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Dedicated to My Son, His Wife and My Two Grandchildren … and All the Parents Raising Children
To be a good parent … we do not need to be people who have arrived; God simply calls us to be on the way, seeking, finding, and rejoicing in what we find. (Emphasis added.)
Catherine Stonehouse, in Joining Children on the Spiritual Journey: Nurturing a Life of Faith.
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My son and I recently had a very interesting conversation about providing for the spiritual lives of his two small children, ages almost three and almost one.
Yes, children have – as all human beings do – innate spiritual needs and desires.
Throughout the ages people are confronted with all sorts of probative “why” and “how” and “what” and “who” questions. Why do bad things happen? How can we be good? What is love? How do you forgive someone? Who made the world? Why go to church?
Yes, we are all bound by these questions. And, no – politics does not provide the answer. And, yes – by thinking all things are political as many do in this imploding secular culture we establish one thing for sure: life and cultures demand that individuals pay particular attention to our interior, the spiritual plateau in all human beings or court chaos and destruction, disintegration. Absent attention to the spiritual: cultures, societies, communities, families, nations, individual people are undone – destroyed – trapped in selfishness, error, hostility, destruction, conflict, injury and despair.
Frankly, we are inclined precisely in that destructive dimension in contemporary America and the West at this very moment.
We are, of course, not human beings seeking a spiritual experience, but rather – spiritual beings seeking a human experience.
Look around you. Do you see how costly denying God and spiritual reality can be?
Parents attend to your spiritual existence and invite your children to join you. Individually you will each be better – together you will be a family – a sacred, life-saving vessel in a world of choppy waters and occasional gales.
I wish you smooth seas – no matter the conditions you meet.
Shalom.
Moral Indignation. Been alive for seven-plus decades. Ain’t met a single perfect person, nor an angel. My conclusion: we are not perfect. Yet, now some (armed with moral indignation) are set on tearing down statues of people they find unsavory. With this approach the Democrat Party may find itself banished after their lengthy history of favoring the Klan and racial segregation.
In the language of Boston politics – what goes around, comes around.
God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. (Emphasis added.)
C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity
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Such an interesting thought, clearly stated. The stakes in a Christian life are not to be simply nice, or to conform to the rubric of the practices of religion – but rather to live as the children of God. In that alone is redemption.
It is not enough to be nice, nor is it to live nicely behind closed doors while the world around you collapses. A sequestered life is not sufficient for a Christian.
Look around you, we live in a culture that more and more resembles Sodom and Gomorrah. New York City has a public hotel that encourages residents to engage in all sorts of sexual activity in plain view to their neighbors in surrounding apartments. Their mayor shelters nude women who solicit cash donations from tourists in Time Square. His justification? The women are undocumented aliens and New York is a sanctuary city.
Chicago is a killing field. The City of Angels (Los Angeles) is for the most part a shambles with widespread poverty and homelessness. And we bar mention of God in public places. How sick is this!
What is your responsibility? What side of the divide are you on?
Shalom.
God, bring us to our senses. Give us the courage to speak out.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation … not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
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Very few visible in mass media are habituated to excellence. If you want mediocrity or less, mass media provides an endless supply of such lightweights. However, beware: if you have a diet of mediocrity you will disgorge yourself of the attitude, instinct, discipline and will for excellence.
Excellence takes strength of soul. Excellence understands sacrificial love. Excellence honors God in its being and doing.
All have the capacity needed for excellence. Yet many forfeit the strength of soul. Those who forfeit strength of soul live lies – excuses are common to them, envy too – they seek nothing more urgently than to thwart the will of others, to neutralize the soul.
Those who forfeit strength of soul are weak links. They abound in politics today. They prefer dependence to a free populace for they fear being challenged to live fully. They keep others bound-up so they might wallow in under-achievement, the cost of which always includes dishonesty and corruption.
When mediocrity rules, men are targeted, for it is men who do the dying, who come easily to sacrificial love. A warrior class is always necessary. Today, the weak seek their demise. Men are targets for the weak fear them.
Want to see the locus of excellence in American culture, look at the middle class and those like me who lived in poverty and in daily combat. Look, not just at me but at my petite mother – one tough cookie … and her parents, and her brothers Don and Ray. Their habit was excellence – its byproducts: humility, confidence, contentment, compassion, joy and laughter, insight, wisdom, generosity, gratitude.
Excellence comes to those who must work hard to survive, and to whom difficulties befall because in the hardest things they live daily by strength of soul. This is why the Left so despises the middle class and seeks to make dependents of the poor. Don’t let yourself be sold short or sold out.
Live in excellence. You’ll scare the heck out of the elites and make of us again a great people. And, in the habits of excellence is satisfaction.
Enjoy the life God has given you. Don’t let anyone deny you a life of excellence – especially of moral excellence.
Shalom.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. (Emphasis added.)
Jean-Paul Sartre
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Sartre, of course, is wrong about being “condemned to be free” but he is correct in saying the human person is “responsible for everything he (or she) does.“
Responsibility is largely honored in its absence now. We can thank the Left for this. They talk about rights but never about responsibilities. In health care they never see the sanctity of life as a gift and our responsibility to take care of ourselves, to eat properly, exercise, control our weight, avoid unhealthy vices, etc.
Indeed, the godless Left holds few “responsible” least of all themselves and those in their ranks who seek that others pay the tab for their irresponsibility. Of course, the Left does hold responsible those who expect each of us to be responsible. Odd as it seems, even the godless Sartre is more to be trusted than the present day American Left.
I guess one can conclude that years of Leftist irresponsibility has made even Sartre a Conservative. If you need a measure of how ill-conceived the positions and policies of the Left are – imagining Sartre a Conservative probably does it.
Shalom.
Remember – Spirlaw is a blog about faith and culture – as such it must address the culture as it is. And that now means as its political state the condition of which would be vastly improves if God and faith were given a rightful place. Yes, if each living being saw life as a gift and took responsibility for it as such.
The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. Fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. (Emphasis added.)
Samuel P . Huntington
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Do not Islam and Marxism display the truth of Professor Huntington’s remarks? Is our national security not, then, contingent upon America and the West knowing who they are and who their rivals are – what is the bedrock of our identity and their identity?
American and Western identity rests on our classical legacy, Christianity, the relationship between church and state, freedom of religious expression, free speech and free elections, the rule of law, civil society and the peaceful transition of political power, free market economics, and our historic national footprint.
When cultures clash, as they do now, one must have a very clear understanding of who one is.
When cultures clash radical variation in basic identity within a society is a luxury that cannot be readily accommodated. That said, a political party like the Democrat Left whose identity is based on: perpetual radical social and economic “change,” the centralization of cradle to grave power in the federal government, creating conflict through “identity politics” which manufactures angry “victim classes” and enslaved government dependents – compromises the nation’s security. A state of perpetual internal flux puts in question one’s basic identity – it distracts and creates unnecessary and dangerous discord.
Indeed this is where we are today: division within while those within and without who wish our defeat grow stronger and more intent on our destruction.
To make matters worse, very few of those who occupy political office have any inkling of the challenge we face and the fundamental question it raises. The question? Who exactly are we?
In a clash of cultures not knowing who you are is fatal.
Shalom.
The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. (Emphasis added.)
Albert Einstein, in Out of My Later Years
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Do you remember the story of Jesus visiting the home of Martha and Mary? (Lk 10:38-42)
In that story Martha is busy preparing a meal for Jesus and others while her sister Mary is seated at Jesus feet listening to him. Martha asks Jesus if he does not care that Mary has left her to do all the preparations alone.
Jesus answered Martha – “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”
This is precisely the wisdom Albert Einstein expresses. We all have the capacity to experience the mystical.
A life lived within mortal limits is a life not lived. It is a life without fullness. It is “the mystical” that makes a life, that alone completes a life.
Feodor Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov this: “Much on earth is hidden from us, but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystical sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world.”
We have many like Martha. And few like Mary. Which are you?
Those like Mary possess calm, certainty. They see and they are not lured into all that is earthly. They are not worrisome. Addicted. They are not egotists. They are not trapped in the nonsense that prevails among the masses. They are not captured in the present day and all its false gods and endless foolishness.
Our culture is full of Martha in many forms. Ignore them. They have chosen the lesser things.
Are you Mary or are you Martha?
Shalom.
Russia and Us. It is interesting that for all the hubbub about Russia over the years, we have not been smart in dealing with them. We have been, because we have “leaders” who do not live life on a mystical plateau, unable to see the undeniable truth about Russians which is this: Dostoevsky reveals their core, their heart – their orientation to life (even as they try to supplant him with Marxist nonsense).
The truth of who they actually are is their soft underbelly and, not being well and fully formed, our “leadership” cannot see it.
When the blind confront the blind – it is always an “eye for an eye.” Endless folly. “Clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right.”
… sanity is spiritual. It simply is.
Gerald May, M.D., in Simply Sane
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Liberals are fearful, frightened. Having neither faith nor having sufficiently deeply examined themselves and the demonstrative nature of being human, they are in great need of reassurance. Hence, they are “snowflakes” demanding special zones of “protection” and they relish being victims and asserting all sorts of privileges they associate with victimhood. Yes, in such “status” they are reassured … at the expense of others – no matter the cost to other, self or society.
Fearful as they are, they seek control. They do so by making errant ideas their idols and forcing others to conform to their fear-driven orientation.
They root in politics – local, state and national. In this regard they create and encode fanciful notions: homophobia emerges, fascism assigned to others, genders “multiply” from two to many, “transgenderism” becomes a “human right,” marriage “re-defined” and child sacrifice legalized.
In the extreme, immaturity emerges. One thinks of the liberal state legislators who fled the state of Wisconsin to avoid conceding power to their fairly elected opposition, or of U.S. Senator Charles Schumer’s obstructionist tactics intended to thwart America’s legislative business and peaceful governance, or of the bureaucracies use of “leaks” to scuttle an American Presidency.
Liberals were once better than this. Alas, they are no more what they once were.
In life we must choose – self alone, or self in the Spirit. That is: life with or life without God. The liberals mistake – life without God, life without Spirit. In this, as May notes, sanity is lost.
It profits one not at all to maintain discourse with those who forfeit sanity. The mere semblance of dialogue with them destroys one’s own sanity – individual or nation.
We live in strange times.
Shalom.
… He is before all things and in Him all things hold together.
Col 1:17
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These are the words of St. Paul in his Letter to the Colossians. Think for a moment about what St. Paul is saying. He is telling us that we live in God, that we have our being in Him.
Think too about today and how we operate each day. Do you think in all that you do that you are acting within God’s ambit, framework or are you acting without any thought of what St. Paul is saying?
Think too about the discomfort you might feel in being so responsible for success in a world in which no one feels that they are immersed in God’s dominion, but rather each is alone to navigate all of life’s twists and turns, misfortunes, accidents and mistakes.
In St. Paul’s view one is never so at risk, so apt to be plagued by anxiety or fear, self-doubt or confusion. In his view, life is easier to negotiate, faith is implicit in one’s disposition and outlook. Are we not a far cry from that peace and certainty today? Would it not make sense to restore St. Paul’s view to your life? Why suffer as you do?
In St. Paul’s view we live and think and experience in a complete way, in a manner that brings us closer to our base identity: that of spiritual beings.
Think about it: your tranquility is simply a matter of adopting a point of view that gives you peace. In a culture and age that does not understand the relationship between God and the human person, chaos flourishes and its costs are tragic but unnecessary. This need not be the case, and surely not for you or your children.
Shalom.
The loss of the Christian religion is why the West has been fragmented for some time now, a process that is accelerating … (we are) stripped of ancestral faith.
Rod Dreher, in The Benedict Option
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What in particular has been lost?
To answer this question is to chart a course back to health and stability, joy, meaning and purpose, resolve, determination, responsibility, identity, intimacy, strength and courage.
So what is the answer? Well here is part of it. We once identified God with Creation – with our beginning, our origin, and this nexus of God and Creation placed God in the present moment of each day. Having disconnected God from Creation, we are lost.
Lost, we are without stability, comprehension, understanding, hope and certainty. We lack vitality. We have nothing to fight for or to defend.
In our present state, our capacity for belief and the ability to have a full human experience are absent. Yes, some among us have become like the Zombies in the Walking Dead – mindless, soulless stumble bums.
Losing the presence of God, nothing is sacred – when once all was sacred.
Having lost sacramental consciousness, the Spirit suffers – we are less than we have been created to be … more uncertain, anxious, frightened, confused. We have been hollowed out.
Our medieval ancestors had it so much easier. Imagine that. They saw God in all things, revealing Himself through people and events, in places and things. In contrast, we live starved of full human experience, and the experience of the Divine. A pathetic and tragic disposition. Those “with less” had so much more.
Think about it. Without God we lose humility – sit and stand alone – dependent on self; this a desperate state given too frequently to addictions, suicides, violence, desolation, hopelessness – crushed by the burden of life without God, without belief. In our midst stand sad clowns and crazies, and those in a stunned stupor – flat, nonsensical, troubled, unpredictable, explosive.
So what might one do?
St. Benedict reacted to the corruption and chaos produced by the fall of Rome by removing himself from the destruction and concentrating on his faith life, on Christ, prayer, living a modest, careful and caring life. He dedicated himself to living his faith daily and in all things.
You can do the same and you need not flee to the desert or take a place in a cave. No, you can “hunkered down” in place. Make space between the confused and you, between you and Christ and those lost to belief.
The times call for a Benedictine presence. Your witness can save others and sustain Christianity just as St. Benedict did. Fear not. This, too, shall pass.
Shalom.
