumpet that old fashioned journalism is dead and assert that no one pays attention like they used to, the facts seem to be that journalism is everywhere. More people invest more of their time listening and thinking about the events of the present than ever before. When I hear what those in front of the cameras are saying, I wonder whether they really believe it or not. Are these men and women serious about what they're saying? Or is it just a job for them? I've always wondered. I've gone back and forth on this. For a while I question whether the experts we see on the various feeds for X or the TV channels are like the brighters that Pravda used to be. Did the Soviet journalists actually believe they were reporting? Or was it just a job, like all of the jobs, marked by the incessant dishonesty of the system in which not telling the truth was a prerequisite? I don't really know the answer to that question. At first, I thought modern journalists were just so, simply cogs in a gear that moved regularly and efficiently to achieve the purpose of the machine. What they said was not nearly important to them as much as the fact that they got to say it. And for a time, I retreated into the fallacy of immediacy. That is, I thought the modern figures were different than the respected and honored journalists of the past. Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley brought us the news every night in a form with completeness that we could trust. I figured this trust had been violated in our contemporary arrangements because journalists like these men just don't exist anymore. But the more I know about the world of their time and their version of it, the more I realized they made decisions and chose what to talk about based only on their points of view and dismissed other points of view uncongenial to their notions of how things ought to go. Reporting wasn't pristine then. I've come to understand it never has been. I just reread the autobiography of Eric Severide, a doyen of the serious journalists when I was a young man. In his book, he described his growing up and his interest into journalism, as well as the formation of his point of view. His work, which was written in 1948, was of course limited by what he knew of the world at the time and what he thought of what he had experienced. He reported what he thought was true and important. In his book, he was focused on making sure the readers knew how he had come to know the meaning and the gravity of the important things of the world. His autobiography was his appeal to his viewers to take him seriously since he was a serious student of the world and how it worked. Yet in his final chapter, he talked about China and its inevitable settlement into the House of Nations. It had a long way to go, but it would achieve this most likely by becoming a communist country, which he thought was inevitable. Severide reflected it probably would do so only by a kind of collectivization that the Soviets had achieved in their country. It seemed the pathway forward, wouldn't which all of those who spent the entire book criticizing could have told him. So I've come to a depressing conclusion. The journalists who talk to us for the most part are true believers in what they uh are true believers when they talk to us. Rather than hacks, they're professionals who apply themselves completely to their work, which is why we have to listen critically. It's not enough to question or to criticize based on sincerity. Truth matters in every respect and at every juncture and in every way. My conclusion is that it has never been more important in all of this to say our prayers for ourselves and for our neighbors. Pray for those who persecute you. Do good to those who hate you. This is not only advice from the Savior, it's the only way forward in our lives. Back in just a moment. We come to our last segment, Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called An Odd Plus. There is an odd plus that does to us accrue, we who have entered our seniority. With our years come a newer view of the world from our perspicuity. You see, now with our wrinkled, grizzled mien and all that occasions our becoming old, a peculiar aspect causes us to lean out of sight into what is dark and cold. We become markedly invisible as we occupy our full gathered lives, and we full fade, an aspect risible, at which everyone seems to connive. It doesn't take long, just the right birthday, and life evaporates to a puddle. It matters not what we in our girth way, or how many of us meet in huddle. Pass the right ears, and then you're gone. No funeral, no vigil, no body. Become old and quickly darkens the dawn, with no elixir more than our hot toddy. But we do see and hear what others do not, can capture and understand the hidden, and will at distance hear can't and smell rot, to know truth is more invoked than ridden. Despair not, all who have put on their years are privileged to live in this day and time. We are not bowed down by the weight of tears, nor are we soiled by today's dark grime. That's an odd plus. I hope you can join us in the weeks to come as we continue to explore what it means to be living Catholic.

SPEAKER_01: 24:39

Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcr.org.