There's a pro-choice bumper sticker one sees now and again that says "Keep your laws off my body." No good comes of dismissing your opponent's argument, and it's not hard to imagine the repugnance of a woman crushed by poverty and commodified by men at the thought of some well-fed stranger in a $5,000 suit placing ordinances on her womb. The thing is, though—every law is on our bodies. That's what a law is: something to restrict where we can physically go or what we can physically touch. They can't govern our minds, and it would be a nightmare if they could. We have laws, ultimately, to keep us from killing each other; and they're enforced by those who, in the last resort, will physically restrain us from breaking them. Keeping my laws off your body would mean blood and rape and anarchy in the streets.
At the 2015 Women in the World Summit, Hillary Clinton stated that "deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed." Crudely shrewd, sandwiching "religious beliefs" between a neutral phrase and a negative phrase, lest we should discern any distinction. The "structural bias" of men being larger and stronger than women has always been basis enough for a culture of oppression without the need of any religious justification; and if religions have often ratified that oppression to varying degrees, at least some of them have urged the view of women as fellow children of God, thereby opposing and offsetting the structural bias of nature. But without deep-seated religious beliefs to offset that natural bias, there's nothing much to staunch the oppression of the unborn, who after all are smaller and weaker than any of us. Mrs. Clinton has always impressed me as a person who is not so much pro-choice as pro-abortion. I try to love her in the sense of willing her good, but I fear and hate what I think she half-knowingly serves.
In 2013, pro-lifers singing "Amazing Grace" outside an abortion facility in Texas were drowned out by a crowd of pro-choicers who broke into a spontaneous chant of "Hail Satan." In 2015, former "high wizard" Zachary King confessed to performing over 150 Satanist rituals during abortions. In 2017, the Satanic Temple in Missouri worked with Planned Parenthood to oppose anti-abortion legislation of the grounds of religious liberty.
Religious liberty.
We need to remember that, despite various anti-woman positions held by feminist leaders (Margaret Sanger's hair-raising malice towards black women, for example), the feminist movement has fundamental truths behind it. Women are and have been stomped on by the patriarchy, particularly under the Islamic religion that American feminists so confusingly adore. The sins of those who were entrusted with power in order to uphold virtue have brought about the profoundest possible crack between truth and love. Far too many men down the centuries have read as far as "Wives, obey your husbands" (Ephesians 5:22) and stopped before "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church and laid down His life for her" (Eph. 5:25).
But none of this, none of this, justifies the murder of the innocent. The failures of the Church, so numerous and awful, are reasons to fight harder for the Church—not to turn away and serve the Enemy. No one really believes anymore that unborn children can't feel pain, can't move and dream and start to know the voices of their parents: there's just too much science in the world now. More and more, this issue becomes a naked struggle between muddy Earth and howling Damnation. We all know the solace of John 3:16, but we mustn't forget the admonition of Revelation 3:16—"Because you are neither hot nor cold but lukewarm, I shall spew you out of my mouth." There's no room for neutrality here. We have to stop this thing.
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
On Mary (or, Six Words, Seven Words)
I'm very fond of the old carol "Away In A Manger." It's simple and sweet, with a sort of childlike wisdom and piety about it, and the melody is nicely hummable. But I have questions about one of the lines: "The little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes." That can't be right. He was like us in all things but sin; obviously He cried and pooped and spat up like the rest of us. In fact, as my old pastor Fr. LaValley once observed, Our Lord's dual nature is perfectly summed up in six words: "And Jesus wept" (John 11:35), showing his humanity; and "Lazarus, come out!" (John 11:43), showing His Divinity. (It does puzzle me that we never see Him laugh, but that's a whole separate blog post.) Anyway, the little Lord Jesus definitely made crying.
There's a bit in The Everlasting Man where G.K. talks about how you never see statues of Christ in His wrath, and how it's probably just as well because that would be terrifying, but it's extremely important to keep it in mind all the same. Even as we sit here at our computers, you and I, the Day of Judgment is getting closer, and we'll both of us be hearing either "Well done, thou good and faithful servant," or else "I never knew you, ye accursed." In a similar way, you never see images of the Blessed Virgin holding a sobbing Christ-child, and it's just as well, because we turn to our Mother for comfort and peace. But it's also good to remember that her task and burden was not to lug around a golden facsimile of the human form, impervious to pain and passion, but to feed and bathe and swaddle an infant born to poverty. Because she never sinned, she can't have given in to anxiety or annoyance, but there's no doubt that they beleaguered her as much as they do every loving parent.
I mentioned once that having a cat had given me daily occasion to ponder how asinine we must seem to the Host of Heaven, always thinking we're on the wrong side of the door. Likewise, having a child has given me (if it's not too audacious to say it) a fresh emotional insight into how Our Father must feel about us. She hasn't done anything whatsoever, apart from simply being my daughter, to make me love her; but as God gives me strength, I would eye-gouge a grizzly bear for her, let follow what might. Her crying rends my heart, and the tiniest flicker of her smile warms the pit of my stomach. Small wonder that Love Himself was willing to suffer and die for her.
Sonya doesn't talk yet. (She's been outside the womb seven weeks.) But when she's hungry or frightened or lonely, Ellie or I will lift her up and hold her close and rock her back and forth, and then she hears the seven words that matter most: "I'm here. You're safe. I love you." When little Lord Jesus was crying in the manger, Mary said those words—not in Aramaic or in Latin, but with her arms and with her warmth; and his human nature heard and was comforted, even as His Divine Nature held her back, and murmured those same seven words to her.
There's a bit in The Everlasting Man where G.K. talks about how you never see statues of Christ in His wrath, and how it's probably just as well because that would be terrifying, but it's extremely important to keep it in mind all the same. Even as we sit here at our computers, you and I, the Day of Judgment is getting closer, and we'll both of us be hearing either "Well done, thou good and faithful servant," or else "I never knew you, ye accursed." In a similar way, you never see images of the Blessed Virgin holding a sobbing Christ-child, and it's just as well, because we turn to our Mother for comfort and peace. But it's also good to remember that her task and burden was not to lug around a golden facsimile of the human form, impervious to pain and passion, but to feed and bathe and swaddle an infant born to poverty. Because she never sinned, she can't have given in to anxiety or annoyance, but there's no doubt that they beleaguered her as much as they do every loving parent.
I mentioned once that having a cat had given me daily occasion to ponder how asinine we must seem to the Host of Heaven, always thinking we're on the wrong side of the door. Likewise, having a child has given me (if it's not too audacious to say it) a fresh emotional insight into how Our Father must feel about us. She hasn't done anything whatsoever, apart from simply being my daughter, to make me love her; but as God gives me strength, I would eye-gouge a grizzly bear for her, let follow what might. Her crying rends my heart, and the tiniest flicker of her smile warms the pit of my stomach. Small wonder that Love Himself was willing to suffer and die for her.
Sonya doesn't talk yet. (She's been outside the womb seven weeks.) But when she's hungry or frightened or lonely, Ellie or I will lift her up and hold her close and rock her back and forth, and then she hears the seven words that matter most: "I'm here. You're safe. I love you." When little Lord Jesus was crying in the manger, Mary said those words—not in Aramaic or in Latin, but with her arms and with her warmth; and his human nature heard and was comforted, even as His Divine Nature held her back, and murmured those same seven words to her.
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
On Ignorance (or, My Hands Tie My Shoes)
Ever see Boondock Saints? These two Irish Catholic brothers decide to start shooting all the criminals in Boston, and wacky hijinks ensue. It's a fun movie, but I've always been confused by the beginning. As the film opens, we're in the middle of Mass and the priest is saying the Our Father. I'm pretty sure Catholics do that. It's odd that he's the only one speaking, though. Not even one single person in the congregation is joining in? And then he blows right past "deliver us from evil" and goes straight on into "For Thine is the Kingdom and the Power &c." without any liturgical embolism like, you know, "Deliver us, O Lord, from every evil, grant us peace in our day, in Your mercy keep us safe from all distress," and so forth. I guess he's really in a rush to get to Communion. But wait, now another guy's getting up, a monsignor (that's a thing, right?) and he's giving—the homily?! Where the hell are we? What part of the Mass is this?
In my experience, most people who attack the Faith are attacking something else entirely, which they've mistaken for the Faith, and which I would typically join them in attacking if they would listen to me for a moment or two. We had a friend called Olivia back in the day who once asked me how I could believe that the Pope is never wrong about anything. And when I said, "Liv, honey, that's not what Catholics believe," she objected that her info came from her college philosophy professor. Now, I'm sure that nigh on every teacher who's ever drawn breath has been stuck teaching a subject outside his or her field from time to time. But for mercy's sake, this was in the year 2000. We had the Internet.
Problem is, you can't use the internet, or any other resource, unless you know that you don't know. If I'm writing about (say) the Crimean War, then I'm conscious of my ignorance and I can invest 0.72 seconds to learn that it ended in 1856. But if I'm writing about World War II, then obviously there's no need for me to fact-check because everybody knows that World War II ended in 1944.
We think we know things. We think we know things that we don't, and we base beliefs and opinions on faulty premises, and we end up with dangerous conclusions. In the ancient days, the Oracle revealed that the wisest man in Athens was Socrates: the man who knew he didn't know. 'Course, it's a bit different now that Truth is one of us; there's a few things I'm willing to say I know. And I can't teach a child how to navigate the Earth while constantly qualifying every lesson with, "But remember, this might be totally wrong." Sometimes you just have to take a swing and hope you're not too far off the mark.
I literally, and I'm using a gravely injured adverb correctly here, literally don't know how to tie my shoes. I do it every day of my life, and have done since I was like what, five? Six? But that knowledge is not contained in my intellect or accessible memory. My hands know. When it comes time for me to teach Maggie Rose to tie a pair of shoes, I will first have to sit down and relearn the skill by watching myself do it. I find that absolutely fascinating. Our Sensei used to hide advanced techniques inside of beginners' rote movements, and when it came time for them to learn the more complicated maneuvers, he'd say, "You already know this; you just don't know you know." Socrates in the Meno elicits a complex mathematical proof from an illiterate slave boy with a series of basic questions. Sometimes we know more than we think.
Wait, weren't you just saying we know less than we think? Put down the bourbon, Toner. Ha, joke's on you, I'm not drinking bourbon. It's Jamesons left over from St. Patty's. But anyway, note the denominator. It's when we're prideful—oh, that silly 2,000-year-old bastion of philosophers, I can breezily find holes in their logic that no one's ever noticed before—that we tend to overestimate ourselves. It's when we're being humble—how could I, a lowly blue belt, already have Dim-Mak strikes hardwired into my muscle memory just from practicing First Kata?—that we discover greater wisdom within us than we suspected. That's the really interesting thing about so much of Jesus' advice. It's always, of course, designed to make us holier (you take the lowest place at the banquet because humility is the root of all virtue); but it also tends to conceal surprisingly shrewd pragmatism as well. It's precisely when you choose to start at the bottom that you're likeliest to be told, "Friend, go up higher."
In my experience, most people who attack the Faith are attacking something else entirely, which they've mistaken for the Faith, and which I would typically join them in attacking if they would listen to me for a moment or two. We had a friend called Olivia back in the day who once asked me how I could believe that the Pope is never wrong about anything. And when I said, "Liv, honey, that's not what Catholics believe," she objected that her info came from her college philosophy professor. Now, I'm sure that nigh on every teacher who's ever drawn breath has been stuck teaching a subject outside his or her field from time to time. But for mercy's sake, this was in the year 2000. We had the Internet.
Problem is, you can't use the internet, or any other resource, unless you know that you don't know. If I'm writing about (say) the Crimean War, then I'm conscious of my ignorance and I can invest 0.72 seconds to learn that it ended in 1856. But if I'm writing about World War II, then obviously there's no need for me to fact-check because everybody knows that World War II ended in 1944.
We think we know things. We think we know things that we don't, and we base beliefs and opinions on faulty premises, and we end up with dangerous conclusions. In the ancient days, the Oracle revealed that the wisest man in Athens was Socrates: the man who knew he didn't know. 'Course, it's a bit different now that Truth is one of us; there's a few things I'm willing to say I know. And I can't teach a child how to navigate the Earth while constantly qualifying every lesson with, "But remember, this might be totally wrong." Sometimes you just have to take a swing and hope you're not too far off the mark.
I literally, and I'm using a gravely injured adverb correctly here, literally don't know how to tie my shoes. I do it every day of my life, and have done since I was like what, five? Six? But that knowledge is not contained in my intellect or accessible memory. My hands know. When it comes time for me to teach Maggie Rose to tie a pair of shoes, I will first have to sit down and relearn the skill by watching myself do it. I find that absolutely fascinating. Our Sensei used to hide advanced techniques inside of beginners' rote movements, and when it came time for them to learn the more complicated maneuvers, he'd say, "You already know this; you just don't know you know." Socrates in the Meno elicits a complex mathematical proof from an illiterate slave boy with a series of basic questions. Sometimes we know more than we think.
Wait, weren't you just saying we know less than we think? Put down the bourbon, Toner. Ha, joke's on you, I'm not drinking bourbon. It's Jamesons left over from St. Patty's. But anyway, note the denominator. It's when we're prideful—oh, that silly 2,000-year-old bastion of philosophers, I can breezily find holes in their logic that no one's ever noticed before—that we tend to overestimate ourselves. It's when we're being humble—how could I, a lowly blue belt, already have Dim-Mak strikes hardwired into my muscle memory just from practicing First Kata?—that we discover greater wisdom within us than we suspected. That's the really interesting thing about so much of Jesus' advice. It's always, of course, designed to make us holier (you take the lowest place at the banquet because humility is the root of all virtue); but it also tends to conceal surprisingly shrewd pragmatism as well. It's precisely when you choose to start at the bottom that you're likeliest to be told, "Friend, go up higher."
My niece Lily being adorable as usual.
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
On Beauty (or, I Could Just Eat You Up)
What do you do with a sunset? You can gaze and forget yourself, sublimated, called forth from your isolated being into the furnace of Deity—watch it gutter like a swamp fire, fade, and drop you back to earth. You can paint it, answer its life-giving blaze with your own small creative powers, slap a frame on it, hang it somewhere, leave it for the spiders. You can take a picture of it, fumble for a grip on its majesty, stuff the eye of God into your phone and hope to reawaken the awe with the tap of a screen. What do you do with it?
In our wiser moments, we remember that Beauty isn't there for us to use it like a toaster oven. It was there before us and it would be there if we were not; it would be closer to the truth to say that we are there to serve Beauty's purposes than the reverse, but that's not quite true either because there's nothing for which Beauty needs us. We are simply permitted to behold it (not to hold it), and the only proper answer is gratitude. And despite my lemme get your attention opening paragraph, gazing and painting and taking pictures are perfectly honorable responses to the sunset, as long as the intent is to honor it rather than to possess it. Beauty comes to us in its own season, and not at our whistle; if we receive it with joy and trust and patience, it'll stay and glimmer quietly below our waking minds.
So all that being said, what emerges as the basic error behind the sin of lust? Obviously, the desire to possess the other, but not the actual person: only the beauty of the person, as if that could be detached and put in our pocket. That's why, as others have pointed out, a man will go to a strip club although he wouldn't go to a restaurant where they slowly unwrapped a burger, waved it around, and then put it away again. Tacitly, he believes that a woman's beauty is a thing he can pull off of her like Peter Pan's shadow and consume without any need of her. You can make the same philosophical mistake with a sunset, but it's less pernicious because you can't get your hands on the sun. A man who sleeps with a woman in the desire to ingest her beauty and discard the person like a peanut shell, actually does the opposite: her beauty can't be owned and his desire therefore won't be satiated, but her personhood can be progressively devoured until she's an object in her own eyes as well as his.
But here's the insane part. You can't hold a sunset, you can't consume a woman's soul. But the source of all beauty, Beauty Himself, has made Himself physically consumable. A tiny wafer, the sort of thing you might gobble by the dozen while you watched the Super Bowl—a commodity. Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, all fit easily in your wallet like a silver dollar. Bizarrely glorious indignity. Now life's question: what do we do with it? What do we do with Him?
In our wiser moments, we remember that Beauty isn't there for us to use it like a toaster oven. It was there before us and it would be there if we were not; it would be closer to the truth to say that we are there to serve Beauty's purposes than the reverse, but that's not quite true either because there's nothing for which Beauty needs us. We are simply permitted to behold it (not to hold it), and the only proper answer is gratitude. And despite my lemme get your attention opening paragraph, gazing and painting and taking pictures are perfectly honorable responses to the sunset, as long as the intent is to honor it rather than to possess it. Beauty comes to us in its own season, and not at our whistle; if we receive it with joy and trust and patience, it'll stay and glimmer quietly below our waking minds.
So all that being said, what emerges as the basic error behind the sin of lust? Obviously, the desire to possess the other, but not the actual person: only the beauty of the person, as if that could be detached and put in our pocket. That's why, as others have pointed out, a man will go to a strip club although he wouldn't go to a restaurant where they slowly unwrapped a burger, waved it around, and then put it away again. Tacitly, he believes that a woman's beauty is a thing he can pull off of her like Peter Pan's shadow and consume without any need of her. You can make the same philosophical mistake with a sunset, but it's less pernicious because you can't get your hands on the sun. A man who sleeps with a woman in the desire to ingest her beauty and discard the person like a peanut shell, actually does the opposite: her beauty can't be owned and his desire therefore won't be satiated, but her personhood can be progressively devoured until she's an object in her own eyes as well as his.
But here's the insane part. You can't hold a sunset, you can't consume a woman's soul. But the source of all beauty, Beauty Himself, has made Himself physically consumable. A tiny wafer, the sort of thing you might gobble by the dozen while you watched the Super Bowl—a commodity. Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, all fit easily in your wallet like a silver dollar. Bizarrely glorious indignity. Now life's question: what do we do with it? What do we do with Him?
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