The Water Is Wide

Decomposing Into Bureaucracy

Over sixty years ago, French writer and social critic Georges Bernanos looked at modern democracies and found within them the seeds of their destruction: the increasing power of the state at the expense of personal liberty. From his essay "Why Freedom?" from the book The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos:

As the power of the state increases we must declare with regret—a respectful regret, that’s understood of course, for we are respectful citizens—that this All-Powerful Being does not gain in morality as much as it gains in power. This remark cannot be applied yet to certain prosperous states, but you know the true nature of a man is revealed in poverty. Therefore, it is proper to observe the poor states in order to get an idea of what has become of the state in our time. The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more. It is precisely by this trait that tyrants have always been recognized. People would like to make us believe that the Nazi state was a sort of unforeseen and unforeseeable monster, an absolutely chance phenomenon, something fallen from the moon. But the Hitlerian state did not differ essentially from certain so-called democratic modern states that are in the process of dissolving into the totalitarian form. Whether democratic or not, the modern state has all of the economic rights. When, in certain cases, a state claims a share of some 83 per cent of a citizen’s income, against the promise (which it can always take back) of guaranteeing to him whatever is left over, one certainly has the right to wonder where its claims will end. Anybody who controls property always ends by controlling people. Anyone who gets in the habit of stealing runs the serious risk of becoming a killer…The democracies have been decomposing too, but some decompose more quickly than others. They have been decomposing into bureaucracy, suffering from it as a diabetic does from sugar, at the expense of its own substance. In most cases, this bureaucracy itself decomposes into its most degraded form, police bureaucracy. At the end of this evolution, all that is left of the state is the police—police for the control, surveillance, exploitation and extermination of the citizen.

Given the spin doctoring by both sides in the shouting match of incredible intellectual dishonesty that has engulfed the "debate" about the Obama administration's plans for "health care reform," it's easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. It's always best to focus on the fundamental differences between the opposing views, the non-negotiable self-evident essential truths that each party embraces.

"Anybody who controls property always ends by controlling people. Anyone who gets in the habit of stealing runs the serious risk of becoming a killer."

You accept those propositions or you do not. If you do, you know where you stand, and no amount of lying--whether subtly clever or ham-handed--will alter the positions to which those truths lead you. Nor will false "support" from clueless allies lead you astray, down blind alleys of misdirection.

In the end, I think, even for those with intellectual honesty and goodwill, or perhaps especially for such people, our differences about the way we view the world, our place within it, our relationship to God (if we believe in God), and our relationship to one another, are so profound that on some issues, no compromise is possible. At such a point, people take a stand and slug it out. One side wins, the other loses.

I think that we're engaged in one of those struggles. I wish we had alive today and engaged in this struggle, men and women of the intellectual depth and eloquence possessed by Bernanos. I wish we had them on both sides, so that the differences in core values that are at the bottom of our differences about "health care reform" would be made clear to the greatest number of concerned citizens. We don't, however. At least, I haven't been able to hear them in the cacophony of yelling and screaming that's been saturating the airwaves and main stream press. If they exist, I wish they'd step up, although I wonder, given the apparent short attention span of the average citizen, whether many would take the time to listen and to think.

Like A Voice Heard In A Dream

Excellent thoughts:

...Our longing for transcendence is inextinguishable in us, and the appeal of the transcendent to our deepest natures will always be audible and visible to us in some form—first and finally in the form of beauty—and will continue to waken in us both wonder and an often inexpressible unhappiness. But in an age such as ours, within the picture of the world that now prevails, that beauty must seem more ambiguous, more beleaguered, and the call of transcendence more elusive of interpretation, like a voice heard in a dream.

In the absence of that scale of shining mediations that once seemed seamlessly to unite the immanent and the transcendent, the earthly and the heavenly, nature and supernature, we are nevertheless still open to the same summons issued in every age to every soul; but it must for now come to us as something more mysterious, tragic, and terrible than it once was.

Die In Order To Live

Love is not a deal, it is a sacrifice. It is not marketing, it is a form of worship.

[...]

The mature man realizes that his life affirms itself most, not in acquiring things, but in giving his time, his efforts, his strength, his intelligence, and his love to others. Here a different kind of dialectic of life and death begins to appear. The living drive, the vital satisfaction, by "ending" its trend to self-satisfaction and redirecting itself to and for others, transcends itself. It "dies" insofar as the ego is concerned, for the self is deprived of the immediate satisfactions which it could claim without being contested. Now it renounces these things, in order to give to others. Hence, life "dies" to itself in order to give itself away and thus affirms itself more maturely, more fruitfully, and more completely. We live in order to die to ourselves and give everything to others. ...The "dying" to self in order to give to others is nothing more or less than a higher and more special affirmation of life. Such dying is the fruit of life, the evidence of mature and productive living. It is, in fact, the end or the goal of life.
---Thoma Merton, Love and Living

The narcissism of our age is seemingly boundless. It is also powerfully seductive and so capable of masking its intent that it can frame even the normal love a husband, a wife, a mother or a father ought to possess by the very nature of such love, in terms of "self-sacrifice." Our culture seems to pervert the very essence of the word "love" and to make it simply another "emotion," a "feeling" that references the object of "love" not as a separate God-created being worthy of our emptying of ourselves of our "selves," but as just another catalyst, albeit a powerful catalyst, that creates within our bodies and our minds physical reactions and emotions that bring pleasure to ourselves. One of the most powerful physical reactions is sexual arousal and one of the most powerful emotions is that of "feeling good about myself." Life is "all about me."

This is an age in which men and women exist as far from their "true nature" as is possible. When you spend a lifetime steeped in the corrosive influences of "self-actualization" and other forms of navel-gazing, it becomes extremely difficult to realize that not only are you clueless as to the answers to life, you are clueless as to the proper questions.

At the point he realizes his complete ignorance, the desperate man, the wise man, begins to pray.

Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

The Earthes All Staked

As I contemplated the Passion of Christ last week, I was struck by how well C. S. Lewis saw the parallel of the desperate end game of Jesus' life and the human condition. His prayers of anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane are unanswered. He turns to the Church he created, and it condemns Him. Then the State (Rome) considers his fate, and abandons Him out of political expediency. The final appeal to "the People" He has come to save from themselves results in a demand by them for his death. On the cross, he dies after uttering as His last words an anguished cry at His divine Self's apparent abandonment of His human Self: "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

You see how characteristic, how representative, it all is. The human situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be a man. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut as you reach it. To be like the fox at the end of the run; the earthes all staked.

Whether our run ends as a young man or an old one, sooner or later, for every single one of us, "the earthes are all staked." Suffering is our lot because we live on this Earth, and all of us must die. To deny this fearful fact, or to avoid facing it, is the reason many of us live our busy little lives of "quiet desperation," filling up our days with nonessential possessions and activities in the unconscious hope that if we don't think about it, we won't have to deal with it.

As someone much smarter than me in these matters stated once, the problem is that we are not made for this world. Certainly, the things of it will never buy us happiness nor make our lives ultimately content. The sooner you realize and accept this, the sooner you'll stop wasting your precious time and really begin to live.

Of course, I'm preaching to a deaf world, one that does its best to deride the notion of suffering as anything more than bad luck, rather than the lot of a fallen world. Before I left on a road thrip on Good Friday, I posted a typical short post on Twitter (there can be no other kind of post than a short one on Twitter) that merely quoted Dr. Gordon Allport, in his preface to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning, in which he set forth the central tenet of "existentialism," a term coined by Frankl: "To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in the suffering." That "Tweet" generated only one reply, from a Pilate wannabe lawyer in St. Louis, who so eloquently reposted: "Yeah, not so much into suffering, really." As Chesterton proposed, the only appropriate response to a nonbeliever when he asserts as to a believer's belief that he doesn't understand it is, "No, you do not understand." My response to the oh-so-cool fellow shyster was "No. Of course you're not." I'm sure that response flew right under his radar.

What a vacuous time and place in which we live! We're so busy denying the inevitabilty of death, drowning our natural fear in a cesspool of noise and inebrieation that we've lost the capacity to appreciate the fact that death gives our life meaning; that in the end, suffering is our lot, and how we respond to its inevitable occurrence is what marks our lives as full or barren. Instead of embracing the suffering and offering it up, we deny its existence or run pell-mell away from it until it grabs us by the scruff of our neck, by which time we are ill-equipped to cope with it on even a superficial level, much less able to find any "meaning" in it.

"These are among the things it means to be a man." So many of us are boys until the day death grabs us by the throat and throttles the last vestiges of our meaningless existence. 

Others of us understand that, while comedy teaches life lessons, tragedy teaches deeper ones. In the end, the bitter pill often seems much more like "life" than the sugar-coated one.

English theater star Ruthie Henshall as Fantine in the Les Miserables 10th Anniversary Special sings "I Dreamed A Dream" (with all due respect to the sensation-of-the-moment, Susan Boyle)

A Candle Burned Brightly

Yet another post from three years ago, from another blog. March is a month for bittersweet memories in my small corner of the universe.

But a Short Time to Live

Our little hour,—how swift it flies
When poppies flare and lilies smile;
How soon the fleeting minute dies,
Leaving us but a little while
To dream our dream, to sing our song,
To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower,
The Gods—They do not give us long,—
One little hour.

Our little hour,—how short it is
When Love with dew-eyed loveliness
Raises her lips for ours to kiss
And dies within our first caress.
Youth flickers out like wind-blown flame,
Sweets of to-day to-morrow sour,
For Time and Death, relentless, claim
Our little hour.

Our little hour,—how short a time
To wage our wars, to fan our hates,
To take our fill of armoured crime,
To troop our banners, storm the gates.
Blood on the sword, our eyes blood-red,
Blind in our puny reign of power,
Do we forget how soon is sped
Our little hour?

Our little hour,—how soon it dies:
How short a time to tell our beads,
To chant our feeble Litanies,
To think sweet thoughts, to do good deeds.
The altar lights grow pale and dim,
The bells hang silent in the tower—
So passes with the dying hymn
Our little hour.
---Leslie Coulson

My brother Jeff was born on March 16. A day later, and my parents would have switched his first and middle names and he might have been Pat. God forbid, because he never seemed a Pat to me.

He was one of the few people I have ever known who knew from the time he was little what he would be when he was big: be a musician. No doubt ever entered his mind about that. Or, come to think of it, about much else. He might have been the most self-possessed human being I've ever known, albeit with a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor.

He was a cool dude. A ladies man, yet he met the love of his life in college and married her as soon as they graduated. They both looked like they'd just jumped off the top of the wedding cake.

They had a hell of a life together. They bought a beautiful home on a wooded lot in upstate New York. Deer wandered through the back yard. We spent many happy nights there drinking beer, listening to music and laughing.

He was a freelance musician, gave private percussion lessons, scored for Warner Brothers, arranged music for high school bands, taught drum lines for drum and bugle corps, played drums in a rock band, and composed. He made a good living at it, too, which was a tough thing to do in that business. He and his wife were doing great right up until the time he was diagnosed with MS at age 31.

Most MS sufferers have remissions. He was one of the rare 4% who go straight downhill. I helped his wife put him in a nursing home 3 years later. A year after that, he died. My wife and I had spent his last day with him, the day they put in a feeding tube because he no longer possessed the strength to even swallow. I'll never forget the look of utter defeat in his eyes as we left him that evening. We flew 2500 miles home, only to pick up a voice mail message when we walked in the door that told us that he had died several hours after we had left him.

Many times, you're tempted to say that life is cruel. But, life is what it is. It has a beginning and an end. You have a finite number of hours, only you never know how many, in the aggregate, you get to spend. Spend them foolishly, and the joke's on you.

One of the reasons that I ultimately came to believe in God is that I simply refuse to accept that people who are so alive when they're alive cease to be alive when their earthly existence ends. If I believed that people like my brother Jeff, a candle that burned brightly but flickered out too soon, did not have an existence that superseded those of some of the gutter trash whom I've encountered in my much longer life -- well, then, I'd be have to grab a shotgun and meet out some justice here and now. Overall, I think it's more productive to believe that justice is delivered ultimately for all eternity, and that what we do while alive echoes forever.

Maybe I got to live longer than he did because I'm a slow learner. He certainly seemed to understand his purpose from the get-go, and he lived it fully and completely, or at least as completely as God permitted.

"Our little hour." Take a lesson: Spend it wisely.

Barriers, Real Or Imagined

People who know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world. They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all.

They can only conceive one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and other men. They do not know that reality is to be sought not in division but in unity, for we are "members one of another."
---Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

How do you save yourself from yourself? Half a century or more steeped in the ethos of a world that holds up nothing but mirrors, and you eventually admit that it's impossible. One needs, like C.S. Lewis, to one night drop to your knees and admit to the Lord that you can't do it yourself, that He'll have to do it for you.

Then you pray, continuously, in the midst of an arid wasteland, that He will hear you. And you understand, in His failure to answer you, that He has. And you go about His business, in darkness.

And I know their mother's ages
And I know all the stories so well
And I know I'll see their faces in Hell
So wipe away their traces
Blow the dust off from the shelf

Because I'm still in love
I'm still in love
I'm still in love
With nothing but myself

Justin Currie, Still In Love

The Measure of Faith

One the nice things about writing a blog that no one reads is that I can pretty much stuff it full of whatever I like, and I'm reasonably confident that I'll piss off only the occasional wayfarer who stumbles across it looking for a ready-made analysis of Pat Conroy's book that bears the same name as this blog's. Of course, that's the same name as an old Scottish folk song, so sometimes I'm also read by old Scots, I assume. I also assume that they're as pissed off at discovering this blog as are disappointed students.

In that spirit, I'd like to print something bound to anger legions of unlucky readers: an excerpt from a homily given at a mass in Rome three and one-half years ago by a Cardinal named Ratzinger. It was the mass in preparation for the conclave of cardinals who had convened in Rome to begin, that morning, deliberations to select a new pope for the Roman Catholic Church. Ratzinger was focused that day, as he was before and since, on the problem of Catholics whose faith seems, in the lyrics of Bob Dylan, to be "blowin' in the wind."

The second reading, taken from the Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul discusses "the measure of the fullness of Christ" to which "we are called in order to truly become adults in the faith. We must not remain children in the faith, without coming of age.”

“What does it mean to be children in faith?” the cardinal asked. “St. Paul says that it means being 'tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine.' A very pertinent description!"
 
"How many winds of doctrine”, he said, “have we known over the last few decades! How many ideological currents! How many schools of thought! The little ship bearing the thoughts of many Christians has frequently been shaken by these waves, thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertarianism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so on.”

“Every day”, Cardinal Ratzinger said, “new sects arise, and St. Paul's words concerning the deception of men and the cunning that leads into error come true.”

He said that, “Having a clear faith, according to the Creed of the Church, is often labeled as fundamentalism. While relativism, in other words allowing oneself to be 'tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine,' appears as the only attitude appropriate to modern times, a dictatorship of relativism is being formed, one that recognizes nothing as definitive and that has as its measure only the self and its desires.”
 
"We,” the cardinal reassured, “do have another measure: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An 'adult' faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelties; an adult and mature faith is profoundly rooted in friendship with Christ.”

“We must bring this adult faith”, he said, “to maturity, to this faith we must lead Christ's flock. And it is this faith - faith alone - that creates unity and is realized in charity. ... In the measure in which we approach Christ, so truth and charity come together in our lives too."

It's easy to see that the Catholic faith, especially as "practiced" by many in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, is riddled with relativism. How else to explain Michael Novak and Gary Wills both calling themselves Catholic and, actually, meaning it? Unless you believe that there's truth in the line penned by Stephen Stills: "nobody's right if everybody's wrong." If you do, then it all makes sense.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
---Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter VI

Red Sky In The Morning

The Times Are Nightfall, Look, Their Light Grows Less
---Gerald Manley Hopkins

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.

Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal…

Judy Collins, I Think It's Going  To Rain Today

Virtue Versus Irrational Repression

Read this great post today at First Things, in which theology professor R.R. Reno discusses the possible implications of MRI research on the "patters of brain function."

So, maybe a severe Puritanical attention to moral discipline was right after all. Maybe the intense moral pressure of traditional morality is necessary in order to achieve the stable neural patterns that prevent our instinctual responses from overwhelming our reasoned responses. Perhaps the common good depends on the presence of virtuous, disciplined citizens who have been habituated to deny themselves immediate, instinctual satisfactions.

But I’m just speculating. We are presently engaged in a vast social experiment of moral relaxation that, we are told, will promote human happiness by freeing our instinctual desires from irrational repressions. Time will tell whether private hedonists are capable of being effective public servants.

Subtlety, Self-Deception, and the Courage of Our Uncertainties

Within me are those lamentable dark areas wherein my own capacities lie hidden from me. Hence, when my mind questions itself about its own powers, it is not easy for it to decide what should be believed. For even what is within it is for the most part hidden away unless brought to light by some experience. In this life, the whole of which is termed a trial, no man should be sure whether one who can pass from worse to better might not also pass from better to worse. One hope, one trust, one promise--your mercy!
---The Confessions of St. Augustine

Lately, I'm feeling as Thomas More felt, at least More as his character was portrayed in Robert Bolt's play "A Man For All Seasons." When confronting his cocksure future son-in-law, who assures More that the son-in-law knows God's will, More replies that he has more confidence in his knowledge of the law than of God's will. More observes, with some bitterness, that God has become a bit too subtle for More to clearly discern what God intends More should do.

In addition to the possible subtlety of God's communications to me, there's the more profound problem of my defective receivers. Even the most devout, pious individuals (the late Mother Teresa, for example) often confess that when they pray to God for a sign, they perceive only the static hiss of white noise or the sounds of crickets chirping. "Devout" and "pious" are adjectives that have never, ever, been used to describe me. My God-given temperament has enabled me to corrupt whatever natural receivers were built-in at conception, and I'm sure I could do with not merely a good cleaning to scrub off the corrosion, but the addition of a signal booster.

Even when, looking back, you think you may have a clue, St. Augustine, one of the world's most astute self-analyzers, reminds us that we can never be certain that we've got it right, due to those "lamentable dark areas" that lie within all of us. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it many centuries later, "Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."

So, how to proceed? The alternatives are endless. Just read the blogosphere and you'll realize that everyone's got an opinion and too many of us are compelled to express it. You could freeze like a deer in the headlights merely contemplating all the bone-headed possibilities. Nevertheless, for the two or three people who occasionally read this blog, I'll tell you what I've decided. Well, at least until I change my mind.

What I've decided to do is to take a little advice from Father Richard John Neuhaus, a cleric who the left loves to loathe, about this matter.

We are all uncertain about what God wants us to do. That is to say, we do not know "for sure." Of course it seems silly, when you’re well past middle age and have spent your life doing what you believe you’ve been given to do, to get up in the morning or suddenly stop in the middle of the day’s work and ask, “Is this what I’m supposed to be doing?”

[...]

The answer is that we act in the courage of our uncertainties. I am fond of pointing out that the word decide comes from the Latin decidere, to cut off. You face choices—whether to be a priest, whether to go to this school or that, whether to marry a certain person, whether to pursue this line of work or another—and then you decide. And, in deciding, you have cut off the alternatives and pray you have decided rightly. But you do not know for sure. Alternatively, you are trapped in the tangled web of indecision.

I haven't spent my life doing what I thought that I'd been "given" to do. In fact, I'm not certain that I should have spent my life doing what I "chose" to do, particularly since it involves not only being a lawyer, but having to associate with them. Perhaps that's part of my present problem. On the other hand, Fr. Neuhaus is correct to point out that you have "to decide." You do the best you can, and leave the "tangled web of indecision" to those who live solely to parse the nuances.

In other words (and in words intended to irritate non-Texans), you "cowboy up" and get on with it. You find the courage to act in the face of your uncertainties. As long as you sincerely intend to follow His lead, God will eventually let you know if you're heading down the right path. At least, you pray that He will, even if you may never be certain at any given moment that you're not ambling aimlessly in the wilderness.

Alison Krauss and Union Station, There Is A Reason