Earl Donald the Bewildered

YOU, ANDREW MARVELL

2010-04-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

--------------------------------------- You, Andrew Marvell
by Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun And here upon earth's noonward height To feel the always coming on The always rising of the night: To feel creep up the curving east The earthy chill of dusk and slow Upon those under lands the vast And ever climbing shadow grow And strange at Ecbatan the trees Take leaf by leaf the evening strange The flooding dark about their knees The mountains over Persia change And now at Kermanshah the gate Dark empty and the withered grass And through the twilight now the late Few travelers in the westward pass And Baghdad darken and the bridge Across the silent river gone And through Arabia the edge Of evening widen and steal on And deepen on Palmyra's street The wheel rut in the ruined stone And Lebanon fade out and Crete high through the clouds and overblown And over Sicily the air Still flashing with the landward gulls And loom and slowly disappear The sails above the shadowy hulls And Spain go under and the shore Of Africa the gilded sand And evening vanish and no more The low pale light across that land Nor now the long light on the sea: And here face downward in the sun To feel how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on . . .
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SPOLIA AEGYPTORUM

2009-12-24T14:38:00.000-08:00

I've gotten a little behind with the poetry thing, so here's another.

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Spolia Aegyptorum

Leaving this place,
The land of sin,
We find us loaded down
With all the golden lucre of the land-
Hold! Is it not best to travel light?
These Goods do not combine;
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
How to unite contradictory minds?
Still, we heft our weighty packs,
Turning toward the forlorn wilderness.

Later on, encamped beside the Mount,
Uneasiness speeds its way among the tents.
Moses has gone up, seeking God;
Perhaps God slew him-
Such perilous Gods we do not need.
Fretfully we wait, repining for
The leeks and onions of the fertile land;
Who now shall guide us,
Take us out of the wilderness of sands?
New gods are made out of our treasure,
Convenient, beautiful, by us controlled;
No more forced marches!
And the revelry began,
Dancing around the altar of our god
Brought out of the Land of Egypt.

What went awry I still don't know,
Head reeling from the weight of wine,
Stomach sour, with a metallic tang,
For Moses, coming down,
Seeing the orgiastic dance,
In temper, threw the plates he bore,
Wasting all his labor there;
On us, his anger broke like storm.
To pull down the Idol he commanded;
Madmen brook no contradiction.
Worse awaits; grinding it fine,
Polluting the one source of water,
He made us drink; now on our tongues,
The bitter, bitter taste of wrongful knowledge
Reminds us of apostasy's reward.

That was then; now, the Law is given.
Ready we are for our new home,
But first, our treasure is required,
The same which once was misapplied,
Made into a tabernacle,
A fitting home for God;
He will dwell among His People
And lead to that which is beyond.

After much wandering we have arrived,
Driving the giants from the Land,
Brought to this fit end,
Having learned right and wrong uses
Of gold brought from the land of Egypt.
A trouble it is still to me;
Though gold, brought to God's altar,
Is rightfully used, was it rightly acquired?
Many the bones lie with gold blended
Bleaching in a roadside bed of sand,
Both temptation, and a warning
to all who will not give their treasure.
Perhaps it would be better,
When fleeing the land to leave the gold;
Many a soul to hell has fallen
for the costly Babylonian robe.

--Don Comfort

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OZYMANDIAS

2009-12-23T16:29:00.000-08:00

Jeremy and Rachel have submitted this poem. It's one of my favorites as well.

OZYMANDIAS
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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PUNISHMENT

2009-09-04T10:52:00.001-07:00

We are told "The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom". What does that mean? We tend to think that Love is inconsistent with Fear; are we not to love God? After all, we are also told to "Love the Lord your God". I believe much of the modern disorder is connected with this confusion. Often, when one refers to the Fear of the Lord, someone will say "Love casts out fear" or even quote St. Anthony in saying "I no longer fear God, but I love Him, and Love casts out fear". We much too easily forget what an exalted life was led by our Father among the Saints St. Anthony of Egypt, and how far we fall below even the most minimal standards in terms of sobriety of mind and ascetic practice. Many of those who say such things don't even believe asceticism is necessary, but St. Anthony, who did not fear God, spent his life in repentance, doing battle with demons lest he should be deprived of the grace of God. It is no doubt true that St. Anthony would not have learned to love God as he did had he not lived in the fear of Him all his life. Reverential fear, the fear engendered by just authority, inspires love, counter-intuitive as that may seem to the debased reasonings of our time, which knows only the craven fear of tyrannical authority.

I much prefer prisons to asylums; punishment is a moral thing, and the prison is a moral environment, erected by those who believe that the will is free, and that there is such a thing as moral choice. Asylums, on the other hand, are shops for repairing broken machinery, and therapy the tool by which we seek to re-create damaged psychological instruments in our own image. They are, therefore, a mechanistic environment which cannot truly believe there is such a thing as real choice, and as a consequence cannot really believe in freedom. In the one, people on the outside are regarded as free, and a person is only put in prison because he has abused this freedom; in the other, the person on the outside is already in prison, and people are brought to the asylum for adjustment so that they may become better adapted to the conditions of their incarceration.

This is, perhaps, a somewhat perverse portrayal, but I believe it communicates the ideal essence of these institutions; Prison is a moral environment and the Asylum is not. Morality is the practice of Right and Wrong; a Moral environment is one that aids the clear perception of Right and Wrong, one that rewards right behavior and punishes wrong-doing. Modernity, on the other hand, has an acute abhorrence of the very idea of Right and Wrong; it believes with fanatic intensity in a world where different shades of gray blend gradually into each other. In the Modernist twilight there is no longer sufficient spiritual illumination to make a moral distinction. The stronger the light of the Spirit, the clearer emerges the distinction between black and white. It is, of course, possible to over-simplify. The color gray does really exist, as a generality, but when one examines the situation particularly, it becomes a field of black and white particles in a very complex arrangement. Since every human heart is a similar dot-matrix, we do not judge the souls of Men, but we can and should be able to say right is right, and wrong is wrong, and act accordingly.

One who perceives moral categories clearly is in an atmosphere of Justice. Punishment is Justice in action. Human justice is, of course, fallible, and fails to perfectly reflect perfect justice, but human justice is the model in society of Divine justice. Mercy is the reconciliation of one who has fallen under condemnation, the receiving into fellowship of a brother who was once lost, and has returned to his Father's house, not an eternal excusing of the offences of those who do not truly have any wish to be reconciled with their brothers. Ultimately, justice and mercy are the same; justice which is not merciful is no true justice, and mercy which is not just is not really mercy, though only God can reconcile the two perfectly.

One who preserves clear memories of childhood can no doubt remember the pain of one who turns to authority for the redress of a wrong to find that his situation is regarded as being of no significance; it is a feeling of violation, a loss of innocence, and diminishes one's sense of goodness in the world. The idea that evil may continuously revel unchastened is souring, and erodes the very concept of Justice. Ceasing to believe in Divine Justice is the beginning of moral degradation; once we believe completely that there are no penalties, sin becomes bold. It is interesting that, as mankind ceases to believe in Hell, it has also ceased to believe in the necessity of punishment in governing human affairs. Earth becomes Hell as Man ceases to believe in Hell, as evil no longer is under effective restraint. Since reality keeps intruding even into the heavily-protected sanctuary of the modern psyche, modern institutions in fact oscillate between extreme permissiveness and iron-handed oppression, without once touching down on the hallowed ground of sanity, stressing forgiveness where it has no right to forgive, and exercising unremitting harshness against those who have truly transgressed its values.

Forgiveness is a divine virtue, but modernity forgives offenses committed against other people, which requires no very high degree of magnanimity, and is rather a sin against compassion for the victim, showing plainly a marked inability to give any weight to another's anguish, as the complaint of the outraged individual is shrugged blandly aside. Sometimes multiple crimes are committed before the offenses are taken at all seriously, thereby increasing the burden on the souls of unjust judges of crimes that would not have been committed had action been taken in the first place; this is the result when the societal organ of justice ceases to believe in Justice. The penalty for those that offend against the values of Modernity, on the other hand, is never to be forgiven, even if they have paid a substantial penalty, for punishment is expiation, and Modernity accepts no expiation for sins committed against it. Modernity is unjust in two different directions, and there is no justice in it.

Human justice is finite; infinite punishment is reserved for diseases that are truly irremediable, and only God can judge of that. Sin and disease are often equivalent terms; sin produces spiritual disease, and perpetuates it. Spiritual disease is cured by repentance, and only our own will can keep us sick. No matter what the condition of mind and soul, no one is forced to do wrong; everyone fights a different battle against the passions which prevail within them, and what is a walk in the park for one person is a battle for another in which he has to strain every nerve to avoid falling into evil. Those who lose this battle to the extent that they represent a continuous threat to human society must have their cases referred to the high court of Heaven; this is the true meaning of the death penalty.

Ultimately, the power to punish is the power to form; with this in mind, it is plain why the worldly powers don't want parents to be able to freely punish their children. Parents are not to be permitted effective tools of interference in the instruction of "The State's" children. The State will hold the instruments of coercion, and will dispense reward to those who are submissive to its will; children will be formed collectively by adapting to institutional structures designed to mould body and soul as it wishes, and there is to be no alternative, and no redress permitted. As punishment is an inevitable aspect of government, to cede the power to punish would be to disperse governmental powers on the popular level, to have ordinary people making decisions of real moment, which would shape their families and communities, and this would be the death of the era of centralized government, and the end of the Modern State.

SELF-ESTEEM

2009-09-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

When I speak of Self-Esteem, I do not mean the self-infatuation promoted by modern Psychology, which is a deadly sin. True self-esteem is closely related to humility, as counter-intuitive as that may seem to us in this Dark Age of the Soul. The Prideful put themselves in a false position, as they wish really to be regarded as gods by their fellows; as they can never fill these shoes, they become filled with a deep sense of insufficiency, and this turns all their strivings to best their fellows into a hollow mockery. It is this which leads to the posturing and strutting that we are all so familiar with. The Humble person, on the other hand, truly does not regard himself as anything special; he is a child of God, like any other, and whatever his abilities may be, they are to be used in His service. So the Humble live in Reality, rather than the He-Man/Marvel Comics universe inhabited by the Prideful, in which each one tries to play the role of the ultimate Hero, with a throng of admiring on-lookers. One advantage of living in reality is that the universe backs you up; if you know who you really are, everything around you confirms this. By contrast, the prideful man is always getting shot down by reality; his expectations are always unfulfilled, and so he lives continually with wounded Self-Esteem. What is currently endlessly promoted as self-esteem is in fact the cherishing, pampering, and perpetuating of this woundedness; those caught in the current Self-Esteem environment can never even aspire to true self-esteem, because they have chosen to be moral and psychological cripples rather than apply themselves to the hard therapy which leads to healing, freedom, and the proper estimation of the self in the light of Truth.

CHILDREN

2009-06-19T20:54:00.000-07:00

We all come into the world as egoists; it is our job to get over it. It is our parent's job to help us, and it is our responsibility before God to assist our children in every way possible in this most difficult and most important of tasks; C. S. Lewis portrayed the ego as multiple layers of thick, tough, knobbly, scaly skin which obscure our true personality, but we identify it as our personality. Shedding this skin is the most painful thing possible, for it feels to us like the death of our person, of everything which goes to make us a personal being.

I generally say that the way to discover the truth of any issue is to find out in detail what the modern world teaches, and then contradict it point by point, and this is especially true when it comes to the subject of child rearing, for the World indeed has told nothing but lies to us on that subject; that is, it has told lies to those of us who intend to raise our children as Christians. It has told the truth about how to raise a certain kind of child; if you want to raise an egotistical pagan, a self-satisfied narcissist, destructively self centered and self nurturing, being at the same time utterly dependent on the forms the contemporary world has invented to contain these impotent egos, then you can follow no better course than the one the world has laid out for you. If you follow the advice the world has given you for producing the kind of children it wants, and foolishly take it as a sound program for producing the kind of children you want, whose fault is that? We seem to have this very strange idea that we can take advice from those whose motives and ideals are utterly alien to us, and productively fit it into our Christian worldview without seriously distorting our Christian universe, but of course this is not possible.

What kind of child should we, as Christians, wish to produce? Of course, we want a child that will be submissive to God in everything, unhesitatingly laying down his own will before the Divine Will; but how does one go about raising a child like that? In a word, Obedience; Obedience, we are told, is the key to all the other virtues. When we practice obedience, we act as if we are a part of something larger and more important than ourselves; when we are disobedient, we proclaim in a language everyone understands that we are the largest thing in our Universe.

Our time is unique in that many (if not most) children fail to follow the values of their parents. This represents a failure of parenting on a vast scale. The State practices effective parenting in its self-appointed role of One True Parent, (to which the child's natural parents are subservient). As the State does not wish for the caretaker/parents to erect effective obstacles to its efforts to form the minds and wills of the children, Parents are in many ways obstructed, and even forbidden from practicing effective parenting.

Many parents wish to instill obedience in their children, but few in our day are successful. Why is this? Perhaps partly it is because we have confused obedience with getting our kids to do what we want them to. Children who obey grudgingly and only after much haranguing, and who go back to doing whatever it was they were doing the moment your back is turned are not being instilled with a spirit of obedience; children who have to be bribed constantly, in many and sundry ways, are not being taught obedience, but are being turned into little mercenaries. We need to teach our Children the value of Obedience, so that they can be inspired to acquire that virtue; once, when my daughter was being over-argumentative I simply turned to her and asked, "Do you intend to obey, or not?" (I wouldn't recommend this for those whose children have been raised without effective restraint). Because she really did, deep down in her heart, (really deep!) wish to be obedient, that was enough (for the moment).

Our children also live in a social environment which preaches relentlessly to them the supreme value of the unfettered will, and there is no way to shield them from this totally; there are however, things we can do, and they all need to be done in conjunction, or we have done nothing. It's like trying to contain water in a bowl with holes in it; if you plug only one hole, the water will just leak out of the others. So if you choose to homeschool, and yet watch T.V., you have essentially done nothing; if you use your television only for watching movies you must be very careful if you are to avoid exposing your children to the full panoply of modern social propaganda. Almost all contemporary children's movies have very explicit pedagogic messages woven intricately into the story; unfortunately, most parents are primed to pass a movie for consumption as long as it doesn't have too much gratuitous bloodshed or explicit sexuality, and if the language isn't too bad. These aren't even the first things I look at as a parent; the most important thing is, what's the moral? I have known parents to reject a movie that actually had a rather wholesome treatment of human relationships because it showed a little "skin", while accepting a movie for the consumption of their teenagers that portrayed a very perverse view of sexuality because it didn't. You also have to be careful of your child's friends (a common piece of parenting advice in the past that has gone way out of vogue) or they will get all the influences of public school and television through the mouths of their playmates.

The most important reason parents aren't successful in forming their children is that we deny ourselves the necessary tools, or so circumscribe their use, and use them so inconsistently, that they are ineffective for any long-term purpose. I am speaking here primarily of the much-despised "corporal punishment" (I used to tell people that in my view, parents should use capital punishment only in extreme situations). In our day, spanking is looked on as extremely barbaric, (I have even been told that I was evil for advocating it). What is it, in our time, that produces this extreme aversion to what, after all, is only one of the constant realities of human existence? Until recently, corporal punishment was commonly used on adults for many offences against the law. As Christians, we accept many aspects of the temporal world as Divine chastisement of sin; we are sentenced to death and a vast assortment of painful circumstances by a just God whom we also confess to be merciful.

I believe the root of our contemporary aversion to these harsh realities does lie in the progress of western culture, which in many ways can be seen as the rebellion of the rich and comfortable against the idea that the pains of mortal life are dictated by God for our improvement. Obviously, it is going to be more comfortable for those who have made themselves comfortable to believe the pains of life are more or less accidental, and that the purpose of human society is to alleviate as many of these discomforts as possible. This necessitates removing God from the picture as One who is in control of all aspects of our life, either by eliminating him entirely, or removing Him a great distance from mundane affairs by positing Him as a "Grand Architect" who, after drawing out the plans left their completion to lesser, fallible hands. Much of the modern hostility against God is because of the pain in the world.

How can we recognize God's righteous chastisement of our misdeeds, and not recognize that it is right to punish children when they misbehave; are we more righteous than God? Obviously, we are less competent; it is nevertheless our responsibility to form the character of our Children in the pattern of godliness. We also know that if they do not learn responsibility that they will suffer many things in their encounters with the world, that if they grow up selfish there will be pain in all their social encounters, that if they do not acquire self-discipline they will be thwarted in all their endeavors by their own weakness of will.

Knowing all this, what is it that prevents parents from training their children to act responsibly? We love our children, and it is hard for us to punish them; we worry that if we strictly impose punishments we will loose the love of our children. This is not true, by the way; it is typically the indulged child that despises his parents. This is necessarily so; the indulged child is one thoroughly in thrall to his ego. For such a child, the parent is only a hateful object that stands in the way of the fulfillment of his wishes; the properly disciplined child loves his parents. There were some boys at one of the churches I once attended who tended to make things a little "lively" at times. Their father's entire notion of parental discipline was to sit them down and have a heart-to-heart chat with them. The kids would sit there, faces aglow with adoration, saying, "O.K. daddy; we love you, daddy". My daughter would then tell me the kinds of things they said about him when his back was turned; "Stupid old man; we sure pulled one over on him". It is a very bad thing to let your children grow up thinking you're dumber than they are.

Despite our love for our children, it is our responsibility to make sure they are able to win the battle over the ego, and we do this by chastising the serpent whenever it shows itself; it is our love for our children that should powerfully motivate us to do so. The problem is that parents have very tender feelings for their children; these feelings are commonly confused with love. It is not our job to indulge our parental feelings, but to love our children with strong, active love that stands beside our children to help them fight their battles, the kind of love God has for us; not weak, trumpery love that will not act to gain any benefit, but is only a languid feeding on the sweetness of our own feelings. God judged Eli because he did not bring up his sons in righteousness, and would not act to restrain their wickedness; there are many contemporary Eli's. Our time looks upon itself as being possessed of a very special tenderness of heart, but what it has is only a very pronounced weakness of stomach, an inability to deal effectively with any of the harsh realities of life. The refusal to discipline is one aspect of the modern rebellion against authority, and against God, the source of all good authority. We cannot fully recognize God's just authority over us unless we first recognize the principle of godly authority and its operation in bringing order to the world.

Modern children are essentially over entertained, over socialized, and way too divorced from the context of adult life, and the reality of Family as a working community. Because they are over entertained, they cannot take an interest in what is going on around them, hence the ubiquitous childish boredom whenever they are not involved in some sort of game, and resentment whenever life itself is not made into a game for them. I know kids who are unable to take an interest in anything that isn't a video game. My daughter had time to play, but the only entertainments available to her on a regular basis were books and piano; consequently, she was interested in books and piano. I made sure not to have too much "children's" literature around (that staple of Public Schooling's anti-literacy campaign). She was able to take an interest in what was going on in the family because her consciousness was not deluged by fabricated entertainments (the sugars of the intellectual diet); I largely attribute to this the fact that she was able, at the age of sixteen, to seriously desire to enter the rigors of the monastic calling.

That children are over-socialized is sufficiently demonstrated by the kids you see with cell-phones, who feel they must constantly inform their friends of what they're doing; "Hi, I'm at the Mall; now I'm going to get lunch; now I'm waiting at the crosswalk; now I'm crossing the street.....". Peer Pressure is social addiction, and the consequent inability of over-socialized children to resist any movement of their peers. This kind of socialization is what Public Schooling was invented to produce (It didn't really have anything to do with education). It used to be that socialization took place mainly in family groups; that is, families gathering together for some social function or another. Of course people tended to roughly congregate in age-groups, but the point is, socialization was done in the context of the Family, and consequently people had social contact with people of all different ages. When Public Schooling imposed its grid on the development of children universally, you immediately begin to see a very different kind of socialization emerging; sausage-link socialization, in which each age group socializes primarily with those of the same age, and has little social contact with any other age-group. This is the environment the social engineers of the early 20th century desired to produce, an environment in which the opinions of one's peers are not only an important factor, but almost the only factor. Each link thus segregated from the others provides a tasty meal for propagandists, who are then free to devise social experiments on each age-group independently, without interference from those who have enough life-experience to be somewhat resistant to manipulation. My daughter was raised apart from this model of socialization by intent; it was really my most important reason for homeschooling. This made her kind of an odd duck; she really didn't fit into the groups where the kids were locked together in a social embrace after the public school pattern. I don't really think she missed much. She developed into a young woman who liked very well to be with children her age, but wasn't dependent on it. I think the kids who were involved in that type of socialization were much sillier and much less emotionally mature, and (incidentally) much less truly self-reliant.

Children aren't meant to live in a Never-land world made especially for them, but to fit into the context of adult life, and learn to function in that context. The Family is the most basic unit of social order, and as such it is a living, working community in which each of the inhabitants needs to have a productive place, not a dormitory for detached individuals on the way to their various destinations; consequently, the children need to be managed in such a way that it doesn't make the smooth and efficient accomplishment of daily tasks impossible. Many, if not most, families are entirely dominated by the children, and so any productive purpose is entirely suspended, as the daily activity becomes to keep the children barely within the most minimal bonds of civility. Adult life should not come to an end whenever the children are present, therefore children have to be made to behave in such a way as to make Adult concourse possible in their presence; the old rule "Children should be seen and not heard" was a real necessity back in the day when most everyone had eight children. Can anyone even remotely imagine what a gathering of families would have been like back then under today's conditions? The mind reels!

Children are a mirror, reflecting the whole range of human passions with the utmost clarity. In them we may most plainly see what the human creature is, with selfishness, greed, lust, and cruelty alternating with the innocent expression of love, trust, pity, and what can only be described as a primordial hunger for the Kingdom of Heaven; like clouds covering the face of the sun and passing on, so are the alterations of childish moods. They have not yet learned the arts of subterfuge and self-deception at which adults become so adept.

Children need solidity in their environment, and they will run tests to make sure it is solid. They push the boundaries not because their deepest wish is for there to be no boundaries, but to establish that the boundaries are firm; they know adults say many things they don't really mean. When an adult means something strongly enough to make a child comply with it, this establishes the importance of that thing in the child's mind, or at least how important the adults in his life really think this is, despite what they say; think of the difference in the reaction of parents when their child runs out into the street versus their reaction when the child, for instance, doesn't want to go to church, or say prayers. In the former instance, the parents are likely to be angry, and they will make sure the child does not run out into the street; in the latter, there may be a manifestation of some concern, but it's not as likely to be treated as a big deal. Children, who intensely study adult reactions as clues to the nature of reality, read: "Physical dangers are real, but spiritual dangers are illusory"; Indeed, this is what the parents have communicated, and possibly what they, in their heart of hearts, unreflectively believe.

The forlornness of a child who has his own way in everything can sometimes be observed; everything he has set his will against has proven unsubstantial, and he is left standing in the nothingness of his own will; children engage in intensive battle to establish the supremacy of their will, and are intensely unhappy when it is established. A child doesn't have the capacity to order his own universe, so when outside order evaporates, he is left to the chaos of his own impulses. They are little lawyers who relentlessly examine and press each article of the parental command, compulsive gamblers who will risk all over the possibility that maybe this time he will get away with it. This is why persistence and consistency in discipline is so necessary; if you punish nine times for a particular offense and the tenth time let it go, the memory of the one time he got away with it is enough to push him over the edge. Children also develop internal and symbolical resistances to authority; when I was little and got my hand slapped for something, my mother noticed that for some time afterward I would pick at the place that had been slapped, and fling my arm in the air. When she asked me what I was doing, I said, "I'm taking it off, and throwing it away". I just barely remember the incident, and believe that was my private way of internally rejecting the reprimand; my parent could slap my hand, but I was not going to accept it. Of course, if you just settle for superficial compliance you're treating the symptom, not the disease; in order to effectively parent, you have to be inside the mind and soul of your child.

It is important to start early; expectations are established at a very early age, and have to be painfully refuted once rooted. I know someone who had a child with a very loud cry; this baby was treated differently from their other children. As soon as the child started to cry, it got what it wanted, just to stop the noise; of course, the child developed with the expectation that when he said "jump" everyone else was to say only "how high?". The parents have been battling that one out for the last several years.

Saying "They're only children" is the blanket excuse for any kind of misbehavior; as if you can't be held responsible for the behavior of your children as long as you persistently remind everyone that they are children (as if we thought they were Senior Citizens). Now, it is true that we need to remember that children have small attention spans, and have to be reminded of things, but they should be expected to behave in a civilized manner. Drawing mustaches on the Icon prints on the church bulletin-board is not something that should be excused by their being children; they should know what inappropriate behavior is. If they don't know, they should be taught. Many children don't appear to think it necessary to listen when they are being spoken to, and the magic words "I forgot" make everything O.K. . I can tell you, when a child is held responsible for hearing and remembering what you said, both hearing and memory improve by about 150%.

We should be aiming to produce children who behave well; the highest ambition of many parents appears to be to produce children that only a mother could love, and who regularly press her to the limits. If we were truly concerned about self-esteem, we would discipline our children; a child whose behavior is so bad that it is a penance to be around him is going to feel this disapproval, whether it is articulated or not, and this will influence his self-esteem. A child who learns to discharge tasks swiftly and competently will have better self-esteem; this may seem like a mystical statement to those whose minds dwell in the dense mists of modern psychology, but self-esteem, if it has any substance to it at all, and is not just a kind of gas with which we regularly have to pump up the psyche, depends upon really being esteemed, and those who are esteemed are those who comport themselves in a way that is esteemable.

Children have to be trained to focus before they will be able to regularly and competently carry out any task; a child that is not required to focus his attention on the task-at-hand, won't. It is much easier to let your thoughts tumble around in LaLa Land, if you know that you are not going to be held responsible for the hash that results because you're not paying attention. The only way to focus a child's attention that I know of is to have some kind of awful penalty, and of all penalties, the one which seems to hold the attention most is the afore-mentioned corporal punishment. This, of course, makes sense; we are conditioned to be influenced by pain. Pain is designed by our beneficent Creator to be the teacher-of-last-resort; when we feel pain, it tells us, "this is bad; I'd better stop doing this". It sets up internal resistances and inhibitions which are a great aid in later life in resisting various seductions, and in attaining the degree of self-compulsion which is so necessary in becoming a responsible person; there are, of course, other ways to learn, but none so deeply emblazons itself on the memory, as indicated in the adage, "The burned hand teaches best". The only way other forms of learning can be effective is if some amount of self-discipline has already been acquired. Pain also educates on a deep level; it is relatively easy to get a person to adapt their superficial behaviors, but painfully difficult to educate on a moral level. This, of course, is where it is determined what kind of person the child is to be. If a parent does not carry the battle into this arena, they effectually cede influence in the child's moral development to outside influences, i.e., the World.

Though Parents expend their best efforts, it is still necessary for the child to choose. It takes a great effort of the will to overcome lessons reinforced with painful consequences, though. This makes it a moral thing, for the will is involved on a conscious level in choosing right and wrong, not just overridden by the strength of passions which have never received an effective check. It is necessary for those for whom the wrong lessons have been enforced to choose against their upbringing, and of course a child may choose to reject a good upbringing despite all compulsion; but it should be made easy for children to choose the right, and difficult to choose the wrong. The undisciplined child is hag-ridden by his own will, and will choose his own way even if he dimly perceives he is leaving happiness behind in so doing. Choosing one's own way is the direct road away from God; it is the path Adam and Eve chose in the Garden which led them out of Eden, and it has been leading the Human race through an infinite diversity of sordid hells ever since.

One weapon the Psychobabblers use to great effect against the Modern Parent is the idea that, if they do not utilize great care, they will irreparably damage their children by inflicting them with low self-esteem. Once a child recognizes his parent's concern in this area, he will play this card over and over again to avoid punishment, and can even leverage it into a series of rewards for bad behavior designed to bolster his self-esteem; life is good for a child whose parents read Pop Psych literature. What low self-esteem is, of course, is wounded pride; it used to be called "the sulks". The path to esteem is for one who does not succeed to try harder, and if success still doesn't come, to recognize that you are one of few and poor abilities, but as a child of God your life's fulfillment comes in using your talents, such as they are, in His service, without finding it necessary to determine the exact order of magnitude of your abilities in the galaxy of God's Kingdom. Children used to have to function as members of human communities, and became able to discharge adult responsibilities at a young age; this is true self-esteem, being a valuable component of human society, using your abilities for the love of others, and being loved by them in return.

MARRIAGE

2009-06-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

Despite the relentless proclamation of female superiority at present, I believe men and women to be essentially equal, both possessed of foibles characteristic to their gender; the masculine abuse of sexuality tending in the direction of rape, the female toward prostitution. These, however, are the grosser perversions of human sexuality, and there are all sorts of unhealthy attitudes and practices between these two extremes; but human sexuality itself is blessed of God. It is a temporal virtue; we are told in the Fathers that sexuality exists because of God's foreknowledge of Man's fall, that it is a provision for Man in his fallen condition, and even that the close association between the procreative and urinary organs are an indication that sexuality comes of the corruption of mortal life. Nevertheless, it is a provision, and almost a necessity; it is very difficult for most to turn away from the yearning for a sexual relationship even to pursue a higher virtue, for the pleasure associated with it, even in its most corrupted forms, is very intense and poignant. Therefore it must be guarded by discipline from taking over and dominating the life of a human creature. Because of the pleasure associated with it, Modernity elevates sexuality to the very pinnacle of priority, and aggressively promotes a sexuality that is unfettered and insatiable, but it is Pleasure that Modernity worships; it has very little use for fecundity or any other aspect of sexuality. If it did take these things seriously, it would produce inhibitions in its singleminded pursuit of pleasure. The Paganisms of the past did seriously worship sexuality, and so set bounds on it (though they were inconstant observers of these proprieties). True Christianity, though, does not worship sexuality; fecundity is for a purpose higher than itself, and must be directed toward those ends to be truly good. Consequently, it is set in an environment structured to promote these purposes.

Marriage is the form of discipline sanctioned by God for governing the passion of sexuality. In explaining these things to my daughter when she was on the eve of Young Womanhood, I compared marriage to a fireplace, which is the only safe place in the house to build a fire; if you elect to build it in the middle of the living room floor, it will likely spread uncontrollably, reducing the entire house to ruin, and possibly even involving the neighbors in the catastrophe. Marriage is the only way I can truly love my neighbor in the context of sexuality; apart from it, the fires of my lust will spread perpetual grief in my community. In marriage a man and woman moderate each other's characteristics, bringing one another closer to balance.

What is marriage, essentially (apart from the sacramental aspect introduced by Christianity)? It is the recognition by a human community of the relationship between a man and a woman, and a public sanction of this relationship. In this light, it is apparent that what most modern people practice is not marriage, but a kind of conventionalised fornication, because we're not asking anyone's permission for anything; marriage is no longer an expression of obedience, but of self-will. In the past it seems like marriage generally worked; in our time, though, we seem to be in a condition in which marriage generally does not work, even if the couple, for whatever reason, never does actually separate. This was brought to my attention when I was attending an Evangelical church in Denver; I could remember (I'm such an old fogey) a time when married couples seemed like a single entity. Though there were still older couples in the church where that seemed to be the case, most of the married couples in our community seemed more like loosely associated individuals, each with their diverse interests and activities, with a broad demilitarized zone between them of issues that they realized couldn't be approached without conflict. This was even in couples which would generally be characterized as having a "happy" marriage. Every once in a while, the equilibrium a couple had maintained for years would fall apart, almost always resulting in the termination of the relationship. It seems like we should be looking to older marriages for information on how to heal contemporary marriage; why could they survive anything when we can survive nothing?

Perhaps it is really so that marriage has a particular structure which makes it work, like any other aspect of reality, and to conform to that structure produces a working arrangement, and to depart from it results in friction, the overheating of the components, and the resulting breakdown of the arrangement. I think especially of the imagery of the husband as the head of the family; I know lots of women bristle when that is referred to, but why does everyone need to be a head? This can arise only out of the perception that the head is the only important thing, assisted mightily by the fact that we all really want to be in control. It shouldn't be a threat to female dignity to recognize the man as the head of the family, so long as it is clear that she is the heart of the family. The Family has traditionally been viewed as a corporate unity. A body needs a head and a heart, but it does not need two heads or two hearts, neither are they interchangeable; each part must function where and how it was meant to, or the integrity of the system breaks down. A favorite mantra of the Feminists of the last generation was "Biology is not destiny". Excuse me; for a human creature, biology is destiny. To affirm the contrary is simply to say "I do not have to be what I was created to be"; at the extreme edge of this attitude toward life are those who hate their own gender, and either act out sexual roles appropriate to the opposite sex in one way or another, or even, with the aid of modern surgical technology, seek to physically alter their gender.

An image of the Family that has helped me in thinking about the issue is that of a wheel; the Father being the rim of the wheel, built to handle the shock of contact with the world's rough exterior, the Mother being the hub of the wheel, possessed of a different kind of toughness, which absorbs the stresses generated by the operation of the wheel, and children the spokes which bind them together. Obviously the hub must be in the center to function, and in order to function well, it has to be a real piece of work. It is clear to me that a woman is a more complicated piece of equipment than a man; this does not confer superiority either (modern people being always ready to assume that when you are saying that two things are different you are saying one of them is superior), for a thing need be only as complex as it needs to be to perform the function for which it was designed (excessive ornamentation might interfere with the flight of an arrow). Referring to the analogy of the fireplace, in another way the Mother herself is the fire at the center of the home, the source of warmth and comfort. Femininity is a vital energy, badly needed in our homes and communities; I think the social fabric of communities has begun to decay since women's flight (or, in many cases, forced march) to the workplace. There is hollowness in the community since women have abandoned the home; the one who formerly tended the domestic fire is gone, and the convivial glow of communal life has gone out as well.

Another necessary thing for the integrity of the family is that all its components be moving in the same direction; this, it seems to me, is the primary way in which families in past and present differ in their observable operation. When man was the breadwinner and woman the homemaker, their tasks were different, but their goal was the same; they were both working on the same project. Now, the tasks are the same, i.e., to bring in a bit of income by working for someone else, and come home tired in the evening to try and pull together the neglected and disordered strands of domestic life, (now largely consigned to weekends), but their careers pull them in different directions, producing many conflicts of interest, and the children are also all going different directions between school and various activities; even those who intend to be stay-at-home mothers end up going in a hundred different directions a day, just trying to ferry everyone to their various social activities. This is not a Family, but a boarding house for detached individuals who happen to be of the same blood. News Bulletin: the "Soccer Mom" is not a traditional mother, just at the opposite pole of the corporatist social economy from the working mother. The assumption that everyone must be perpetually entertained is destructive of family life, for a family is designed to be a working community. More on this theme in my next post (when and wherever that may be).

Here we arrive again at the question of authority. In order for any group of people to move in the same direction, it is necessary for a single hand to be on the tiller. Also, (a small snippet of reality here) all effective social authority is established by force; sad, but true. You simply can't get people to do as they should consistently unless somewhere there is a strong, forceful figure who says, "If you cross this line, there will be painful consequences.". The reason why we still have Police forces and Armies is that we still know this, in the back of our little democratic, egalitarian, anarchistic minds whenever it comes to a question of an authority we believe really must be preserved (such as the idea that strangers shouldn't be permitted to sack my house). Now, as a Christian I believe that somewhere in the insanely complicated workings of the Universe, there is reason behind everything. I believe the reason Men are made larger and stronger than Women, and Parents larger and stronger than Children, is that this is a conference of physical force to bolster the natural authority dictated by God for the ordering of fallen human society. Obviously, large measures of injustice and pain have sprung out of this arrangement, just as they do from the exercise of all earthly authority; injustice and pain are the fruit we elected to eat as our daily bread when we tasted the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Obviously, the more godly a couple becomes, the less onerous is this authority; the more obedient the wife, the more responsible the husband, the more gentle, and almost invisible become the bonds of authority. I cannot understand why any woman would surrender to me the intimacy of her body if she felt she couldn't trust me not to tyrannize over her.

When I say that a Wife is under authority I do not take it to mean that she is a child, and not an equal partner. A woman has her characteristic insights and influences necessary for the health of the Family; a woman under tyranny is one unable to do her part in the functioning of the God-given entity of the Family. In Modernity, we labor under mistaken ideas of authority (well, we labor under mistaken ideas of almost everything). The only possibilities present to us seem to be Tyranny and Anarchy, but classical philosophy knew both of these to be aberrations of authority, not examples of the good exercise of authority. Before the Modern period, the idea of good monarchical government (examples of perfect goodness being rare to come by in History) was of King ruling in Council; this Council was not a modern Parliament which abrogated kingly authority, but an assembly of wise men who used their talents to bolster and uphold kingly authority by their sage advice. It was understood that a king is probably not the wisest man in the kingdom, and so for a king to habitually disregarded the advice of his council would likely lead his kingdom to ruin. So in the Family; a man disregards his wife at his peril. Many foolish men have been saved from ruin because they heeded the council of their wives; does this mean that the wife should become the authority if the husband is foolish? Any medieval person would tell you what results if a Council rebels against the King because he does not follow their advice; years of social disorder and bloodshed. Obviously, something to be considered in only the most extreme circumstances.

Both Masculinity and Femininity have their specific powers. A good father strengthens the character of his children; a good mother soothes her children, reconciling them to their duty. A bad father alienates his children; a bad mother spoils her children. Here is a long-standing argument. At a church I used to attend, some of the ladies, when disagreements arose on how to handle the children, would accuse me of suffering from "Testosterone Poisoning" (that favorite diagnosis of Feminists). I, in turn, would shoot back, "Motherhood is a Sinful Passion". Well, there we have the conflict in its essence. It is possible for men to let their characteristic reactions run away with them; Motherhood is a passion, and it takes not very much of a push to turn it into a sinful one. Both Men and Women need each other to moderate the characteristics of their gender, and they need to be held together in a stable relationship to give one the chance to act on the other. My maternal grandparents were very different people; my grandmother was a very vociferous woman, who would loudly and often voice her opinions. My grandfather was a taciturn individual, accustomed to uttering about five sentences a day. My grandmother had a lot to say about every issue, but when my grandfather finally said "This is what we're going to do, and that's the end of it" my grandmother would accept this. Women need to actively advocate their viewpoints, and they have; women in the past were not the brow-beaten, downtrodden caricatures presented to us by Feminists, but at the end of the day, someone has to make a decision, or there will be no peace. I think if my grandmother were a woman of our generation, she would have made herself and everyone else miserable by ceaselessly clamoring for her own way; because she had the good fortune to be born before the revolution, she was able to live a relatively happy and productive life. There are, of course, also men whose character is stabilised by their wives. There is this difference; I believe Men are somewhat prone to be influenced by Women. After the initial infatuation, I do not believe the same can be said of women generally; an "equal" relationship between the sexes is dominated by the woman, nine times out of ten. There are people I know who illustrate this perfectly; she rules the husband, the kids rule her, and the result is perpetual chaos. All my experience tells me that a Woman must be the moderating, not the controlling influence, or there will be no moderation, and the influence of the masculine gender, just as badly needed as that of the female, will be lost. The energies of femininity are too fierce to be permitted to rage uncontrollably; if the Mother of the family is the fire, the Husband is the fireplace. If properly contained, the whole family may draw close to the warmth of maternal love, nurtured by the feminine sensitivity and care for those she loves; if not, everyone gets burned. Only in the Insect World is the Female made larger and stronger than the Male, and the entomological romance typically ends with the male being devoured by the female; there are a lot of Insect marriages in our time.

I think we should make some effort to remember exactly what are the problems of sexual fulfillment in the course of nature. First of all, the idea that the order of society reflects Patriarchal domination is sheer, raving lunacy; just look what kind of order you get when men are left to themselves. That's right, male oriented society is just a glorified hunting camp. Once this is understood, it becomes obvious that ordered society is a response to the needs of women; for order to exist in society, it is not only necessary for men to make peace among themselves, it is necessary to make peace with the women, a much more arduous task.

What are the needs of the normal man and woman? The needs of the man, it appears to me, are simple; he requires various diversions, male comrades to share it with, and sexual/romantic encounters with women. These can be brief; a few evenings at home, and he can gallop back to the hunt, fully satisfied. The needs of women are more complicated, and harder to satisfy; for one thing, she needs for men to be something beyond their superficial nature. She needs to access and call forth a deeper nature in men that usually will not emerge independently, at least not until later life; she needs for him to be a husband and father. The problem is that it is perfectly possible for most men to meet their needs by a series of unentangling romantic encounters; a man must be seduced into domesticity, if he is not socially trained for it. This is something the women of the past knew that present-day women have forgotten, or have rebelled against; in our utopian mindset, we tend to think that everything ought to happen as we think it should, or that there should be some simple social adjustment that will make everything work. Welcome back to Reality, folks! It really isn't working. I read that in Japan, in particular, large numbers of men do not wish to marry, because Japanese women have abandoned traditional roles; it is hard enough to get your normal young man to give up his independence even when it means having a nice home, a "girl to come home to", and a variety of domestic comforts. When marriage typically means having a wife that you see mainly on weekends, housekeeping chores when your day at work is done and a woman to insist that you do them, plus a house full of noisy, uncontrolled children at all times, then marriage can begin to seem like selling yourself into perpetual slavery on singularly unattractive terms.

When the family presented itself to the world as a united front, the man was seen as the public representation of that unity, and husband and wife were bound together by economic necessity. I'm not quite sure we are better off with these bonds being loosed; bonds, of course, by their nature are confining, but before loosing any bond, it seems one should examine exactly what it is that is being bound together. It may be that we are destroying the raft which keeps human society afloat. So, welcome to life in the 21st century; our families are scattered and divided, fewer are electing to marry, and autoerotic and homoerotic alternatives are endlessly promoted. The government will act as the husband of any woman who is tired of her current relationship; a woman I used to know somewhat intimately now proclaims she doesn't even desire a man. The government provides the needs of she and her children, (though not lavishly) and this way she gets to make all the decisions.

Ochlophobe made a point over at his blog about the kinds of relations we have pretty much following and being dictated by patterns of technological development, but alteration in the patterns of social relations appears to me mainly to have been accomplished deliberately as a way of preparing the ground for further socio/political developments; I guess I don't really believe social change has been dictated by technological development so much as that technology has been used as giant earth-moving equipment to sculpt human society into a previsualized pattern.

Marriage today, along with all other aspects of life, has been severely damaged by utopian thinking; this causes us to believe that if there is a non-ideal aspect to something that we should scrap it and try to invent something better. Chesterton characterized many modern innovations as going out in a rainstorm with an umbrella and a watering pot and watering the garden; in other words, creating an artificial device for meeting a social need which doesn't, in fact, accomplish the purpose nearly as well or as completely as the natural processes we are interrupting in order to interpose our devices. Unfortunately, we sometimes don't recognize the deficiencies in our machinery until we have already disabled the natural systems; having induced universal drought, we find that we just can't keep up with our little watering cans. Men and women today, I believe, are in a condition of almost universal frustration; being told by society that they must modify their sexual behavior in response to certain social theories, they have become awkward and conflicted in their responses. Men are told to curb their chivalrous instincts so as not to appear sexist, and so develop in a way in which they really respect women much less than they formerly did; Women, on the other hand, really seem to, in the depths of their being, want a strong man, but they are trained to strenuously resist anything that looks like male domination. So they go from the strong man to a more "sensitive" type, and have only contempt for him because he is not strong.

So men and women rebound off one another in confusion and pain, going through their serial divorces looking for the one that will meet all their needs, but the thing that men and women most need to discover is that they can't completely meet one another's need; there is this tendency in the West, with our influence of romanticism, to build a shrine to human love as the summit of all earthly beatitude, but only God can completely meet our needs, and we are all sons and daughters of God, no matter what our relations to one another on Earth. I think the person who drifts from relationship to relationship never learns this; he says, "This woman didn't make me happy; maybe that one over there will". Much divorce springs from these romantic ideas; when we find our spouse does not make us perfectly happy, we decide the marriage was a mistake, but marriage is not supposed to be a picnic in a field of flowers, but a mission-field, and yes, it does sometimes resemble a battlefield (perhaps the close affinity between the words Marital and Martial isn't entirely accidental).

These things should really be unspoken; sexuality only functions normally when its operations are unconcious, but in our time, under influence of the presumtuous utopianism which regards all conventions as machines that can be pulled apart and reassembled in superior configurations, they do need to be discussed. The true pattern of sexuality as it has been from the beginning must be archaologically unearthed and carefully preserved against the rampaging hordes of barbarism, for it is the primordial and most basic unit of social order, and if it is ripped from us, then night will indeed fall upon our world.

Human sexuality is like a pool in the middle of a desert, which is unfortunately somewhat polluted. There is a sign on the banks of the pool which warns travellers of the pollution, and suggests it might be best to wait until out of the desert to slake one's thirst; however, if one feels he must drink, for whatever reason, instructions are given as to what parts of the pool have the purest water, and suggestions for filtering procedures to remove most of the contaminants. Through centuries, thousands have drunk with safety from this pool by carefully following these instructions, but many have also set their sights hopefully on the far side of the desert where they know are rivers of the purest waters, and rather than risk ingesting poison trudge hopefully on. In our time, however, tons of festering garbage have been dumped into the pool by the enemy of souls, and I think it is a real question now whether any can drink these waters without damage. Nevertheless, if one lacks the stamina to walk out of the desert, he is still safest in following the instructions governing human sexuality, and entering into the discipline of Christian marriage.

GENDER

2009-05-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

With the Fall, we have left the realm of the safely abstract, and have now to consider the things of Earth. This is the sphere of confusion of mind and heart and life-and-death contention between brothers, of un-blissful ignorance and fog of the intellect, of woe and pain, strife and division.

_______________________________________________

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Obviously, we are not talking of two different species here, the division of the sexes comes after the ordinal creation of Man. God did not create Eve also independently out of dust, but rather, as it were, divided Adam's own being. So we have two entities springing from a single source, each with a different spin, positively and negatively charged particles, the yin and yang, difference in union exerting influence upon one another, repulsive forces held in proximity by overwhelmingly powerful attraction, in order that they might act as a single entity.

Nevertheless, Men and Women often seem like alien creatures to one another. Feminists (male and female) even speak as if men and women are different species, with differing interests and not a whole lot of reasons to interact, besides sexual attraction and procreation, but these little difficulties are being addressed through homosex and artificial insemination. Men, it seems, are being "phased out" just as the Bull has already been phased out of the farm; as any farmer knows, geldings and mares is what one wants to work with, not these nasty, snorting bulls.

But properly speaking, men and women are more to one another than just fleeting sexual encounters and childbearing. Now, when it comes to considering what men and women are to each other, I can, of course, speak only as a man. I realize there are those who will unreflectively discount anything I say about women on that account, but I do not consider my perspective to be thereby invalidated; we are all like people who have lived in a house their entire lives, and have never once been outside it. No matter how intimately we know the interior aspect of the house, we can have no idea what the appearance of the outside of the house is like; that we may learn only by consulting our neighbors.

Much is made of the overwhelming power of the masculine sex drive, and no woman knows what it is to have to struggle with that intense pressure, but I consider woman's sexuality to have an equally powerful effect on her person. I do in fact believe that, in comparison, a man's sexuality is more or less superficial; female sexuality is inextricably wound through all the fibers of her being, whereas a man can, at times, be somewhat detached from his sexuality.

Despite the power of male sexual responses, I do not believe that, at root, it is an entirely carnal response, unless it has been made so by the singleminded pursuit of sexual stimulation. At least I know that for me, the attraction I feel for a woman does not initially have anything to do with her sexual characteristics, but is more something that reaches out from the essential femininity of her person, touching me emotionally, though the other reactions are not slow to subsequently assert themselves. Also, women often seem to feel that a man's interest in a sexual encounter is solely physical, whereas she is most interested in the emotional aspect of the relationship. I think we have here a confusion based on the differing nature of the experience; I believe women divide the physical from the emotional in a way that men don't. Women experience both physical and emotional aspects of the event, both of which needs need to be met, whereas men experience a single physical/emotional event; it is here that a man most clearly experiences the love of his wife, and feels that he most intimately communicates love to her. It confuses him somewhat to discover that she regards it almost as incidental. Even to have a feminine presence in his environment can be emotionally sustaining to a man; perhaps the clearest articulation of this would be just to say that in many respects, a woman is to a man like water. To one without female companionship, even a smile from a girl is like a drop of water on the tongue of one perishing from thirst in the desert; conversely, the experience of a man in a marriage relationship can sometimes be compared to that of someone being waterboarded in a cell in Guantanamo.

Masculinity and Femininity model different things; this is seen clearly in most mythologies. Masculinity is of the sky, femininity is of the earth; the earth is watered and brought to fecundity by that which falls from the heavens. The masculine is the initiatory, the feminine the receptive principle, the masculine the disciplining, the feminine the nurturing, the masculine the outward moving, the feminine the inward turning; all of life unfolds in the interaction between the two influences of masculine rigor and feminine softness, is a dance of the complementary natures of masculine virility and feminine grace. Modernity rails against these things, and denies them where it can, but traditional human society has always said "vive le difference".

These things are generalities; it is especially difficult to speak of gender in a way that does not seem to falsify to some extent, because we are all really the same kind of creature, all have the same capacities, but use them differently. Also, any single statement that can be made of men and women generally will find many that fall on the wrong side of the definition; we are circles which largely overlap. Even so, when we attempt to say that a man and a woman share a particular characteristic, there will usually be found a subtle difference in the mode of approach. These things are understood best by the imagination rather than the intellect, I think; masculine and feminine characteristics have such an entirely different flavor, even when they seem to be the same type of thing.

Chesterton, writing toward the beginning of the political upheavals of his day concerning the relations of the sexes, said that no issue had any importance at all compared to the supreme importance of men continuing to be men, and women continuing to be women; in our day, we have difficulty understanding this. After all, how could men and women cease to be Men and Women? Sex is, after all, only a matter of biology, isn't it? The problem is that we have largely lost the knowledge of what Gender is in its essence; it is possible for a woman to become unfeminine, and thereby loose one of the most valuable characteristics of her soul as it was created to be. A man may become unmasculine, thereby becoming a psychological gelding, fit only to be a slave of the modern industrial complex.

THE FALL

2009-05-26T19:57:00.000-07:00

Authority comes from God; this, of course, is the best, the purest, kind of authority, the kind which springs naturally from God's true capacity as Creator and Sustainer, Who knows the nature of His creature more intimately than is even possible for the mind of the creature itself. That it is still possible to reject even this most basic and natural authority is shown from the Fall of Lucifer. This primordial fall spread outward to encompass, we are told, one third of the Host of Heaven, and then to Earth to involve Mankind itself in this irrational rebellion against the root of its own Being. Talk about sawing off the branch you're sitting on!

Every true authority is an extension of God's authority; we are told by the Apostle that our governing authorities are put in place by God. I take this to mean not that each particular political authority is personally appointed by God as His Regent; certainly there have been very bad kings, and even rulers that it is right not to follow, but that the principle of governing authority is a godly principle, for order, and not chaos, is of the nature of God.

That the strong rule the weak is a principle of natural authority; nowhere are we told to resist an established political order just because it is maintained by strength and not on democratic principles, or some previously established right. The strength to rule is itself given by God, and can be taken away by Him as well. The one who submits to authority is in a high moral position; it is by this obedience, this triumph over the selfish will that we all have, that makes every person wish to assert his own will over that of his brother, that social harmony is made possible. He who exercises authority must take care, for he is always under temptation to use this power capriciously, in a self-aggrandizing way, and so corrupt his will and engender social injustice. He will be judged for the use he makes of his authority, but it is equally damning for one who has authority, either by nature or position, to refuse to exercise it, because this breeds anarchy. There cannot be order without authority, there cannot be harmony either in home or society without order; without concord, there can never be peace, that Shalom the scripture speaks of which is simply the overflowing of every spiritual and material blessing. The possibility of this is what we rob ourselves of by our childish rebellion. Authority can, of course, be abused, and must sometimes be resisted. This does not abrogate the principle of authority. Those who choose to resist authority should do so with the willingness to suffer some form, at least, of martyrdom; this is what keeps the pestilential race of Activists from infecting the Body Politic.

Authority should really only be disobeyed when we are obeying Higher Authority; in Modernity, we resist authority because we are Egoists, and live under a political system which perfectly models the Luciferian revolt in all respects. This principle of Revolt affects our attitude toward government in all its aspects, in nation, state, and local community; there are many processes in all these levels which function inefficiently or not at all, just because people will not be governed. There are social costs to this inefficiency that are none the less real because they are not readily apparent. The same social disease that affects our attitudes toward authority in government extends itself also to personal relations in the Family; to Husband and Wife, Parent and Child, but those are subjects for later posts.

TELL ALL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT

2009-05-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

This poem is a favorite of my Sister-in-law, the lovely and talented Brenda. I would say "kindhearted", too, but I don't wish to over-strain my long-disused complimentary faculties. (Look, Hyphens!).

______________________________________________

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

LIGHT

2009-05-07T10:21:00.001-07:00

Once again, this is something that probably should have appeared earlier in the series. I was reminded of it by something a priest said in a homily; I decided I had better deal with it before making the transition from more abstract to more mundane issues.

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God said, "Let there be Light!". What, exactly, is light? Wave, particle, electromagnetic resonance? A material token of the glory of the Invisible Light of God? In any case, with light we have the first element of physical Creation; energy and motion, heat and excited particles.

The light we know is gathered into and emanates from lamps hung in what we call Space, reflected occasionally from the mirrors of moons and planetary bodies; but light had priority in Creation over these bodies. I think it was St. Issac of Syria who said, essentially, that the Sun and Moon were created as timepieces to measure the fluctuation of the increments of time, which were already created; Day and Night are more ancient than Sun and Moon.

We always associate light with the Sun, because in our experience the movements of the Sun (in appearance) govern the appearance and disappearance of light. The Sun, obviously, is a component of the material creation, and consequently it has a life-span; there was a time when it was not, and there will come a time when it will "wear out". Consequently, when we think of the beginning of things, we think of darkness; that the Universe was a lightless abyss before the beginning of the World, no matter what kind of theory we have about this beginning. The horror of the emptiness of this abyss hangs over all of modern mankind, giving (or helping to give) a persistent nihilistic cast to our mentality. The imagery of human language always (so far as I know) before modern times associates light with goodness, and darkness with evil; persistent attempts have been made in Art and Literature in recent times to reverse these associations, but it is a failure. In the Nihilism of our civilization we may come to hate light, but we know what it means in the grammar of good and evil.

Nevertheless, as Christians, we know (or should know) that this is not so; "In the beginning, God". Before the Creation, God did not float alone in an abyss mightier than He; He is All in All, the ever-blessed Trinity, a shoreless Ocean of light and love, illimitable, without beginning. The Abyss is not beginningless, or it would be co-eternal with God; rather, the Abyss is the place carved out of His Being by the creating hand of God to give space for other being. The Light of God recedes to give place for lesser lights, the resulting vacuum is the womb of all Worlds. Though in the created Universe light seems such a fleeting interval, poised against the vastness of interstellar Dark, this is but a temporary condition; there was a time when darkness was not.

MAN

2009-02-25T07:58:00.000-08:00

According to the teaching of the Church, Man is a rather strange combination of contrary factors; made of the substance of Earth, breathed on with the breath of Heaven, He is neither one nor the other, but stands at the intersection of the worlds, and is Himself the reconciliation of these different orders. In His appointed role as steward of the Earth, He stands over it, administering the Grace of God to the entire world, and stands before God offering the praise and worship of all earthly things.

After the Fall, Earth is no longer subject to Man, but He must leave the Garden, and go out to wrest a living from the hostile world; still He carries in Him the seeds of His error, which is the wish to regard Himself the equal of God. Consequently, He is always striving to return to Paradise by His own efforts, of which the Tower of Babel is the first and characteristic example, and our own technological dystopia perhaps the mature fruit. Repeatedly, throughout History, Mankind is raising towers to Heaven, and either seeing the entire project fall apart in confusion through His sinful ignorance and error, or finds, (in a few of His lesser attempts) that His tower is, after all, only another ziggurat, and His attempt to manufacture the terrestrial Paradise just a common garden.

It must be recognized how much the teachings of Evolution distort the Patristic Universe, particularly when it comes to the doctrine of Man. In the Evolutionary cosmology, Man is integrally a part of the life-matrix of Earth, and that is essentially all He is, no matter what kind of spirit-nature God may have tacked onto our ape ancestor; He is the product of slime, being automatically pushed up the ladder of biological evolution, which is assumed to eventually become spiritual, and no act of His own can either advance or retard His progress. He is predestined for salvation, but must first work His way through the Purgatory of biology; clearly we have here entered a universe heavily influenced by a gnostic spirituality. How different is the place of Man in the Christian cosmos; set in a high place, fallen to a low place, created to have fellowship with the Angels, become "like unto the beasts" by His passions, unable to rise from this ignoble position until pulled up by the condescending hand of God Himself, He shall be judged in the end according to His deeds, because He is called to remake Himself after the form of the Perfect Man, and through Him to attain to the likeness of God. Christ, as the "New Adam" stands in the place of the Old as High Priest over all the Earth, and is the reconciliation in Himself of all things, the Spiritual and the Material, the Human and the Divine.

THE TOYS

2009-01-26T18:43:00.000-08:00

This is a poem which has always touched my heart; let all us disobedient children hope to touch the Heart of the Father-God:

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The Toys

My little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd,
—His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray'd
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
'I will be sorry for their childishness.'

-Coventry Patmore

send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

THE WORLD

2008-11-23T20:56:00.024-08:00

The World is a neutral substance; it is what you make of it. It can be either the threshold of Heaven or the Gate of Hell; Merrie Middle Earth, eaten into on both sides until there is but a filament's worth of neutrality in it, if that. He who would walk this razor wire must indeed keep his feet firmly planted on terra firma.

What relation to the world should a Christian have? We are told that we are in the world, but not of the world; most seem to interpret that passage as saying, "even though we are not of the world, we must strive to be integrated into the affairs of the world". To me it seems obvious that the intent of the verse is that we are in the world whether we like it or not, but must take care that we do not become "of the world". Much scholarship is directed at the idea that what the Fathers meant by the world is not the world as such, but the sinful passions which afflict us. Of course, I agree that what the Fathers speak against is not God's creation, which is good, but the fallen world and fallen nature, the bonfire of the vanities, and in this sense it is very true that He who is a friend of the world is the enemy of God, but it is necessary for us to realize just how profoundly Man's rebellion against God affected the substance of the World, and not speak as if the World as it exists now is not groaning with us in the shadow of corruption cast by our Firstfather's ordinal misdeed. Some speak as if when Christ ressurected, destroying death, or when He was baptized, sanctifying the nature of Matter, that the effects of the Fall were reversed at that point, and the World reverted to its ordinal "good" condition. Those who say such things reveal, by the way, their low view of God's Creation (usually they are somewhat under the influence of Medieval Scholasticism), but also that they not only do not have the Patristic Mind, but are not even in accordance with Scripture; when St. Paul wrote of all Nature groaning in anticipation of it's deliverance from the bondage of Death, this was after the Earthly life of Christ, which the aforesaid pundits attribute as the deliverance from the effects of sin. It probably hasn't escaped anyone's notice, but Death exists, and death is the result of sin.

Why this blindness in the face of the fact of sin? It is the love of the World (which is emnity to God); embracing the good of this world, and plummeting to perdition, finding in the end that the love of anything in this world for itself alone is the embracing of corruption. The beauties we see in the world point us toward life in God and the Eternal Kingdom; if we learn to love that life, we will always be in exile here, under the harsh tutelage of corruption, and must always long for the day when the world we know will be purged, and return to its ordinal condition. Till then, the Kingdom of Earth and the Kingdom of Heaven are in this world together like oil and water, two principles so completely contrary to one another that no compromise can ever exist between them, contending against each other until the last day.

THE CHURCH

2008-11-05T20:31:00.001-08:00

Christianity is not based on some body of esoteric knowledge, nor is it a ritual system for preserving an economy of propitiation. Christianity is centered on the Church, that is, on the body of those being saved by the sacrifice of Christ through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, being united with Christ and one another through partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, thereby constituting the Body of Christ. Consequently, it is true that it is not solely, or even primarily, a religious phenomena. There are those who will make of this truth a weapon with which to attack Her salvific institutions, but there is no validity in their efforts, for there is no real connection between the idea that the Church transcends religiosity and the idea that therefore Her religious accoutrements are of no real value. Even if true theological knowledge could be gained through study, it would be necessary for one whose theological opinions were orthodox in every respect to join himself to the Church in order to be of the Church. In my former protestant worldview, it would have seemed silly to think that one who believed all the right things wasn't Christian, because Christianity is all about belief, isn't it? This is why Protestantism, as anti-intellectual as it often is, is still firmly based on intellectual apprehension.

But Christianity isn't about believing the right things, though it is important to believe the right things, but about being united to Christ. This union takes place only in Christ's Church; the Bride of Christ, of one flesh and one body with He who is the Divine Man who divinizes Mankind.

Where does that leave those who faithfully believe in Christ as they understand him? My belief is that only those united to the True Church through the mystery of baptism, and who faithfully unite themselves to Christ by their righteous lives constitute the Bride of Christ; that is, those who dwell in holy splendor in closest intimacy and union with the Lord of Creation, but where there is a bride, may there not be bridesmaids? What of the Meek who will inherit the Earth? Surely a lesser blessing than that of beholding the face of God, but still no negligible benefit for those who have zeal without knowledge, as do most of my Evangelical relatives; perhaps those like me who have the benefit of an Orthodox baptism but are unworthy of it will be permitted to be their servants.

There is a place for all in the Church; those who cannot attain theological knowledge are not debarred from Her; Faith is the key to the Kingdom. I cannot tell you how incredibly grateful I am that my entrance into Heaven does not depend on my correctly understanding every theological nuance; I would probably fail the examination at many points. May He who receives little children accept me, blind and weak as I am.

TERENCE, THIS IS STUPID STUFF

2008-10-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

All the poems that people sent me earlier were in an e-mail account which is now defunct; so, I am just canvassing people I know for their favorite poems. This one by Housman was supplied by my brother.

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Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff

'Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.'

Why, if 'tis dancing you would be,
There's brisker pipes than poetry,
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse.
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half-way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I've lain,
Happy till I woke again,
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heighho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore,since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true,the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
- I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

-A. E. Housman

Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com.

FALSE RELIGION

2008-08-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

Posting is going to be sporadic from here on out; in case anyone still wants to send poems, they can now be sent to ddcomfort@gmail.com.

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True Religion is the worship of God; the fullness of this true worship is in the Orthodox Church. I do not mean to characterize all other religions as False; most contain some truth, are partly oriented in the direction of true worship, and have people in them who are true worshipers of God to the extent that they know Him.

I characterize as false religion which is oriented in the opposite direction of the worship of the True God. This religion is involved in the worship of Earth, or of human experience, emotional or intellectual. Humanism, Pantheism, Panentheism, Deism, and all of the various forms of Gnosticism involve the worship of false gods, not just the incomplete worship of the True God. This false worship today insinuates itself in all the forms of religious practice; this is the religion of the World, not the worship of the God beyond all worlds. Wherever God, even if He is believed in, is regarded as an object of utility toward a secondary purpose, here false religion rears its head.

Humanity is the image before which we today are most frequently required to burn incense; but what is Humanity for? If it seems to any that this is a question that doesn't need to be asked, they are then identified as adherents of false religion, no matter what religion they consciously espouse; only Deity may exist to no other end.

RELIGION

2008-05-30T19:50:00.001-07:00

Those of us who are Orthodox know what is true religion; the Faith once delivered to the Apostles. It is also true that true religion transcends the bounds of religion; as long as those who say that Orthodoxy is not religion mean only that, they do not speak falsely, though there is a fatal tendency to confuse them with those who mean something different. Therefore, to my mind, it appears that it is not productive to emphasize the non-religious aspect of Orthodoxy at this time; this is rhetoric adopted from the Protestant Neo-Orthodox movement of the mid-20th century, and so confuses rather than clarifies the issue. What many mean by saying that Christianity is not religion is that they consider such things as church services, churches, candles, incense, priests, and altars to be meaningless accretions that might as well be cleared away as obstructions; these we must chide for having a Manichean Faith. They offer us bodiless worship; but we know that for us carnal humans, the bodiless soon becomes the insubstantial, and the insubstantial the non-existent. All the paraphernalia of religious practice is but the body of faith, and this body does not differ substantially from one religion to another; this is what human creatures do when they worship; it is true that, even as the human body should serve the needs of the spirit, the body of religion should serve the spirit it contains, not vice-versa, but the inseparability of this body and this spirit should also be emphasized.

WHEN WE WALK WITH THE LORD

2008-05-22T22:07:00.000-07:00

This came from Kelly Jolley, otherwise known as "Bosphorus".

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When we walk with the Lord

stumbling

along, words lightening my feet

pondering their path

rainy Chicago

airport tarmac baptized iridescent black

delayed from 1:43 to 2:08pm

stewardess gesticulates

her boredom

oxygen is flowing even if

the plastic bag does not fully inflate

Who knew my feet would take me here?

Who knew that following footsteps would lead

me here?

other men, smarter and more solidly educated

talk to me but I know my place

even if bootless ambition makes it pinch

I resolve to turn my back on old goals

even if my hankering after them makes me

crane 'round,

Lot's wife, to see my past destinations shrink

reversing their direction as I reorient myself

What a glory He sheds on our way

I have chosen the sheep's life by choosing the

Shepherd

but I have not chosen unreason

I choose to be a Logical sheep

a sheep of the Logos

plane stalled on the runway almost to take-off

yellow signs order drivers to yield to aircraft

wings matter now, having them, or not.

Kelly

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O.K., Kelly, now that I've put one of your poems that you previously published on your blog on mine, shouldn't you in fairness reciprocate and publish one of my poems that I put on this blog on yours? There are only two.......

FALSE MYSTICISM

2008-05-19T03:40:00.000-07:00

It has been noted before now that the states above and below normal experience sometimes bear an uncanny resemblance. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between those Saints who have attained noetic vision of the things of God in Theosis, and those conditions which may in some way resemble this, but in reality have nothing to do with it.

First of all, there are those many who may have read of real mystical experience in the Fathers, and know that it transcends the merely rational, but attempt to emulate this in their lives by the suspension of their faculties of discernment, becoming one with the New-Agers in the suspicion of anything at all resembling reason, consequently accepting anything which enters their fancy as the fruit of mystical spirituality. Others actually do attempt to practice the disciplines, but without ascetical rigor or sobriety. The point is, demons lurk on the path of spiritual vision; the unwary cannot but fall into their clutches.

There are also religious traditions which rigorously practice a mystical technology similar to that of Orthodox ascetic practice, but do not take it in the same direction; this is, in fact, true mysticism, but it is not the mysticism of Truth. There are those who attain exalted spiritual vision, but their spirituality is of the World, and is therefore not truly spiritual, but delusional; the Fathers warn that the non-Orthodox should not even try to practice the advanced spiritual disciplines. Those that can't understand this simply don't realize what Orthodox baptism does.

These caveats I consider necessary, having written of Mysticism in the previous post; I wouldn't want anyone to just say "Cool!" and go to it with out caution or instruction. I should also mention that my own experience is negligible; mainly concerning my memory of Baptism. This memory has, however, helped to steer me away from what I consider to be deadly errors in my personal prayer life; at various times, as I was praying, I would fall into an "ecstatic" condition, in which a fire would be lit in my breast, and I would be filled with great, passionate excitements, very emotionally stimulating. What saved me was the memory of the spirit I received at baptism; a very clean, rigorous spirit. The "Passionate Prayer" did not follow upon any special seeking or preparedness for worship, and it wasn't followed by any great freedom from temptation; in fact, it tended to come when I was struggling with sin, and the "passionless flame" of true Orthodox spirituality was receding from me. It made me feel great, and righteous, and that my sin didn't really matter to God; it was, in fact, a variant of the "Good Buddy Jesus" spirituality of my Evangelical upbringing. Anyway, it was recalling the purity of my baptism (which I didn't retain very long) which helped me identify my error.

The knowledge that Truth is beyond knowledge should lead us to humility; if we are humble, we will recognize how weak we truly are, and therefore how vulnerable to the deceits of the Enemy. This realization should make us appropriately cautious, to the point that we barely dare to raise our eyes to Heaven, let alone consider ourselves worthy to attain any exalted degree of spiritual perfection, but rather cry out constantly, "Lord Jesus Christ, O Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner".

THE MYSTICAL SUN

2008-05-05T16:10:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from spending a month-and-a-half at St. Anthony's Monastery in Florence, Arizona; I had intended to post something explaining what was up, but that was one of the many things that didn't get done before I left home. So now that I have lost the few readers that had persisted through these mad, muddy meanderings, I will continue the futile exercise of writing posts for a few weeks, until I leave home for good to wander the face of the Earth in search of my spiritual home.

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That in the heart of Man which gives light, that knowledge of meaning and purpose which is as the voice of God, continually prodding and nudging one toward Truth, giving no rest to any but those who have willfully blinded themselves out of hatred for light, this is the mystical Sun which lights the landscape of our lives, unspoken and unspeakable. Because it transcends all rational categories, it is expressed by way of paradox; the incongruity between two material explanations of the same truth provides the binocular vision by which it may dimly be seen. When, by Faith, the two halves of the inexpressible truth are accepted in entirety, this divine sun rises in the space between, shedding the spiritual illumination which is beyond the reach of reason; the rationalist who thinks he eliminates paradox by intellectually forcing a juncture between the truths that are accessible to him has really only succeeded in manufacturing a half-truth out of the two halves of the whole.

WORLDS ENOUGH

2008-03-01T11:23:00.000-08:00

Here's more of my doggerel; I had already selected the piece before I realized it was thematically appropriate.
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Worlds Enough

Time sits on us like a brooding hen,
Making all things come to fruition,
And we, inside the ellipse of albumen,
A safe and closed frontier,
We live our lives in frantic haste,
Will not willingly see our small affairs
Come to an end of futile waste,
Knowing soon will come the cracking of the egg.

We fully know the smallness of our lives,
Know too, that it is death which sets us free;
Yet we sweat blood and gash ourselves with knives,
Calling on our gods to move both Earth and Heaven
Only to retard by a single hour
The step into the larger universe.
We would stay huddled, closely packed
If it lay at all within our power.

Nothing well done fails to bear fruit,
Extending beneficence into the greater Kingdom;
Nothing evil ever can take root,
Torn out, swept up, cast away with the stubble.
A World of rotten eggs is insufficient to pollute
The fragrant air of yet-enchanted Eden;
Earth's highest virtue nothing to salute,
The greatest blessedness is but a good beginning.

-Don Comfort

Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

ETERNITY

2008-02-28T17:46:00.000-08:00

This is sort of a continuation of the previous post, but it gets a brand new title anyway.
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But basically, what is Time? I visualize time as a sort of envelope enclosing the material universe, creating the possibility of an entirely different mode of existence within the all-encompassing Being of God. Time is measured by motion, (preferably regular) and motion is sequentiality; even if nothing material existed, if there was a human-like intelligence, and it thought something, then time would be divided into the epochs before the thought, and after the thought. And, of course, as thought elicits thought, soon there is an entire intellectual history, a long, sequential chain of before and after; Time exists as soon as there is sequentiality.

But then, what is Eternity? Certainly not sitting on clouds strumming harps, as in the popular image of Afterlife. We cannot imagine anything that is not sequential, except stasis, and cannot imagine stasis except as tedium. Surely the Life of God is beyond that, or we could not truly desire it.

C.S. Lewis has an interesting image in the book "The Last Battle". Aslan, standing at the doorway, calls for "Time", and the giant who had been seen sleeping in a cavern of the Underworld in "The Silver Chair" stands and throws his shadow over Narnia. Aslan says "While he lay dreaming, his name was Time. Now that he is awake he will have a new one". Those words intrigued me when I re-read the book recently, though I had never particularly noticed them before. In this image, Time and Eternity are seen as the same entity, but Time is unconscious, a state of diminished energy. What it will be like at the awakening is unimaginable, but it will be real Life. No doubt we will then realize that all our previous life has been a working our way through the rind, and only now for the first time getting a taste of the real fruit. To participate in the Life of God will be a dynamic, not a static experience.

When the Fathers say that Time is an aspect of the Fall, I do not take it to mean that there was no sequentiality in the first-created world; in this sense, there are two aspects of Time, one the law of sequentiality, which applies to all material things, and the other the condition of Corruption, in which decay is the universal principle, and all things are subject to change, for nothing can endure. What the Fathers mean by Time in this sense is this condition of ceaseless change, but there is a transcendence of Time which is beyond the simple overcoming of the Corruption our First-Father was made subject to, and that is in the experience of the Uncreated Light of God, in Eternity.

TIME

2008-02-24T04:09:00.000-08:00

This post really should have appeared earlier in the series; I think I'm getting a little tangled up in the roots, if not yet strangled by them.
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One of the things I think as Human Beings we get most confused about is Time. In the Evangelical/Community church I used to attend, one of the things that made up the theological ping-pong matches of the various Faith traditions represented was, "Free Will!" (smash) "No, Predestination!" (volley), back and forth, and back and forth. Even at the time, I thought I could hazily discern the form of a reconciling position in the No-Man's Land between the contending parties; when I came to Orthodoxy, I recognized, in a much clearer form, many of the hazy intermediate positions I had begun to articulate in the Orthodox teaching.

The substance of the confusion was that it seemed if God foreknew everything, then the events of a human life couldn't really be determined by the choices that the individual makes, for good or ill. It was this that led my Calvinist friends to say that the Damned were damned from all Eternity. I knew that didn't sound right, but given their starting presuppositions it was hard to argue with them; I had heard the position argued that though God forsees everything, he does not control, and though for a time, I accepted this, it seemed to me unsatisfactory. I didn't want to say that there was anything beyond God's control! For me, the key to the dilemma was realizing that, in essence, the entire controversy was a confusion over the nature of Time.

Imagine that you are inside a train, standing at one end of a long line of connected cars; each car having one large window looking out on the surrounding countryside. As you walk from one end to the other, you see various scenes through the windows; here a brook, there some trees, here a cow scratching itself against an old wooden fence, here a pleasant meadow, there a herd of feeding pigs, there a muddy bog. To you, all these scenes are disconnected, and sequential; the one coming after the other in order. But to someone sitting on a hill overlooking the same country, all the scenes which you see sequentially are seen at the same time, and the relations between the objects are clear; he will see that the herd of pigs is heading to the bog, that the cow is about to escape through a gap in the fence invisible to you, and that the patch of trees are on the bank of the stream, and overhang it.

God's foreknowledge isn't like prophecy; it's not knowing what will happen, it's knowing what happens. Lest this distinction seem too obscure, (is that possible?) I will try to further elaborate. One reason I didn't like the idea of God not compelling anyone to take a certain course of action, but just knowing beforehand which course they will choose, is that it still made it seem I wasn't free; that everything is already set in stone, and I am just walking a path already laid out. This is because I am thinking of God as an entity entirely inside of time, who sees the path that is already there, but in reality, God sees from an eternal perspective, because He is not encompassed by Time, as are we; so Past, Present, and Future are not separate, they are just Now, or rather, (since now is a designation of Time) they are just what is. God's being outside of Time means that, although he sees the path that, to me, I have yet to walk, this does not mean that these paths yet exist for those inside of Time. Furthermore, God's being outside of Time means that His control over the unfolding of events in Time is not threatened by free will, or, conversely, that free will is not threatened by God's continuous control over events unfolding in Time. The Fathers say that many aspects of our present world are because God knew Man would sin, and therefore made provision for it in shaping His Creation; Adam was not forced to sin by a capricious God who then punished him for it, but allowed to sin by a God who in mercy prepared the world for this eventuality. So we also must believe that many of the circumstances of our present lives are provisions for choices we have not yet made.

Of course, we must believe that God is not entirely outside of Time, or we will be Deists, and will not save our souls; though God is outside Time, He nevertheless walks with us through the long, dreary corridors of Time, to counsel, help, and heal us.

MOST LIKE AN ARCH THIS MARRIAGE

2008-02-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

This was sent by Mehitabel, along with a bunch of others. I had forgotten to mention it previously, but I would prefer to receive submissions one at a time.
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Most Like an Arch This Marriage
by John Ciardi

Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.

Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.

Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is,
what's strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss

I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another's sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.

Send Poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

FAITH

2008-02-09T07:26:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up Evangelical, I thought I knew what faith was. Faith meant things that should never, ever be questioned; that it would be impious, even blasphemous, to drag down into the sordid arena of inquiry. Consequently, as I grew to the age of inquiry, it seemed to me that Faith and Truth were necessarily in conflict; in late adolescence I decided that I couldn't have Faith, because I wanted Truth.

But I discovered that Faith isn't closing your mind; as "The evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for", it is instead that particle of information which causes Truth to emerge from the disordered sea of fact. When I went out "Looking for (Truth) in all the wrong places", I could not find it until I returned to Faith; all the truths I laid my hands on added up to a senseless universe. I had been bashing my head against the solid wall of materialistic determinism, not noticing there was a door in the wall the whole time close by. Faith is the golden key which opens that door. The wall is just as solid as before, I have not stopped believing in matter or reason, but the wall no longer obstructs my passage to the enclosed garden of the soul.

Perhaps I should speak a bit more of the precise nature of this revelation. What closed the door of Faith for me was that I identified reason so closely with the techniques of modern Science; though it established for me many things as true, it could not point to a purpose behind all the universe of marvels it paraded before me. So I sailed the vortexes of nihilism with the lodestone at the center of my soul spinning crazily, but when the Pole Star of Faith rose above the horizon, my direction lay clear before me.

What caused me to be able to accept the faith I had rejected in adolescence was firstly the realization that Faith was not contrary to Reason, but was rather the very Soul of Reason. The soul of the Body is different from the Body, and invisible; but it is not contrary to the Body, and it is the Soul that makes it live. So Reason lives only when in possession of its soul. Secondly was the place that Beauty gained as an indicator of purpose. I had previously followed the teachers of modernism in regarding beauty as irrelevant to the search for Truth; I have written previously of Being as an absolute value, which cannot be argued either for or against. This realization changed everything for me; before, I was at war with my heart, and felt that as I valued Truth I must put everything that I intrinsically felt to be valuable to trial before the august tribunal of Reason, which my training had taught me to regard as brutally materialistic. Now I thought, for the first time, "Why not? Why should not my perceptions of beauty be regarded as the central datum which influences the ordering of all other information? Why must the eyes of the body be regarded above the eye of the soul?". I suppose it was a persistent regard for Truth which saved me from abandoning truth altogether at this point, (as many do) thereby becoming degenerate, but it really never occurred to me that a beauty which was not simultaneously true could be truly beautiful. All the modern world regards Truth and Beauty as a duality, but they are one.

Dostoevsky wrote that Beauty would save the World. On the face of it, that is an absurd thing to say; certain it is that many are damned by it. Perhaps it is true only for those who have themselves lain in the pit of Nihilism, on whose benighted brains it finally dawns that, perhaps if the world is only beautiful it is meaningful; and the dark tormented dreams disperse, leaving one free to walk in the morning of a new day.

When at the high-tide of youth and health I went looking for purpose, I had no hope, I wanted to die; now that I am not so young, and not completely healthy, I am sustained by Faith, and I believe I could rejoice in my being if I could see but one ray of light. There are times when I have thought that if I were deprived of all my faculties except the ability to breathe, it would be enough; I could rejoice in the possession of my life in the joy of breathing. If Love is the affirmation of Being, then Faith is the surrender to Love; it is this surrender which led me to the God who is Love, and from there to the Christ who saves, and on to the Scripture which records the truths of our Faith, and the purposes of God, and from thence, in the fullness of time, to that Faith "Once delivered to the Apostles".

REVELATION

2008-02-06T04:35:00.000-08:00

It does not appear to me likely that we are going to be able to figure things out all by ourselves; by our own effort, we have two strategies open to us for attempting to make sense of the universe: the painstaking analysis of each grain of phenomena that enters our experience via our senses, or the articulation of general principles which we perceive to be behind all the various permutations of the phenomenal universe. These general principles, of course, are a kind of revelation; what the Apostle tells us is written on the heart of every man. If we depend only on the analysis of phenomena for our truth, we are like a child on the beach, examining the soil where he sits, justifiably concluding the entire universe is made of sand; of course, our senses are also a kind of revelation. Why else should we consider our senses as portals of Truth? If our senses are the result of random processes, why should not their report be equally random? It seems to me, we can trust our senses to the extent we regard them as endowed by a beneficent Creator; One who gives them for our instruction, not our confusion, but we cannot rely on them utterly. They are for the verification of truth, not its discovery. 'The Heart knows its truths, which Reason may not know".

Were it not for the grace of the beneficent Father, we would be sightless; deaf, dumb, and blind. The Creator of the Heart of Man is also the Lawgiver of Sinai, reinforcing these truths almost to the point of redundancy for the benefit of His dull children. Then, lest the point of these precepts be lost forever in the legalistic multiplication of irrelevant minutiae, Christ came as Teacher to remind us, "To Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself....this is the whole of the Law". Lawyers may be workers of evil, but the Law itself is a thing of beauty.

UNTO THE AGES OF AGES

2008-02-01T03:23:00.000-08:00

This in from Sophocles:
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Unto the Ages of Ages

He who has conquered Death and is alive forevermore, unto Ages of Ages.

O humanity, having left your first estate, having become mortal, you are dead. Death is your reward. Death is the fabric of your existence, it holds you, it defines you, you breathe it as air. It you run from. It you strive to postpone. It you define life by. What is life but not death? What are you, o humanity but a slave to not death? Why, o death, do you hover over me? Why do you stick closer to me than a brother? Why do you separate me from love? Why, o death, do I have to not be? Sin is conceived in me, o death, and I die more so, and yet you are not satisfied. Die more you want me to. I sin and die once again.

And when this mortal frame expires, I will continue to die, o death, forever. I will forevermore not be in Him who is Life. My God, my God, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to you, o LORD. I a sinner, am to span eternity with You. You who have conquered death and who can die no more, I am to be found in You. You, o Lord Jesus Christ, in the community of Your Father and the Holy Spirit, forever, from eternity begotten by Him, you were when there was not any save You, o Triune God.

Thou hast been always loved by Thy Father, o Lord. Forever Thy Father has sent Him who testifies of Thee, proceeding from Him, the Fount, hovering above the waters, the earth null and void. And I, a worthless sinner, who has broken all Thy commandments, whom You have loved, but because Your love burned me I ran, seeking my own way, am called by Thee to dine with Thee. This brokenness only I have to offer Thee, o gracious Master, I have nought else, my beautiful Lord, lover of mankind. But I am undone, I am a man of unclean lips.

Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, o LORD

Unto the Ages of Ages,

Amen.

Lord have mercy on me a sinner.

-Sophocles Frangakis

Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

MORAL CERTAINTY

2008-01-28T22:04:00.000-08:00

How do we know the truth; where are the deep springs of certainty? In the depths of the heart of Man, the Apostle tells us, are things we just know, and ignore at our peril. Of course, sinful Man chooses to evade these things by obscuring their truth, arguing that we don't know these things, that they are not proven, that they are not logically necessary. The history of Modernity has been the history of the attempt to divorce Truth from its foundations planted by God deep in the heart of Man. When once Truth is located in things that Man can verify independently, then Man is the master of his own Truth, and hence of his own being. The senses having been selected early on as the location of ascertainable truth has led only to philosophical doubts of the instrument. The modern experiment should have ended there, but there came a crafty weaver into town by the name of I. Kant, who offered to clothe our noble Empiricist in a gown of superior quality, in which he has been strutting and parading the streets of Academia ever since, deaf to the cries of the children proclaiming his essential nakedness, though lately he seems to at least have developed the ability to blush.

There are currently two forms of transmission of truth from the past; Tradition and Scholarship. Originally, the two methods were one, scholarship being intensely tied to tradition, and used as a kind of filter to distinguish authentic tradition from its more spurious forms, but in modernity, the two have separated into hostile camps. The method of modern scholarship is apparently to adopt as a prejudice something immensely flattering to ourselves, and to always look at any actual evidence that may exist through the lens of our pet prejudice; Chesterton wrote of the scholarship of his time that it involved scrapping supernatural stories which have some foundation in favor of natural stories which have no foundation.

Scholarship and Tradition might be compared to two people, one who studies a rock known to have originated from a distant mountain, the other having a distant, hazy view of the mountain itself. If you study a rock intensely enough, you can probably tell a lot about the kind of soils, and therefore the kind of vegetation, which might prevail on the mountainside; of course, this involves a couple of key assumptions. One, that the data you possess is not something erratic, and therefore is truly indicative of conditions on the mountain, and Two, that it is in fact prevalent all over the mountain. The two methods should obviously be used in conjunction, but it is the one who has sight of the actual mountain who should have the controlling authority; modern scholarship is somewhat given to informing us authoritatively that there are no pine trees on the mountain, when they can be seen quite plainly standing out on the ridge.

Anyway, we live in the world of totalitarian scholarship, with its own epistemology, and a dedicated corps of amateur police tirelessly striving to enforce its decisions; but for one who heeds the voice within, these things are meaningless as the wind, which may shriek with all its voice, yet never compel one to surrender. It seems to be the role of the modern schools to create a race of individuals who simply cannot think outside the box of contemporary scholarship, baseless though its dictates may be.

MORAL ORDER

2008-01-24T12:20:00.001-08:00

Condolences to poor Ochlophobe for his recent illness; that's a problem I don't have, my lungs having been developed while growing up on the high Andean plateau, but I know many suffer from it tremendously.

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So; Truth being so complicated and all, is there a real, discenable right and wrong? There is a persistent tendency in Modernity to say that all values are arbitrary; at this point, all categorical imperatives and all merely pragmatic moralities are quite exploded. They were minimally functional (yet still socially corrosive, in my view) as long as there was a sufficient social memory of a more forcefully articulated, and indeed, more natural morality, but now that these things have receded into the near-legendary past, what can be said against those who choose to regard their own immediate pleasure, or even inclination, as of more value than the good of other people, or the eventual good of society? I am going to say that, if you are an atheist, or even an agnostic, there is nothing. If your neighbor decides to torture your dog, rape your daughter, or burn down your house, you can certainly say that you will do everything in your power to prevent them, including appealing to the relevant social authorities to aid you, but you cannot say he is doing wrong, in any absolute sense of the word. You may say that right is defined by what the majority of the people want, as if when the majority of the people decide that it's o.k. to rape your daughter it makes any difference in the morality of violating a young girl; it is also the case that certain peoples historically have found themselves outside the circle of concern of their community. People may be quite positive that they don't want anyone raping their daughter, or the daughters of the people they are accustomed to associating with directly, and yet be blithely unconcerned over what happens to your daughter. It seems usually to go unnoticed that the minimal protections provided by a traditional ethics for those outside of society's circle of concern have been quite eroded away by today's politically-correct ethicists; Jews, Blacks, and Homosexuals would have had no hope of a hearing, if the society of the early 20th century had been founded on the ethics of the 21st century. The politically-correct mentality has no tradition of mercy towards its opponents; for those who fall out of its circle of concern, the future is indeed bleak. Late modernity has already proven a continual holocaust for those who, through no choice of their own, occasionally invade the bodies of women, thereby threatening to impose responsibilities on them; later on, no doubt, the holocaust will extend to all those who offend against its totalitarian ethics by holding on to more traditional moralities, and have the temerity to regard them mandated by Divine authority.

The ethical imperative of late Modernity is that all individuals are self-determinative; any factor that serves at all to impose limits on the ability of an individual to absolutely determine what kind of creature they are to be, and what kind of responsibility (if any) they have for the happiness and well-being of another, is seen as a gross imposition on the rights of the individual. I will engage in sexual activity, and I will regard the being that comes in the course of nature to be a hostile invader, to be expelled without guilt or consideration from the womb; I will jump from this high building, and I will bring a lawsuit against the ground for smiting me.

The only refuge from this lunacy that I can see is to believe in a Creator; that being given, all else proceeds rationally. Because I am not my own creator, I do not determine my own nature. Whatever rights I may have spring from this nature; that being the case, I must know my nature in order to determine what kinds of demands I may justly make on my universe. Because the Creator created me, His knowledge of me is much greater and much more intimate than my knowledge of myself. All my operations, physical and spiritual, are a mystery to me; I must appeal to my Creator for the key to the understanding of my being. If I choose to make up my own rules of conduct, it is the same as if the owner of a new automobile were to say "The manufacturer demands that I put oil in the car before driving it, but I choose not to do so". In one sense, he is free to make that decision, but obviously if he does so, he is not free to drive a smoothly functioning automobile, and very soon will be unable to drive at all. Similarly, he may choose to put the oil in the gas tank, and the windshield wiper fluid in the crankcase, but if so, he must accept the naturally occurring, deletrious results.

Obviously, any complex entity such as a man or an automobile has a vast number of processes which must be complied with to maintain functional integrity. Some have major consequences, some minor; some consequences of wrong behavior may not reveal themselves for years, or be such that they are not apparent at all until suddenly manifest in catastrophic circumstances.

Because Modernity believes in physical reality, it knows, when building towers and bridges, that there are designs which work, and those that don't, materials which will withstand particular stresses, and those which will fail to do so; because Modernity does not believe in spiritual reality, it regards Man's spiritual nature as infinitely manipulable. This is why the spiritual towers and bridges erected in early Modernity are collapsing spectacularly around us, to the ruin of families and communities, and the eventual dissolution of the social fabric itself.

A SECOND CHILDHOOD

2008-01-19T09:48:00.000-08:00

O.K. People, you're not doing your part on this Poetry thing; I'm not going to keep it up all by myself. So far, all we've had are a couple of poems sent in that were written by other people; I had originally hoped to have more original work sent in. Why should I be the only one to embarrass myself publicly? I had thought that everyone wrote poetry; there's no need to be shy, I've been around the block, and have already seen most of the standard varieties of ineptitude. If you don't know how to write a poem, learn! Start with rhythmic babbling, and work up from there.

This was not supposed to be the all-things-Chesterton page, but I had wanted to share my favorite Chesterton poem, then Fred Pfeil sent "The House of Christmas" as a seasonal offering, and Andrea sent Abou Ben Adhem, which I decided to pair with Chesterton's parody, and I still want to include my favorite poem by G.K. Chesterton; so here it is:

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A Second Childhood

When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
I think I shall not be too old
To stare at everything;
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing.

Wherein God's ponderous mercy hangs
On all my sins and me,
Because He does not take away
The terror from the tree
And stones still shine along the road
That are, and cannot be.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for wine,
But I shall not grow too old to see
Unearthly daylight shine,
Changing my chamber's dust to snow
Till I doubt if it be mine.

Behold, the crowning mercies melt,
The first surprises stay;
And in my dross is dropped a gift
For which I dare not pray:
That a man grow used to grief and joy
But not to night and day.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for lies;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.

Nor am I worthy to unloose
The latchet of my shoe;
Or shake the dust from off my feet
Or the staff that bears me through
On ground that is too good to last,
Too solid to be true.

Men grow too old to woo, my love,
Men grow too old to wed:
But I shall not grow too old to see
Hung crazily overhead
Incredible rafters when I wake
And find I am not dead.

A thrill of thunder in my hair:
Though blackening clouds be plain,
Still I am stung and startled
By the first drop of the rain:
Romance and pride and passion pass
And these are what remain.

Strange crawling carpets of the grass,
Wide windows of the sky:
So in this perilous grace of God
With all my sins go I:
And things grow new though I grow old,
Though I grow old and die.

-G.K. Chesterton

I hope no one is suffering from Chesterton overload!

Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

TRUTH

2008-01-15T04:17:00.000-08:00

In controversies with other people, we frequently find that a point is reached at which any further discussion is unprofitable, each party talking past the other in mutual incomprehension. On such occasions, it is tempting to regard the other as being willfully bullheaded, and sometimes it is so, (I've done it before) but more frequently, both simply lack a context which allows the other to make sense; it's like listening to someone speaking a language with which we are completely unfamiliar. The sounds are mixed up in an order that is unintelligible to us. Others who speak our language do so with such different stress and inflection that it is hard to understand. In saying this, I'm certainly not advancing a philosophy of relativism; one can be completely familiar with the philosophy of your interlocutor, spot the error without difficulty, and be completely right in doing so. Even so, you are left with the problem of how to communicate this in a way they will understand.

There is a point at which productive discourse can take place, and that is at the very point at which the two viewpoints diverge. In talking to almost anyone, there is a point up to which we agree, but after that, our ideas separate. That is the point which needs to be examined; argue very far away from that point, and you are arguing from different assumptions. What irrational prejudice, what rooted dislikes, what kind of intensely personal experiences cause one person to zig and the other to zag at the point of departure? The answers can sometimes be truly illuminating. Progress can sometimes be made by tracing the idea to see, after all, where it truly leads, or what kind of intellectual universe it springs from. Many carry ideas around in their heads that would horrify them if they knew what gave it birth. Compare the growth of ideas to the growth of a tree; branches continually spreading away from the trunk, dividing again and again; it is always possible to find one's way back to the trunk, and hence to the root, by tracing your way laboriously down the branch, exploring each intersection and mapping the complicated networks and tangles of twigs springing from different branches, perhaps originating from the other side of the tree, or even from different trees. Confusion results mainly from false congruences and false dichotomies; two leaves seen growing side by side are usually assumed to be closely related. Perhaps a trained botanist will be able to tell at a glance that these leaves seen presently in such near proximity are in fact from two different kinds of trees; others without such sensitivity have to work laboriously to the same conclusion. Other leaves positioned on opposite sides of the arboreal universe may be demonstrated to be of the same branch. Obviously, this gets complicated; it might seem that there is some justification for those who say either that there is no Truth, or that Truth must remain forever unknown to us. In ultimate things, I consider this indeed to be the case; I have long considered the most sensible thing one can say about the Universe is that, barring revelation from a higher power, man can know nothing certainly about the nature of the universe, and hence ultimately lacks the key to the understanding of his own being. The long search for Human-centered certainty which is Modern philosophy seems certainly to have foundered at this point; most have by now abandoned ship, and the few determined diehards appear more ridiculous with each passing year, but I also believe that, in Itself, Truth is simple. In the clear empyrean which is its true home, it burns as a radiant energy, flashing forth from the Throne of God on its missions of Justice and Mercy; but as it enters the phenomenal realm, its beam is somewhat diffracted, and as this pure white light enters the prism of the human mind, it is broken into all the colors of the rainbow, and then human beings seek to use Truth to promote their own interests, manufacturing truths from Truth, (Truth itself being regarded only as a source for the mining of convenient facts) suppressing some, and enhancing others. Looking for Truth in the currents of human opinion is like walking down a hall of funhouse mirrors, the twisted glass throwing back your image in every grotesque distortion imaginable. Some even become haters of Truth, seeking to uproot and destroy every evidence of it in the human heart, fabricating and disseminating false truths with which to fill the void.

Consequently, we dwell in an atmosphere of confusion; finding Truth is not hopeless, but it is complicated, and the only point at which we can truly address differing opinions is to find the point where two branches diverge; then, with labor, truth can indeed be demonstrated, falsity shown absurd in the light of its own disastrous logic, but this, of course, takes time. Modern people are typically too busy to remember, let alone think, so of course the temptation is to forgo any rigorous examination of their core assumptions, and adopt a sort of "soundbite philosophy" composed of bits and pieces (many of them contradictory) formed of the sweepings of popular culture. They typically won't take time to examine this collage, and can't defend any part of it, but they can vividly dislike those who point out their contradictions, and they do.

I am not primarily talking about uneducated people here; simple people approach truth at a much more basic level, and are often right where their more sophisticated brethern are wrong. I used to think I operated on a higher plane of truth than my parents, (one of the many things that kept me from accessing the parental wisdom) but found as I matured that many of the things I had rejected as excessively simpleminded were, quite simply, true; these truths were inarticulable by those who had my training in their hands, but true nonetheless. Had I been a less arrogant young man, I might have been able to access these silently held, but profound truths.

So the possession of truth and the articulation of truth are different things, but polemics (not a dirty word in my vocabulary) has to do with the convincing of those who have a different view, and that involves the articulation of truth, and that involves forming a fairly clear mental picture of what Truth actually is. Here I return to the analogy of the forest with intent to refine it a bit. Originally, I said that the entire forest was not rooted in anything; now I am going to say it is only our tree which is uprooted, and that it is being supported on all sides by living trees, whose branches are so intertwined with those of our tree that it is difficult to tell which leaves belong to which tree. Uprooted and malnourished as it is, our world is yet interpenetrated and upheld by truths which come from a different universe. A leaf growing right beside another may be from the other side of the spiritual and intellectual Cosmos. There is one profound difference between these leaves; one is living, and the other is dying. A little space of time will demonstrate for all to see which is which; in the meantime, all the leaves have the appearance of health, and to the undiscerning eye all appear to be of the same tree.

The pursuit of Truth involves sorting out the eternal from the transient. One adept at such things might be able to say immediately that this is an oak leaf, and the one beside it is a maple, but he will be hard-pressed to convince his less-discerning fellows of this unless they will undertake the labor of following the branches; typically, they will just stubbornly argue the point, most likely munching on acorns the entire time.

At this point, (If not long before) the insistent relativist will have broken in, saying with his usual benign smile and air of all-knowingness "Ah, but there are many paths to the top of the mountain, my child". It is a point worth considering. First of all, it may be so that there are many paths to the top of the mountain; at any rate, it certainly can be approached from many trajectories, but what an infinitude of other possible routes there are which lead away from the mountain entirely? Would it not behoove one who wished to reach the top of the mountain to at least ascertain what direction the path they are on is pointing in, and not just assume that any old path will do? Furthermore, even if it is possible that there is more than one path up the mountain, could it not be possible that there is only one safe path, and that, in the case of a peak of insurmountable difficulty, the only possible path may be the one that was blasted out of the side of the precipice in order to make the ascent at all possible. As a matter of fact, most mountains I am familiar with do have only one path to the top; it is there because thousands of people have found that this is the best route to the top of the mountain. I doubt if the person who coined the phrase had any experience with mountaineering. Years of knocking heads with these people has convinced me that relativism is the first, last, and only refuge of the intellectually lazy; it wears an appearance of wisdom, and of broad magnanimity, but is really remarkably foolish, and about the most narrow-minded thing there is going, and there's really no way to penetrate the smug superiority of those who hold this view, for it comforts them with the feeling that they are the ones who have seen through everything, when most commonly they are only the ones who have failed to look.

PAIN

2008-01-08T23:35:00.000-08:00

I apologise for any confusion that anyone may have encountered; the new e-mail address is ddcomfort@gmail.com. I haven't yet figured out how to make the links work (I'm not sure I ever did figure out how to make the links work).
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When I was very young, (I think about five) I saw a still younger child (unknown to me) being given an ice-cream cone; as the child reached out his small hands for the treat, he tipped the cone, and the ice cream fell off of it onto the ground, and he began to cry. At that, a pang shot through me; I can feel it to this day. It seemed it would have been better for the World never to have existed than for that one event to have occurred; of course, that was a posterior analysis, but that was the substance of the feeling at the time. It is a common enough event; I have since witnessed the very same thing many times without reaction, and had most probably seen it before, (my memories of those far-off times being rather hazy). In fact, unless I am very much mistaken, the very same thing had happened previously to me without provoking nearly as intense a reaction.

At this point, you are all probably looking at me as a complete lunatic, and I don't blame you. What was it that provoked such an intense reaction, making that simple event one of the formational forces in my life? I think it was the combination of the childish intensity of delighted anticipation of enjoyment, the abrupt taking away of the promised pleasure, and the broken-hearted wailing that resulted. For that child at that moment, that ice cream was his heaven, and suddenly, the door was slammed shut; more ice cream may be procured, and the child comforted, but still that bereaved wailing echoes down the corridors of time and space. Of course I know it is silly to place such importance on ice cream, but it is exactly the silliness and childishness of it that gives it such poignancy; I don't at all think that the reaction would have been nearly as strong had it been a reasoned and measured response to some great crisis. The disjuncture between the triviality of the incident and the intensity of the response gives it its pathetic quality, and it is one of the things that in adolescence had me shaking my fist at God, and saying, "You Tormentor! Stop it!!". It didn't mean anything in itself, but a tiny paradise was shattered, and my heart broke; I didn't so much care if a rational creature suffered the torments of Hell, but for a child to shed such tears made the Universe seem like a cruel joke.

The reason I introduce this post with this rather unimportant piece of autobiography is because I have come to suspect that similar reactions lie behind many of the core perceptions of modernity; as modern people, we worship Pain, that dark Taboo before which we make such extravagant obeisances, and perform endless sacrifice of infants and other helpless creatures, and really, is there that much of a difference between my reaction to the child's spoiled ice cream, and the reactions of many to such things as Hiroshima? A difference in scale, to be sure, but at its root, the common perception that pain is intolerable, and that we must remake the world, and if necessary human nature, in striving to rid the world of pain. I cannot concede to the Anonymous One that pain is the most important thing there is; he believes that he has upset everyone else's applecart just by quoting some grim statistics, but I keep my apples in an entirely different conveyance, thank you!

Later on, I began to see pain as a gift of God, warning us of wrongness and danger, and really, a great confirmation of the truth of the Christian Faith; only in the knowledge of fallenness and separation from God does pain make sense. Deep in our hearts, we sense the brokenness of the world, and our souls explore the fracture like someone endlessly running their tongue over the rough edges of a broken tooth. In any other system, pain is an absurdity; we don't know what to do with it. When my wife was seeing a counselor, I was speaking with her of the necessity of making some hard choices, and saying that though they would be painful, it might in the end be a good thing; she immediately snapped "Anyone who thinks of pain as good is a masochist". So much for "Christian" counseling! Not until I became Orthodox did I find a complete theology of Pain, and learn to experience pain as sanctifying, and cleansing; after a night spent in tears of repentance, the sun shines with extraordinary brightness through windows of the soul washed clean of years of accumulated grime. Indeed, it comes to mind that this is an important difference between ecstatic religion, the condition of seeking spiritual experiences and consolations, with the attending auto-erotic characteristics that Ochlophobe has so well outlined on his blog, and religion that seeks only repentance and self-mortification; the latter is clean, but the former is completely tied up in the passions of human eros.

Pain is not the soul of the Cosmos; at the heart of the Cosmos beats a heart of radiant Joy. In that light, all pain is seen to be illusory, as insubstantial as a morning mist which vanishes instantly at the rising of the Sun. To the modern mind, the fact that Pain exists is the center of the universe, and proves God to be either cruel or nonexistent, and misery blots out the sun. In every soul either Love triumphs over Pain, or Pain triumphs over Love; on this depends whether our life is heaven or hell.

ABOU BEN ADHEM

2008-01-05T21:01:00.000-08:00

Andrea Rovney has sent in the much-anthologised "Abou Ben Adhem"; here it is.

Abou Ben Adhem

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold:

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?" The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men."

The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!

-James Leigh Hunt

I can't resist pairing it with this one of Chesterton's:

THE PHILANTHROPIST
(With Apologies to a Beautiful Poem)

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe decrease
By cautious birth-control and die in peace)
Mellow with learning lightly took the word
That marked him not with them that love the Lord,
And told the angel of the book and pen
"Write me as one that loves his fellow-men:
For them alone I labour; to reclaim
The ragged roaming Bedouin and to tame
To ordered service; to uproot their vine
Who mock the Prophet, being mad with wine;
Let daylight through their tents and through their lives
Number their camels, even count their wives;
Plot out the desert into streets and squares,
And count it a more fruitful work than theirs
Who lift a vain and visionary love
To your vague Allah in the skies above."

Gently replied the angel of the pen:
"Labour in peace and love your fellow-men:
And love not God, since men alone are dear,
Only fear God; for you have cause to fear."

-G.K. Chesterton

Send Poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

BEAUTY

2008-01-03T23:27:00.002-08:00

On one level, Beauty seems to be nothing but order, and variations of order. This is why trees are beautiful; every tree has a different growth pattern, but each tree is substantially the same as other trees of its kind, has the same geometry, repeats the same angles, and trees of a different kind have an entirely different geometry of growth. Absolute chaos has no beauty; neither does a total stasis. Then there are things which just seem to have a deeper meaning, and speak to the soul of things beyond its vision; mountains, the sky, the sea, fields of flowers, etc. Beauty is an introduction to the being of God, the great symphony in Three movements, of which all the created order is but grace notes. We know the Creator through his creation, and know that He is good. No matter what pains we may have suffered, on bright days, or even grey days, with their very different kind of somber beauty, or in the still heart of the night, we may enter into a kind of deep mystical gladness, and know in our hearts that there is meaning in all this, and that Pain is not the soul of the Universe. All created things spring from this deep fountain of essential being; Beauty flows out from the Throne of the All-Holy Trinity, the Godhead dwells resplendent in Love, the rejoicing of Pure Being.

CHRISTMAS MEMORIES

2008-01-02T22:36:00.000-08:00

Andrea Elizabeth tagged me to share some Christmas memories awhile ago; since it is almost Old-Calendar Christmas, I'll give it a go. I'm not quite sure what I was intended to do, but this post is my attempt to respond to that request.

The Christmases I spent in Peru were very special to me; I remember primarily the deep sense of mystery as the holiday approached, and decorations began to go up. Mystery, and anticipation, as if something too good for words were approaching. These were not our most affluent Christmases, there were no white Christmases, as it was the beginning of summer (or "rainy season, as it was known in that locality). This is something I have often noticed about holidays and vacations generally; the ones I appreciate most in retrospect are not the ones filled with activity, but the ones where there is stillness. Also, the occasions when I had most fun as a child were not when we were going out doing fun things, but when I was able to interact naturally with other children (and, occasionally adults), which is only possible in an unpressured environment. This is the problem with people going bananas trying to make Christmas nice for their kids; people living harassed and frenzied existences increasing the frenzy for the holidays. I suppose in many cases, they are literally destroying peace in a vain attempt to recreate the peace they remember from Christmases in childhood. I'm not saying that if you polled the youngsters, they would give the thumbs up to singing Hymns in lieu of getting their favorite toy or a trip to the ski lodge; I do know that I don't remember many of the toys I got for Christmas as a kid, but I do remember sitting around a lighted Christmas tree in the evening with family and close friends, the house lights off, softly singing carols on Christmas Eve.
I remember driving up into the mountains of Oregon to cut our own Christmas tree; we kind of made a day of it. Fun and fellowship, snow, a nice hike through the woods, and the piney smell in the car on the way home. Somehow, using a farmed tree for Christmas always seemed a little sacrilegious to me; I won't even mention the supreme blasphemy of an artificial one.
The one Christmas I spent in New England was interesting; for one thing, it was the only time I have had really serious snow over Christmas. That, and having churches with tall steeples with clocks in them all over the place made it feel kind of like living inside the stereotypical Christmas card.

LOVE

2008-01-01T02:33:00.000-08:00

I would define Love as "The Affirmation of Being". If that seems absurd (and it does, a little, to me), it is probably because in ourselves we do not fully realize the true nature of Being.

THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS

2007-12-31T04:02:00.000-08:00

Fred Pfeil has sent in this one of Chesterton's; as it is not yet Christmas for me, I regard it as seasonal. Actually, it should still be Christmas for y'all too; you ought to be up to the drummers drumming by now.

I have a great regard for Chesterton's poetry. It is technically imperfect, but full of something that for lack of a better term I will call humanness; in his day, he was well enough regarded by several very proficient poets that they thought many of his poems would be immortal, but that was before the revolution, when all arts and sciences were captured by nihilists, and Poetry became for the first time an inhuman thing.
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The House of Christmas

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

-G.K. Chesterton

Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

BEING

2007-12-29T14:26:00.000-08:00

The most fundamental thing is what is; "To be, or not to be" is not the question. We are, and even an act of self-termination does not resolve the problem of Being; the real question is, what is our reaction to the reality of our existence? What answer can even God make to one who chooses to deny the goodness of being? Every possible act of beneficence, every beauty and pleasure provided to demonstrate goodness would be regarded by such a one as simply bait in a trap designed to reconcile him to the futility of existence. It is this absolute exercise of will which defines the person; to affirm or deny. The denial of Being is the deepest dimension of evil, an insatiate rage against the Creator as the Fountain of Being. "Evil, be thou my Good" is simply its most characteristic expression. All the Author of Life Himself can do is to say, "I set before you Life and Death, a Blessing and a Curse; therefore, choose Life". There is nothing much that can be done for those who don't.

GOD

2007-12-27T06:22:00.000-08:00

Since the rest of my family are either Non-Orthodox or New-Calendar, I get to celebrate Christmas twice; since most of our family were in our house for several days, I haven't been blogging. I suppose this isn't the ideal time to launch a blog; it didn't happen intentionally, I was just messing around one evening and said "Let's see what it would take to get this thing set up", and there I was.

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This is a subject I introduce more or less in order to dismiss it, because I don't really think it's a very interesting question; I'm just bringing it up to forestall those who would otherwise say I didn't start with the very deepest things. But to me, the existence of God is not the beginning of cognitive reflection, but the elemental presumption which renders reflection possible; Reason in the Void is not truly reason. Neither do I think it possible to prove the existence of God; none of the philosophic proofs of God's existence meant anything to me when I didn't believe in God, and none of them really mean much to me now. Evidences of God's existence are plentiful, proofs there are none. The eyes of the soul discern the certainty of these things, if we do not put blinders on as we are required to do by Science. What can be said to those who are blind to these things except "Take off the blinders"? It is a question of fecundity; you can mate a horse to a jackass, but the offspring is sterile, the line ends there. Reasoning without God is mating with a jackass; you come swiftly to the place where there are no more possibilities.

"But" you might say, "Are you not that one who professes a special interest in roots, and is not the existence of God the most fundamental root of all"? Yes, possibly; but roots which lie so deep are perilous for poor, weak creatures to probe into. You wander into dark caverns, and dwell in lightless misery, until you come to hate the light of Sun and Moon (gollum, gollum). Wishing only to probe the conditions of our life, oriented to the worship and service of God is the productive form of root-grubbing; you learn why things in the forest do not prosper, and occasionally find tubers, "rare good ballast for an empty stomach".

To expand somewhat on Chesterton's analogy, God is the blazing sun at the center of the universe; we cannot look at it. In fact, so intense is that light that it defeats our vision, and the light of God becomes clouds and darkness for us. All the lesser lines of inquiry disappear into that darkness, all plainly oriented in the same direction, but we cannot with plain sight describe that juncture, we know only by faith that all things are reconciled in God.

POETRY

2007-12-20T21:37:00.000-08:00

O. K., after Ochlophobe's endorsement I'm almost afraid to write; keep your expectations low, and you won't be disappointed.

By way of lightening the tone a bit, I'm going to be publishing a small amount of poetry here. You retain all rights, simultaneous submissions O. K.. I don't care if it's been published before or not, if it's anything you would like me and my readers to see, send it in. Also, if you have a favorite poem you would like to share with everyone, send it; just be sure you include the name of the author, and make sure I am aware that it is not yourself. I'll probably only be doing 3-4 poems a month, and maybe a couple of my own. Send submissions to: ddcomfort@gmail.com. If you send them to the comments page, I will delete them. Decisions of the editor are final.

To start things out, here's one of my own:

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Pertinacity

Living branch is grafted to dead tree;

dead tree wilts, the branch salutes the Spring,

the springing lily's bugle calls: Rejoice!

The weeping willow bows to it's decay.

Fruits and flowers fill the leafy branch

as branching beauties sprout on either side;

breeze blows, the tree begins to sway,

the live branch scatters petals to the wind.

Dead tree is lonely in infirmity,

bark sloughs off, the worm bores through the bole.

Blue moon looks down to where the tree still stands,

decrepit, leprous, by an evil fen;

in the drear light, an object lies upon

dark grass, dank with fever and disease,

flowers withered, fruits yet unmatured,

dead branch lies broken, rotted at the base.

-Don Comfort

GOLLUM

2007-12-16T23:08:00.000-08:00

I have decided, despite all previously cited reasons, to start publishing my own blog; this will probably be a fairly temporary thing, and if it doesn't work out for me, I'll quit. My reason for starting is that I have thought of a line of questioning which intrigues me, and would like to see what kinds of comments it would elicit. I chose the title "Earl Donald the Bewildered, of Grasshopper-in-the-hole", because I wanted something fairly self-depreciatory to show we are all equals in this arena; "James the Thickheaded" I thought good, and that blog with the title "Absolute Nonsense" or something like that, but I wanted something a little different. Then I came across a site where you could get faux English titles produced by typing in your first name, and have it combined with a title description in overblown heraldic-sounding language. I thought it was hilarious, and produced one for all the members of my immediate family, and then promptly lost the address of the site. My birth-name is Donald (Maxim is my Saint's name, which I go by except in Family situations), so I decided just to use my fake title as the title of the blog.

On this site, I would like to primarily explore some very basic questions of philosophy, mainly by way of retracing the steps that brought me out of secular materialist darkness; these are very simple questions, but my wrong understanding of them made it impossible to break my chains and set out on the road to freedom.

As I have contemplated my life, I have thought it's a little like being born in the upper branches of a mighty tree in a great forest, and one day setting out to discover the unshakable certitudes in which these trees are rooted. As you work your way down the trunk, everything becomes so much more massive and impressive, until finally you arrive at the very base of the tree, and find that the whole forest is literally rooted in nothing; maybe a thin tendril of root or two still connecting it to terra firma, but otherwise unsupported, living off of the nourishment it stored away in the days when it was still connected to the life-giving earth.

This discovery motivated me to set off on a quest for things truly rooted. It is a perilous quest; if you are not careful, like Gollum you may find the deep secrets you expected are only hunger and lightless misery, but it is better than going back to your tree, rootless and rotting from within, for knowledge of roots is what our people are dying for. I constantly run into people who are more intelligent and better informed than I (not difficult), but they seem to have an elemental confusion in all their deepest thoughts, and I have concluded it is usually because they are of the forest, and have no knowledge of roots. So, dear readers, let's do some grubbing around in the roots, shall we?