Think I'll pack up and go...

I don't have any reason to feel positive toward this girl...but I still like her music. And this song is just how I'm feeling.

Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted

"By 'mourning' Jesus, of course, means doing without what the world calls peace and prosperity: He means refusing to be in tune with the world or to accommodate oneself to its standards. Such men mourn for the world, for its guilt, its fate, and its fortune. While the world keeps holiday they stand aside, and while the world sings, 'Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,' they mourn. They see that for all the jollity on board, the ship is beginning to sink. The world dreams of progress, of power and of the future, but the disciples meditate on the end, the last judgement, and the coming of the kingdom. To such heights the world cannot rise. And so the disciples are strangers in the world, unwelcome guests and disturbers of the peace. No wonder the world rejects them! Why does the Christian Church so often have to look on from outside when the nation is celebrating? Have churchmen no understanding and sympathy for their fellow-men? Have they become victims of misanthropy? Nobody loves his fellow-men better than a disciple, nobody understands his fellow-men better than the Christian fellowship, and that very love impels them to stand aside and mourn. It was a happy and suggestive thought of Luther, to translate the Greek word here by the German Leidtragen (sorrow-bearing). For the emphasis lies on the bearing of sorrow. The disciple-community does not shake off sorrow as though it were no concern of its own, but willingly bears it. And in this way they show how close are the bonds which bind them to the rest of humanity. But at the same time they do not go out of their way to look for suffering, or try to contract out of it by adopting an attitude of contempt and disdain. They simply bear the suffering which comes their way as they try to follow Jesus Christ, and bear it for his sake. Sorrow cannot tire them or wear them down, it cannot embitter them or cause them to break down under the strain; far from it, for they bear their sorrow in the strength of him who bears them up, who bore the whole suffering of the world upon the cross. They stand as the bearers of sorrow in the fellowship of the Crucified: they stand as strangers in the world in the power of him who was such a stranger to the world that it crucified him. This is their comfort, or better still, this Man is their comfort, the Comforter (cf. Luke 2:25). The community of strangers find their comfort in the cross, they are comforted by being cast upon the place where the Comforter of Israel awaits them. Thus do they find their true home with their crucified Lord, both here and in eternity."  -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (emphasis mine)

"No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause." ~ Theodore Roosevelt

"The humble person will stick both to truth and to love." -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer and Lewis on Love

"Human love lives by uncontrolled and uncontrollable dark desires; spiritual love lives in the clear light of service ordered by the truth. Human love produces human subjection, dependence, constraint; spiritual love creates freedom of the brethren under the Word. Human love breeds hot-house flowers; spiritual love creates the fruits that grow healthily in accord with God's good will in the rain and storm and sunshine of God's outdoors."

"Spiritual love will speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ. It knows that the most direct way to others is always through prayer to Christ and that love of others is wholly dependent upon the truth in Christ."

"Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them. As only Christ can speak to me in such a way that I may be saved, so others, too, can be saved only by Christ himself. This means that I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love. (emphasis mine) The other person needs to retain his independence of me; to be loved for what he is, as one for whom Christ became man, died, and rose again, for whom Christ bought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brother, before I could begin to act, I must leave him his freedom to be Christ's; I must meet him only as the person that he already is in Christ's eyes."

(all quotes from Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

These words are written of the love of Christian fellowship, or philos, but it seems to me that they also can be applied very aptly to eros or romantic love. And, since the desires of eros are so much stronger and more clamorous and inherently selfish, the need to surrender them to Christ is correspondingly more vital.

But does this mean that we are to live some sort of sterile, "purely spiritual" life, without emotion or human attachment, either in fellowship or in marriage? Even if that were possible, I think not. God created all our loves, and wants us to experience and enjoy them; but in submission to His will and His unselfish (or, as Lewis would call it, "disinterested") love. It is not the affection, or friendship, or erotic desire that is the sin: it is the disordered need of the fallen self to use the other for one's own fulfillment, gratification, and reassurance. Once the will, the self, and the needy, dependent types of love have been surrendered to Him, He gives our loves back as something higher and better, in the same way that He gives back ordinary bread and wine as His transformative and cleansing body and blood.


“When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.” -- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Both Sides Now

"Every impulse of feeling must be guided by reason." -- Jane Austen

"We are never so helplessly unhappy as when we lose love." -- Sigmund Freud

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

"O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fixt His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! O, fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely." -- Shakespeare, Hamlet 2. ii.

My Own Personal Jesus

Apparently Chesterton sees the same picture of Christ in the Gospels as I do.

"I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god--and always like a god.[...] he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel." -- G.K. Chesterton Othodoxy

The most important and often only virtue in typical modern Christianity is Niceness. But Jesus wasn't particularly nice. He was unfathomably compassionate and stunningly kind, but there's nothing nice about calling the respectable citizens of one's community serpents, hypocrites, vipers, and whitewashed tombs full of dead men's bones, nor of driving merchants with a braided whip, nor of telling those who wish to follow to leave their dead lying unburied and abandon their living without so much as a good bye, nor even of telling a man that the only way he will be allowed to join the movement and achieve salvation is to sell everything he owns and give the money to the poor. Nor, for that matter, in telling people that they're going to be cast into an eternal lake of brimstone and fire. I've been rebuked by fussy old Christian ladies for merely using the word "hate", but Christ told his followers to hate their own families, and God hated Esau. 

Should we be kind? yes. Should we love? absolutely. But neither kindness, nor love, nor any other true virtue necessitates the kind of bland, milquetoast niceness which is the single monolithic element of the postmodern moral code and is, in reality, very often the opposite of what is required by love and kindness.

"Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend" -- Proverbs 27:17

(and although I detest the eternal addition of "and/or she" to everything under the sun, let me qualify that, although I love kindness and feminine compassion in a woman, I also like a little bite, like dark chocolate, red wine, or the music of the violin. Give me a girl who's a little bit mean when it comes to the stupid, the modern, and the banal--give me a girl with a little Anne Coulter streak in her.)

Christianity and Courage

"I felt that a strong case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "Christian," especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting." -- G.K. Chesterton

Unfortunately, although this is not actually true of the teachings of Christianity as given us in Scripture, modern Christians seem to themselves believe it. There is a great effeminacy in the Church: a sense that, in order to be a Christian one must become a woman.  Catholics are almost universally pacifists, and Evangelicals touchy-feely wimps. The God of Israel sent Joshua and David to conquer His enemies; the medieval church sent knights, paladins, and crusaders to resist the violence of paganism and Islam; Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church tried to assassinate Hitler. But the modern church fields an army of wan eunuchs whose primary fear is that they'll offend or hurt someone's feelings (and thereby endanger their esteem in the community and worse yet, their funding). I recently had a priest tell me that he could not support an effort to rescue girls from the horrors of sex slavery because the rescuers might have to use force against the traffickers to protect the girls being rescued, and church leaders almost universally denounce even passive, non-violent resistance to the state-sponsored slaughter of infants that goes on every single day in our midst.

But the Lord says:

"If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small. If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, 'Behold, we knew it not'; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?" -- Proverbs 24: 10-12

and

"Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." -- James 4:17

and

"But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, murderers, whoremongers, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” -- Rev 21:8 (note the first item in the list)

and

"Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. -- Joshua 1:9


"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors and mountaineers...This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine." -- G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton on Idealism and Growing Up

"When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: 'Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.' Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old child-like faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election."

This is precisely the position in which I find myself as I finally begin to settle into middle age. Christmas and Easter are just as important to me as ever; perhaps more so. But the 4th of July begins to ring hollow.

"It is not important to succeed, but to do right. The rest is up to God." -- C.S. Lewis

The True Equality of the Sexes

"Christianity has asserted the complete equality of the sexes, and this as plainly as possible. Saint Paul says: 'The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband; and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.'

Once she is man's equal, woman cannot be 'man's goal'. Yet at the same time she is spared the bestial abasement that sooner or later must be the price of divinizing a creature. But her equality is not to be understood in the contemporary sense of giving rise to rights. It belongs to the mystery of love. It is but the sign and evidence of the victory of Agape over Eros. For a truly mutual love exacts and creates the equality of those loving one another. God showed his love for man by exacting that man should be holy even as God is holy. And a man gives evidence of his love for a woman by treating her as a completely human person, not as if she were the spirit of the legend--half goddess, half bacchante, a compound of dreams and sex." -- Denis de Rougemont

I disagree in some respects with de Rougemont overall--I think he goes just a bit too far in trying to demystify and demythologize love, whereas I believe that the mythic and mystical Eros is subsumed into Christian Agape rather than completely replaced by it, so that there is still a "magic" to marital love, as evidenced in the Song of Solomon.

That aside, this is one of the best statements of what I call "the third alternative" that I have seen. By that, I mean that the almost universal assumption in modernity is that there are two and only two alternatives in the relation of man and woman: chauvinism and feminism. Of course, this is typical of modernity: everything is reduced to simplistic dichotomies, usually with one choice being offered merely as a straw man so that one is coerced into acceding to the presenter's view. My response to being given this choice has always been, and will continue to be: "I'll have neither: have you any others?"

Chauvinism is the product of paganism, and feminism the product of rationalism. Only Judeo-Christianity presents us with a true view of what it means to be created male and female: equal in humanity, complementary in identity.

On Virtue

"My child, there is no happiness without courage nor virtue without struggle. The word virtue comes from strength. Strength is the foundation of all virtue. Virtue belongs only to a being that is weak by nature and strong by will. It is in this that the merit of the just man consists.... I have waited for you to be in a position to understand me before explaining this much profaned word to you. So long as virtue costs nothing to practice, there is little need to know it. This need comes when the passions are awakened. It has already come for you. Raising you in all the simplicity of nature, I have not preached painful duties to you but instead have protected you from the vices that make these duties painful. I have made lying more useless than odious to you; I have taught you not so much to give unto each what belongs to him as to care only for what is yours. I have made you good rather than virtuous. But he who is only good remains so only as long as he takes pleasure in being so. Goodness is broken and perishes under the impact of the human passions. The man who is only good is good only for himself.

Who, then, is the virtuous man? It is he who knows how to conquer his affections; for then he follows his reason and his conscience; he does his duty; he keeps himself in order, and nothing can make him deviate from it. Up to now you were only apparently free. You had only the precarious freedom of a slave to whom nothing has been commanded. Now be really free. Learn to become your own master. Command your heart, Emile, and you will be virtuous.

Here, then, is another apprenticeship, and this apprenticeship is more painful than the first; for nature delivers us from the ills it imposes on us, or it teaches us to bear them. But nature says nothing to us about those which come from ourselves. It abandons us to ourselves. It lets us, as victims of our own passions, succumb to our vain sorrows and then glorify ourselves for the tears at which we should have blushed.

You now have your first passion. It is perhaps the only one worthy of you. [i.e. the love of a chaste, modest, and virtuous woman. --ed.] If you know how to rule it like a man, it will be the last. You will subject all the others, and you will obey only the passion for virtue."

-- Rousseau


Rousseau, being a deist and a naturist, of course doesn't understand grace. And he is theologically mistaken in a sentence I have omitted from the quote, when he says that God is good but not virtuous, because it takes no effort for Him to be good (Jesus, in his humanity, exerted the supreme effort in undergoing all temptations and sufferings known to man).

Apart from those shortcomings, however, this is no less than inspiring. We modern Christians tend to think almost exclusively of grace, and not of effort. But although God forgives us for our failings, he wants us to learn to live virtuously in this life: we cannot, because we know we will be forgiven, neglect or refuse to try to be good. It is for this reason that our loving Father allows us to be injured and insulted; to be rejected and ridiculed; to have our dreams crushed and our hearts broken. For only through overcoming the trials and vicissitudes of this life can we become truly good.

"This is, then, the summary of the whole of human wisdom in the use of the passions: (1) To have a sense of the true relations of man, with respect to the species as well as the individual. (2) To order all the affections of the soul according to these relations." -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jacqueline du Pré - Schubert's Forellen Quintet (The Trout)

Came across this rare jewel today. I didn't know Jacqueline had recorded this. It's good to be reminded there are still good and beautiful things in the world.

On Being a Gentleman

Some of you, my friends, have grown up or lived long inside the “sanctuary”; that is, had the guidance of truly devoted parents, a fine education (most often by homeschooling), orthodox religious formation, an exposure to and appreciation of traditional high culture, and sound instruction in social etiquette. Others have, like me, come from “out there”. Some of us belonging to the latter group have climbed the wall and appropriated some of the blessings of the sanctuary for ourselves; others have looked over it longingly but not found a way past; still others are unaware of the sanctuary’s existence and are yet wallowing in primetime TV, fast food, and top 40 radio. But even those of us who find a way inside still face many obstacles before we can truly make ourselves at home.

 

The most daunting of the barriers in my own journey has been social interactions and polite behaviour. Although I am naturally possessed of a gentlemanly nature, I have lacked gentlemanly polish. I find, therefore, an invaluable gem in the 1875 manual The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette, by Cecil B. Hartley. (For the ladies, there is The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette by his wife, Florence. Both are, unfortunately, very hard to find in their original form, but available electronically and in scanned reprint.)  

 

From the introduction:  

MAN was not intended to live like a bear or a hermit, apart

from others of his own nature, and, philosophy and reason will

each agree with me, that man was born for sociability and finds

his true delight in society. Society is a word capable of many

meanings, and used here in each and all of them. Society,

par excellence; the world at large; the little clique to which he

is bound by early ties; the companionship of friends or relatives;

even society tete a tete with one dear sympathizing soul, are

pleasant states for a man to be in.

I have actually tried living like a bear or a hermit, and found that Mr. Hartley is correct: it only increased my misery. Despite my protestations to the contrary, I discovered that I did, in fact, need the society of others; most especially that last-mentioned "society tete a tete with one dear sympathizing soul".

 Further:

 

You may set it down as a rule, that as you treat the world,

so the world will treat you. Carry into the circles of society

a refined, polished manner, and an amiable desire to please,

and it will meet you with smiling grace, and lead you forward

pleasantly along the flowery paths; go, on the contrary, with a

brusque, rude manner, startling all the silky softness before you

with cut and thrust remarks, carrying only the hard realities

of life in your hand, and you will find society armed to meet

you, showing only sharp corners and thorny places for your

blundering footsteps to stumble against.

Right again. It was this that drove me into isolation to begin with. On this head, however, although I accept full responsibility for my own actions, I do have something to say on at least part of the cause which I think is not unique to my own story.

Mr. Hartley clearly delineates (as one would expect in 1875) between behaviour appropriate to the society of other gentlemen and that appropriate to mixed company or the society of ladies. His words "startling all the silky softness" &c here are plainly a reference to the feminine. Unlike the gentlemen of the late 19th century, however, my generation of men came of age in the very teeth of feminism, or "women's lib" as it was mostly called then. And at that time, there was an incessant insistence, a la J.S. Mill, (now proved false) that men and women were equal, meaning the same in every way, and all perceived differences were the result of archaic socialization. This was the time when feminists thought it their duty to rebuke men who "patronized" them by trying to hold doors or show other small courtesies. Consequently, although the earliest years of my childhood had inculcated in me a rudimentary sense of gentility toward the fairer sex, every bit of my socialization from outside the home and subsequent to about my sixth year contradicted that, and it became ingrained in my subconscious (and that of the greater part of my generation) that women and men were intellectually and emotionally identical. You see, ladies; gentlemanly conduct is predicated upon the realization of the gentleman that ladies require gentle treatment. Not that they are intellectually inferior, as some boors have maintained in times past; but simply different, and deserving of special consideration. For men, of their nature, are somewhat rough toward each other. We jest, we tease, we provoke, we fight. And a boy has to be taught that he is not to act in those ways toward girls, because it will not at all be appreciated.

But our generation was not allowed to learn this, because it was supposedly patronizing and demeaning to women. Hence, the epidemic of boorish and callous treatment of women by men in our day. (As a brief aside, feminism has now invented their own answer to the problem: turn all men into women. So the younger generations of men and boys have a whole different set of problems to face.)

Mr. Hartley shows us a better way:

You will soon become familiar with the signs, and

tell on your first entrance into a room whether kid

gloves and exquisite finish of manner will be appropriate,

or whether it is "hail, fellow, well met" with the inmates.

Remember, however, "once a gentleman always a

gentleman," and be sure that you can so carry out the rule,

that in your most careless, joyous moments, when freest from

the restraints of etiquette, you can still be recognizable as a

gentleman by every act, word, or look.

I suppose "hail, fellow, well met" was, in 1875 rugged manly coarseness as opposed to the refinement of the drawing-room or ballroom. Another failing of our time, and of mine: that now we curse like sailors (or soldiers, in my case) in all company without restraint.

Similarly, the first chapter ("Conversation") starts with this now utterly unheeded rule:

ONE of the first rules for a guide in polite conversation,

is to avoid political or religious discussions in

general society. Such discussions lead almost invariably

to irritating differences of opinion, often to open quarrels,

and a coolness of feeling which might have been

avoided by dropping the distasteful subject as soon as

marked differences of opinion arose. It is but one out

of many that can discuss either political or religious differences,

with candor and judgment, and yet so far control

his language and temper as to avoid either giving or

taking offence.

This is probably my greatest infraction. Partly out of zeal for the truth, but mostly out of pride and selfish desire to be right, I have both given and taken offense, almost as a way of life. In class, in casual conversation, on social media, and in every possible way I have ignored this invaluable law (although I knew it) and made many enemies where there was no need. Not to say that one should kowtow and compromise his beliefs: when the time is right, it is imperative to stand for the truth. But I, and many, many others, have made a habit of bringing in our opinions when opinions are not called for; of creating tension and dissension when polite amity and kind respect would have better served the cause of truth.

I am still reading, and may post more gems of wisdom as I come across them. But I highly recommend the entire work for any man who wants to improve his character, and especially to the man who wishes to be a better man for the sake of a certain cherished one who deserves the best that he can possibly be and give.

 

Final Lenten Thoughts

I have crucified the Lord Jesus with my sin. But that is not all. I have abandoned him with his disciples, when I chose to follow my own path rather than his. I have betrayed him with Judas when I sinned, knowing full well his grace and the wrongness of my actions before I committed them. I have beaten him with the soldiers when I blasphemed and used his name as a curse. I have denied him with Peter when I tried to befriend the world rather than suffering ridicule with him. I have accused him with the Jews when I brought discredit to his name by my actions. I have reviled him with the thieves when I traded his blessings for the pleasures of the flesh. And I have persecuted him with Paul when I maligned and acted evilly toward the least of these, his brethren; those others here who love him. Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof, but speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.

Psalm 51

King James Version (KJV)

51 Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

² Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
³ For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.
⁴ Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.
⁵ Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.
⁶ Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.
⁷ Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
⁸ Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.
⁹ Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.
¹⁰ Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
¹¹ Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.
¹² Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.
¹³ Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.
¹⁴ Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.
¹⁵ O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy praise.
¹⁶ For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.
¹⁷ The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

God I wish Lent was over. I need a drink.