Welcome!

Allow me to introduce myself

Vic Biorseth, http://www.Thinking-Catholic-Strategic-Center.com

I am nobody you ever heard of. My full name is Lyman Victor Biorseth. My family all call me either Lyman or Butch; everyone else, including my wife and her family, just calls me Vic. My Confirmation name is Michael. I live in Huber Heights, a Northern suburb of Dayton Ohio, with my wife Marcie, and our nephew Mark. We are all transplants from Southeastern Michigan.

Born and raised in Detroit, I served six years in the US Army as a radio operator from 1960 to 1966, with Foreign Service in Germany and ending with a tour and a half in Vietnam. Although raised as a Catholic, I stood pretty far from the Lord during those Army years.

Marcie and I met in a strange way. She wrote me a nasty letter while I was in Vietnam, chewing me out for not writing to my mother often enough. (She was working in a Detroit hospital as a nurses aid, caring for my mother, who was ill there.) So, we were writing. Then I came home on leave and we met; and I decided I wanted to come back to civil life, and to eventually marry her.

I came home and got my discharge in 1966, with a 40-day early-out due to my extra time in the combat zone. I immediately started courting Marcie, working the assembly line in a GM car plant and going to college in the evenings on the G.I. bill. And all the time, Marcie was pulling me back toward the Church. I really had to clean up my act a lot. (Her prayer life was severely disrupted by the radical changes after Vatican II, and even she was no longer a heavily practicing Catholic.) We were engaged Christmas of 1967, and married Memorial Day 1968. We were never blessed with children; we accept God’s will for us and bless His holy name.

My ongoing education began paying off perhaps a bit prematurely, because I got into data processing, as it was called back in those days, before I got my degree. The school actually placed me in my first programming job. Eventually, the extra hours demanded of the job got the better of the heavy load of study time, and I never finished my degree work. I've been a computer programmer / systems analyst / consultant ever since. In 1972 my employer moved us to Dayton Ohio, and we've been here ever since, although I've changed employers several times.

In March of 1991, my Marcie was mentally, emotionally and spiritually devastated by the sudden death of her sister Joyce, due to an undetected aneurism. Marcie was thrown into the deepest depths of depression, from which it seemed she might not be able to emerge. It was the most difficult and trying time we've ever been through. Her faith in God was shaken to the core, and, her faith was her foundation; her whole well-being, in fact, her very being was very dependant upon her faith, since she was a little girl. I knew, without being able to explain how, that no other part of her health and well being was going to get back to normal unless her faith was restored.

So, I started gathering Catholic information, regarding grief, and faith crisis, and why bad things happen to good people, and how could a good God allow such a terrible thing, and so forth. It wasn't enough; I wasn't the guy to do this, and I couldn't get "expert" fast enough or well enough to do the job. I started getting her into dialogues with priests. We began praying regularly. We joined our church and returned to living life fully as Catholics are supposed to live life. We were members of multiple Catholic prayer groups, went on religious retreats, our reading and even TV viewing choices turned to Christianity and Catholicism. You might say we went quite overboard, if there is such a thing in religious matters.

It took a long time, but we got through it together, thank God. The grief of losing someone you love never really leaves, but it gets older, and bearable. And then, when there was time to reflect, I came to a gradual recognition of something that had changed in me. Through this whole process - in fact, since I received that nasty letter in the war zone - Marcie had been gently prodding me back toward the Church. My so-called faith, up until Marcie's crisis, was a lip-service, going-through-the-motions kind of faith. It was all because it was so important to her, and because I loved and wanted her, and because there was no way we were going to be married outside the Church, and because nothing was ever going to be allowed to come between her and her Catholic faith. If we were going to be together for life, well then we were going to be Catholic, that was all there was to it, and I knew that from the start.

In the midst of all of this effort to return Marcie to her faith, I went to confession for the first time in over 30 years. I spent a lot of time preparing, all to no avail; when I started, I just fell apart and couldn't remember all the stuff I prepared for. But the priest, who wasn't the least bit fazed by anything I said, just took over, and lead me through a good examination of conscience, and my full return to grace. It probably didn't take 10 minutes, although I don't really know. It is fair to say that I just about floated out of that confessional. I cannot even describe the feeling.

When the worst of the crisis was over, I recognized, in myself, a very solid faith that I didn't remember from before. I believed when I was a kid, but pushed it all away from me as a smart-assed, know-it-all, tough young man, and had, as I said, been mostly going through the motions for the sake of my beloved wife. But now, I believed; I recognized the Truth. I was meditating on where this new belief came from, this recognition of the Truth of it all, and the slow realization came over me that Truth didn't come from anywhere. He always was. He was standing right in front of me all along.

Now, here's the ultimate irony in it all. Marcie had never really lost her faith. She had gone through her dark night of the soul, anguish, depression, dryness-in-prayer, and more; but she had never lost her faith in God. In trying so hard to return her to a faith she never really lost, I found in myself a solid faith that I never previously had. It was really the first time I dug into Catholicism in a big way, and I didn't start all that research for myself, but for Marcie. And, digging into Catholicism proved to be habit forming; indeed, I'm still doing it.

In fact, it led me into a program of study leading to the Catholic Deaconate; you can read about that unhappy experience in the various Cafeteria Catholic pages.

And so, that's how we got to this point. The Thinking Catholic Strategic Center is an opportunity, mainly, to write about stuff. My favorite stuff to write about involves my religion; my second favorite stuff involves our rather unique American brand of liberty.

There is one thing only that is important. Never lose sight of that one thing.

Rapidly closing in on our retirement years, and facing the relentlessly increasing threat of job outsourcing of old, mainframe COBOL/CICS computer programmer dinosaurs like me, I took a plunge into a business venture, which failed to produce; then another, which also failed to produce. But in that process, while looking for new ways to make income, I learned how to build a WebSite, and you're looking at the results of that learning process. When I get time, I’ll write another web page about my home-based-business and work-from-home experiences.

Currently, I've re-entered the job market to keep things going until we completely retire. I got my Class A CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) and started trucking. I put in a year over-the-road with one of the largest American haulers, and then changed jobs to join a smaller company that allows me to get home on a daily or near daily basis, and sleep in my own bed in my own house, with whole weekends off, just like a regular person. This usually means 300 or so miles out, and then back home. If you watch the ads, one year (two with some companies) seems to be the magic mark for over-the-road trucking experience. Once that’s completed with no accidents and no tickets, there usually seem to be lots of opportunities for more local driving jobs.

It was a rough life, living and sleeping on a truck for weeks at a time. It meant missing all sorts of family events, including funerals, weddings, reunions and holidays. It also meant missing Mass on an almost continuous basis. You just cannot get a big truck into the small neighborhood streets where most Churches are and get it back out again safely and legally. You can’t even turn it around on blacktop without damaging the blacktop. And, contrary to popular opinion, Churches cannot always send someone to take you to and from Mass from some truck stop or rest area on short notice. By company rules, and common sense, you cannot just unhook and drop a trailer and then bobtail (drive the tractor only) anywhere because that puts the trailer and the cargo at risk, and is usually illegal anyway. Even the tractor alone is still too huge and heavy for a lot of streets and parking spots. Thank God that’s all behind us, we pray permanently.

When I started this web site, I determined to write about the two things verboten in common civil discourse, those being, religion and politics. I submit that the most important subjects to man are tied up in those two things – religion, and politics. And yet, when you have company visiting or you are visiting someone else, or when standing around the water cooler, we are not supposed to talk about religion or politics.

Religion is supposed to drive our every day actions, including even our language, our dress and appearance, and other things associated with the virtues of modesty and common decency. Our politics, in so much as we have anything to say about their direction, will ultimately determine what part of our every day actions are encouraged, allowed, discouraged or prohibited, by civil law. We lowly citizens have something to say about that only so long as our government remains a representative government.

So, this WebSite is my newest hobby; I write and argue about my two favorite topics: religion and politics. I still pray, and I still fish, and I still get out into the woods, and I still read, and I still participate in liturgy, and we still demonstrate against abortion. And we still go for long drives. But this is one more “recreation” thing that I really love to do in my spare time.

A long time ago, seemingly in another life, I began gathering and ordering information for a book, which never really became a book. It started when I got really ticked off about the clearly false way that the mainstream news media was reporting on the Vietnam War, in a manner not merely dishonoring, but outright slandering to American, Australian, South Korean and, not just incidentally, South Vietnamese veterans who served there, living and dead. Seeking to understand the why of it lead to some competing culture studies. Then, I did all my Catholic research, leading into some very serious formal studies, and all of that material, like the Vietnam and Competing Culture material, was saved on electronic media. So, once I had this new WebSite building methodology down, I already had a lot of content ready to be massaged, modified and uploaded into WebPages. And, of course, current events just keep providing new material. Luckily for me, I can type pretty fast, and I enjoy writing.

And, as it turns out, I also thoroughly enjoy working on this WebSite and creating new WebPages. My job career dealt with the very largest mainframe computers, involving smaller PC type computers only to the extent that they were necessary bridge-tools of use to get into the giant mainframe software systems I designed, developed and maintained. And, of course, to use typical business office PC tools, like email, appointment calendars, spreadsheets, schedules, data-bases, word processors, presentations and so forth. Which is to say, my PC skills are probably comparable to those of most who work in any business office today; certainly not vastly superior. And my WebSite-building experience? Well, you're looking at it.

Our marriage began as a holy sacrament and a partnership, a two-way commitment for the duration of our lives. Over the years our partnership has only strengthened. We stand by and take each other’s part against anyone. We recognize that behind every decision and every contentious issue lies the real contention, which is the contention between The Spirit and The Flesh, that is to say, between The Kingdom and The World. Just as we are mutually committed by marriage to loving and supporting each other for life, so are we mutually committed to seeking and promoting The Kingdom, and so are we mutually committed as co-conspirators against The World. We are not perfect, and we are not “big shots,” but we try to do whatever we can, in whatever circumstance, by personal example if nothing else.

I hope you enjoy the content, and that you might contribute to it yourself.

The two subjects of most vital importance to you and yours are your religion, and your politics. Think about it.

What kind of person are you?

What kind of people are we?

What kind of nation is this?

Marcie took vacation time and went with me "over-the-road" living on the truck for a week or more, three different times.

Working in the "sleeper" section of the cab. That's a refrigerator to my left.