A Near-Useless Greatness

It took me an awfully long time to figure this out. Maybe longer than most who've duly applied themselves to the question. But here is what I've concluded:

This world is not a boring place. Not in itself. But it can all too easily seem boring when we look at it - as we often look at other people - solely for what we can get out of it. When we see it as something created primarily for ourselves; or worse yet, for those we most admire or want to be like. All those "cool and smart people," etc. Or, worst of all, when we see the world as something that chiefly we ourselves, and other cool people like us, have created. With little or no input even from God.

But that's not the world's fault. Indeed the Creation itself is so cram-packed with so many things full of wonder, and absorbing interest, and sometimes even delight, that even its dullest creatures - those things that seem to us most merely "what they are," or "what they do", and nothing else -  even these can surprise us. Even these can somehow manage to exceed and escape our attempts to functionalize them: to make them dull and predictable and serviceable. Or so they may, at least, when we push them too far? - too far beyond their natures, and the laws and limits of their natures? Anything in nature - and that includes our human nature - anything in our physical world when pushed too far can spring, or snap back. With the consequences becoming at times not just inconvenient, but violent or even ugly. Like, for instance, the Great American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Or even (some might argue) the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. But also, just conceivably?, in ways that a certain perennially popular genre of science fiction - everything from Hitchcock's The Birds to The Walking Dead? - never tires of reminding us.

In sum, there is no creature in this universe so merely useful as to be reducible to its mere utility. Not even birds. But least of all ourselves, and each other. Indeed, it is just those things in you and me which are most "irreducible" - which are most indelibly "ourselves," as it were (and yet often seem most useless) - that are the seedbed of everything good that lies "beyond" them. I.e., it is precisely these elements - most often encompassed under the terms "soul" or "spirit" - that, when heedfully discerned,  cultivated, encouraged, can become the  groundwork of all those other, "practical" things about us, that make the world sit up and take notice. Which is to say, all those skills and talents that make us useful in the best, completest sense of the word, because they make even busy, important, sensible people actually need us, and depend on us. As opposed to regarding us as so much raw material that may be infinitely serviceable, but is also infinitely downgradeable and disposable. The lesson here is that every human soul is not just a thing beyond price; it is, as designed by its Maker, far too efficient a thing for any of us to presume we can afford to dispense with it. Or use it up. Or worst of all, like Mick Jagger's Lucifer, "lay [it] to waste."

My point is that no God-designed creature is so dysfunctional as to be either without use, or else nothing more than what can be reduced to its various uses. So, yes, even the Devil, that great waster, has his uses. And yet even he - so far as he is still God's creature and not his own - remains more than any of them. (Which also implies that the converse is true: To the extent that he has become "his own god," he is not just "reducible" to his uses, but is much less than any of them. But more on that in my final paragraph.)

So what might be one utility* of Satan for the patient, heedful Christian?

*If that is not too presumptuous a word for One whose cosmic authority and eminence remain very real.

He is, may I suggest, a reminder to us that there are, in this universe, creatures of super-extraordinary intelligence, and rationality, and insight, not to mention power - power to calculate and predict and persuade, to dominate and control. Creatures so supreme, in a word, that if we could see them as their Maker first intended them to be, we might easily be tempted to regard them as no creatures at all, but rather as some species of deity. Even to the point of bowing down and worshiping them, and yielding our lives to them. What prevents us, by God's grace, is when we see the fallen angels clearly for what they have since become - or rather have made themselves - in the naked glare of Divine judgment: beings utterly hateful, both to themselves and to us. 

Yet here is a paradox. What makes demons hateful to us is not that they intended to be so, at least not at the outset. No matter how much they hate us, they had every intention of being esteemed and worshiped and adored, even by humans. Rather are they an example of what can happen to any created being, even the highest seraph, when it becomes obsessed with how it can use, with what it can make of any thing - even itself - to the neglect of what that creature merely is. Because what any thing "merely is" *(as distinct even from what it thinks of itself) is always more inexhaustibly interesting - more pregnant with symbol and mystery, with story and meaning and love beyond its own powers - than anything you or I could ever make of it. 

So why do we often behave as though matters were just the opposite? Why do we too often presume, whether consciously or otherwise, that things - and even people - only become more interesting in the degree that we "monkey with" or manipulate them? 

The problem is that seeing what any thing "merely is" is no easy task. To see any creature for itself - both its inestimable value and its innumerable uses - presupposes something very different from the kinds of human company we're most used to in a busy, hands-on, workaday world. What is  required, rather, is a presence so lowly, and quiet, and "ear-to-the-ground", so preternaturally heedful and hands-off, that it can only be Divine. In other words, to see any thing clearly demands much more than any such talent, or ingenuity, as even the most gifted fallen angel could supply. Even more than an active, probing, dissecting intellect, it requires that almost animally patient, yielding, trustful, and teachable thing we call wisdom. 

With Lucifer, then, may I suggest that we have a kind of ultimate test case, or object lesson, in what happens when any created thing becomes so supremely, commandingly intelligent, and so conscious of its intelligence, as to leave no room and no use for wisdom. But in particular, I think, for the sort of "omni-sensitive," omni-appreciative wisdom which is closest to the heart of God. And that is best secured by, if not inseparable from, humility.

My point is that even the most supremely gifted seraph can reach a dead end. And he never does so more totally than when he becomes so obsessed with the use and the self-making of anything - including himself - as to make himself all but totally useless.

(And once again, pray for the peace of Kyiv. And in particular, pray and fast for the pending peace talks between Trump and Putin. Granted, you may hate them both absolutely. But ask yourself: Are you absolutely sure you can afford to have things to get even worse?)

Towards a More Living Word

As we all know - at least when we think and pray about it - all human words have immense power in relation to the things they designate. Including those creatures they describe, or despise; listen to, or lord over. So perhaps it would be truer to say that our words have many, and divers, powers. And even opposite powers. It may, for instance, be a power to enhance a creature's being or life - as if the thing in question had somehow become (to the heedful reader or listener), not just more vivid, more alive than before, but more grateful for and delighting in being alive. It may be a power to stifle and and stultify, to deride and mock and minimize, so that the thing becomes almost ashamed of being here, or of being what it is. Or it may be a power so draining of life, so bland and neutralizing and attenuating, it's as if the thing barely had any importance or even existence at all. Or certainly none apart from our proactive utilities and agendas. 

No surprise, then, if our Twenty-first Century conception of our uses of words, and of their uses of things, tends towards the harshly functional. Or even the rigidly hierarchical. No wonder that we expect and regard it as our right to command our words, as if we ourselves had just invented them; as if they had no intrinsic or ancient life of their own, seeded and nursed and cultured over countless generations; or that we expect our words to command our things as if they had no intrinsic or primordial, in short, no prehuman life at all. And so it's hardly surprising, that we hypermoderns should think of our words as largely arbitrary in their relation to the things they designate. And expect them to be, as it were, not in the least ashamed or embarrassed by this bold, untethered power of arbitration. But if anything that much prouder towards, that much more defiant of the things they presume to define.

Yet even now, I don't think that's the whole story. How many of us, I wonder, if we could for once be honest with our own emotions, would deny that we have at times experienced words that are very different. Words so alive to, so imbued with, so dyed in the presence of the things they describe, that the latter seemed somehow less complete - or in any case far less vivid - apart from these words' company, and companionship. Almost as if these same things had somehow lost tongues we never knew they possessed. And yet there we were, glad and relieved beyond words at their having found those tongues and those voices again. 

So much, then, for the things our words describe. But now imagine on the other side, if you can, words - not of the "take-charge" kind - but rather of a kind so humble, and humbly devoted to the things of which they've been given charge, they're almost like poor shriveled orphans without them. And yet still so much the richer, the more savory and intoxicating for that parentage, and that dependence. And not just the most carefully chosen words of, say, Shakespeare, or Keats, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Or Walter de la Mare.

God help us, then, when we become so unable to enjoy the living flow of words, that we become more and more unable to discern, and delight in, the living flow of things. God help us, in short, when poetry ceases to speak to us at all. Not even, say, as a minor hindrance, or encumbrance, to words and sentences we might otherwise easily grasp. Yes, even where we find that poetry seemingly buried in prose (in whose folds its most resonant nuggets are so often tucked away).

Nor is it just convention-driven dullness that can blind us to the livingness of both words and things. What may often stanch and dry up this flow of our words is our attempts to channel and constrict, not just our writing, or our actions, but even things themselves into certain supposedly guaranteed outcomes. Which are of course assumed to be utterly good for them. Almost as if these things - and people - had no purpose or meaning, or even right to exist (any more than our words and actions have any right to exist), apart from the fixed place they occupy in our most desired results.

As an example, consider someone in your life who, however much you may be in denial of the fact, has no more ultimate value to you than a successfully moved chesspiece. Imagine a woman whom you think you love more than anything in the world, and so presumably would do almost anything for. Except that, in fact, your real interest in her extends no farther than her becoming, say, your wife or mistress, or girlfriend, or other instrument of your pleasure, or ornament to your success. And now repeat the same exercise, as applicable, with the ideal man or even pet of your choice. Notice your preoccupation in each case with use, and functionality, and ornamentality. As if everything good that happens in the world were somehow a matter of the right control. And in particular, of your right to control.

And so God save us, too, from becoming so enclosed in the bubbles of our own anxieties and agendas, our own ambitions and frustrations, that we could hardly recognize real surprise, real wonder, real miracle, if it surrounded us on every side. Or, if you'd like to vary the metaphor, God deliver us from being so intent on, so bound to the internal track of our mission, our martyrdom, that we become oblivious to external movements of any kind. Even those of nature, even those of God. Above all, God save us from becoming so fortressed in the grandeur of our own misery that we couldn't discern real need if it knocked on our kitchen-doors. Including the needs, and secret desires, of those we profess (often most vehemently) to love.

But not just the needs of others, I want to say: maybe even more so our own? But especially, I think, those most secret needs of all, that dwell in the remotest deeps of you and me, and in their most forgotten, Eden-haunted recesses. Those primordial needs which often, in their very humility, have the strangest way of proving, not just of more absorbing interest, but far more full of wonder and delight, than all our most exalted ambitions, or all our most visionary dreams.

Those needs, in short, which best embody all the things we humans have ever anciently desired. Or indeed, could ever want. At least, so far as we actually let God meet them.

What the Unworldly Need Now

I'll admit, since the breakup of my friend's marriage, I haven't stopped probing the supposedly immutable dynamics of male-female relationships in our time. And worst of it, all my efforts accompanied by the dubious blessings, wisdom and counsel of YouTube. Talk about absorbing far more heat than light. 

What most disturbs me is what seems to be the entire ethos of the current dating market. And in particular, how demands for a certain narrow and ungenerous - if not un-Christian - kind of perfection have never been more strident. Especially in determining criteria for one's choice of life-partners. Or even bed-partners. As if each one of us, male and female and everything purportedly in between, were now free as ever before (or rather, obliged as never before), not just to have it all, but to be it all. Imagine feeling obliged to be everything that a certain graphic-comic sensibility says you are capable of being. Including a good many things that - as expectations continue to rise - very likely you're NOT capable of being. Like, say, some darker, edgier, quasi-vampiric Marvel superhero. Everything except, of course, for being yourself. Let alone anything warmly and companionably (much less compassionately) human.

In short, it never fails to amaze me the creatures we make ourselves to be, in order to be attractively, desirably strong. As if we were acting on the premise that the most inexcusable quality - or at any rate the biggest turn-off - in any human being was vulnerability. Think of the superhumans - if not pagan demigods? - we pose as, and the postures we maintain! And all for the sake of projecting a certain air: an air of power and control, of dauntingness and intimidatingness, of steely self-composure and unstoppable will. Plus a host of kindred traits that might best be summarized by that venerable American word (and tradition) we call "coolness." 

So just what is it, do you suppose, that drives us to pretend that this set of "strengths" - so vital, supposedly, in dating-partners - is somehow going to equip them for lifelong marriage? Or even marriage of a decade or two? Much less the rearing of children? "Oh, but he'll (she'll) change eventually. He's got to." Really? And just how can we be sure of switching gears - whether our own or our spouse's? And with the right measure? And the right timing? And what if, even then, we somehow find ourselves totally "turned off" by the end product?

That's surely the central problem with what passes for courtship these days. We make ourselves so short-term enticing, and so long-term unendurable, not only is it a miracle anyone should want to see us day in day out, much less live with us: it's almost the height of presumption, on our part, to expect that they should want to.

And yes, I know marriage has often been described as the triumph of hope over experience. I just never thought I'd see the day when it would become something more like the triumph of self-importance, and baseless vanity, over any rational hope.

And think of it: All because two people, in the courtship and formative years of their marital project, had succeeded in something at which all of us, always, should be only too happy to fail. They had succeeded in making themselves, and maybe even each other?, so formidably, dauntingly attractive - they had, between the two of them, created such a surplus of dramatic tension, and CONtention - that any "cooling off" period, any relaxing into a routine normality of life was all but sure to prove the most insipid anticlimax. Not, mind you, that even the most savagely attracted couples have any choice but to relax, or be domesticated, sooner or later. For who can live at fever-pitch levels of "romantic" tension all the time?

So what do people - even marriage- and dating-partners - most urgently need from each other? And today more than ever? I would begin by saying they need permission to be themselves. And in particular those aspects of themselves that they're least sure of. Or maybe even - for a variety of complicated and largely unreasonable reasons - least proud of. In short, they need permission to be themselves in their entirety. And not just to the extent that they're "self-confident": i.e., NOT just insofar as they stand up for, and assert, and exert, and even impose themselves upon others, and against others. As if this latter Self were somehow the only kind worth having. Or worth respecting and cultivating. By anyone. Especially when you consider that it is precisely this arrogance in us - precisely this Self whose weight we most like to "throw around" - which is the most unnatural, most de-Edenized, most un-souled part of us: the part that bears not most, but least resemblance to the creature we were created by God. Or rather (and to put it, I think, still more Scripturally), it is that side of us which is most ashamed, not of having sinned, but of having any regrets at having sinned. And so is least humbled by what others (or, indeed, any rational outside observer) would call its mistakes. Including some very ancient, and ancestral mistakes. If not primordial ones. Like eating a certain forbidden fruit, for instance. It is, in a word, that most radically corrupted Self in us which feels most justified, most emboldened, not only not to look back, not to regret that we were once expelled from a certain paradise. It feels even prouder - to say nothing of relieved - at having lost all hope of that garden's intimacy, its delight, its peace, ever being restored.

Which peace, if I remember correctly, was once shattered by a man and a woman, and at the very genesis of their building a life together. And of course (as no less a moral exemplar than Lady Macbeth would remind us), what's done cannot be undone. Still I can't help wondering: If we their children go on refusing to draw hope from the full memory of our origins - yes, even unto the garden we've lost - just how are we ever supposed to give hope to the children we cultivate?

Our National Non-focus on the Family

Regarding the question of whether, and how far, the American Project is based on truths that are self-evident: 

Here, anyhow, are four seminal paragraphs from an essay that I find contains far more ballasting common sense, and far more weight of historically-grounded truth, than anything else I've read on the subject in quite some time (emphasis in bold face is entirely my own):

"The self-evident truths of the Declaration . . . garner much of their specific political significance for the American Revolution from the evidence offered by the facts of Anglo-American constitutionalism; these measure the [British government's] violations (and later the remedies) as well as moderate the radical potential in the revolutionary language taken by itself. Stripped of this context, the first principles enunciated by Jefferson are not self-evident at all—at least, not to anyone raised in the tradition of Western virtue or in a world formed by Judeo-Christian belief.

"Let me give an example. The 'self-evident truths,' it seems to me, do not give an adequate account of the family, the fundamental institution of social life. First, whatever might be said of the relation of husband and wife, the family is built not around equality, but around the inequality of parent and child. Precisely the most basic meaning of Jefferson’s statement of equality—that no man is the natural ruler or the natural subject of another—is not true of this relation, for the parents are surely the natural rulers of their dependent children. Second, the family is first and foremost not about rights, but about duties; even the right of children to care and education is abstract and vague compared to the duty of parents to provide and instruct and the duty of children to obey and learn. Third, the origin of the family is not exactly consent. In some cultures, including our own, spouses choose for themselves whom to marry, but even then the roles they assume are largely socially defined. Except in cases of adoption, and very rarely then, children do not choose their parents, and (leaving aside brave new technologies and, again, adoption) parents do not choose their children. Fourth, the end of the family is only incidentally the security of rights; it is principally provision and nurture in an environment formed by love. And fifth, when family becomes destructive of its ends, it cannot be altered and abolished without in most instances inflicting further wounds that never heal.

"Now about this counterexample to the self-evident truths of the Declaration, allow me to make two points. First, Jefferson and his fellows were altogether aware that families were not formed upon their principles. Precisely what they objected to in Tory political theory was political patriarchalism, the effort to form the state on analogy to the family. Natural equality meant that the king was not to act as father in relation to his people—not that fathers were not kings in their own homes. Government by consent meant that the commandment to honor one’s father and mother could not be invoked by a political nobility demanding homage. That abusive government can be changed was not seen to undermine the indissolubility of marriage nor the lifelong attachment between parent and child.

"But secondly, there is no denying that, since as long ago as John Locke’s Two Treatises and even Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, liberal philosophers have sought to reconceive the family on liberal terms, and of course in our own day a vast social experiment has been undertaken to remodel the family on egalitarian principles and to reorient authority within it on the basis of consent. Though opinions about the success of this effort are bound to differ, allow me to say for my own part that I am more impressed by the resilience of old patterns against all the force of dominant opinion than I am by evidence that abuses have been diminished and familial happiness more commonly achieved. The fundamental equality of the sexes may be self-evident, but their equality in the sense of their having no relevant differences even from the point of view of the family is not. And unless one is driven by a personal or ideological commitment to nontraditional family forms, I do not see how one can argue that the current regime with regard to the family in Western society is self-evidently the best, at least with respect to children. One might note that almost nowhere in the West today are native populations even reproducing their numbers, and in some countries those populations are on the verge of precipitous decline. It is a matter in which we certainly need, and all have difficulty sorting through, the facts."

In a nutshell - and as usual - I couldn't have put it better.

Wishing you all a most blessed, healthy, moderate and grounded 4th of July weekend.

Crossing the Threshold of Hope (NOT optimism)

Any civilization, no matter how otherwise superior, can have a crisis of confidence. Even one that proudly calls itself American. Or Chinese. 

One especially traumatic instance in recent history is China’s Century of Humiliation (c. 1846-1949) at the hands of the West (and, sadly, of Britain in particular). A distinctly ugly episode, at least in the Chinese experience, that the present regime in Beijing never tires of browbeating us into remembering and being ashamed of. Rather as if it had ended just 3 years ago, and lasted all of the previous 300. Indeed, almost as if we Christian Westerners were the only ones capable of such heartless atrocities. And yes, I'm sure there is something uniquely humiliating in having suffered the sort of crisis of confidence that engulfed 19th-century China. Imagine it: You're the kind of civilizational empire that produces all that it needs from within itself, and so believes itself to be both commercially and intellectually - maybe even spiritually? - self-sufficient. Only to be bludgeoned into finding out that an alarming segment of your population, at all social levels, has a craving for a foreign product as sordid and debilitating as opium.

Again, this is all to the West's permanent, irreversible shame. My point is that, throughout the period in question, the Chinese governing classes were suffering a crisis of confidence; they were experiencing nothing remotely like a crisis of conscience. They began to doubt the superiority of Chinese civilization; they didn't begin to wonder if that civilization was supremely horrible (say, because of its brutal settler colonialism, or because of all the adjacent occupied/absorbed peoples it had stripped of their identities). They questioned China’s competence to rule the greater part of Asia; they didn't doubt or disparage China’s right to exist. 

Whereas I think many today - both pro- and anti-Western - would quite plausibly argue that the 21st-century West is undergoing a crisis of both kinds. I.e., our Western elites haven't been merely investigating, and self-recriminating over, what the West has done wrong; they've begun to doubt, and in some quarters even to deny, that it has ever done anything right. In short it would seem that, regarding belief in itself, and conviction as to its own basic worth, today's West is a royal mess. But if so, just when did it go wrong? Or, assuming it deserved to go wrong because of its unique and unprecedented awfulness, roughly when did it begin to go off the rails?

For some no doubt highly personal reason I keep coming back to the year 1970, and my native America. We had just successfully invaded the moon, and soon we would find ourselves rather audaciously invading a then-little-known place called Cambodia. A milestone - or even a blueprint? - book also came out that same year. In it, author (and soon-to-be National Security Adviser) Zbigniew Brzezinski proclaimed that no less than the entire industrialized West was in the throes of a massive, irreversible transformation: it was, quite literally, between two ages - both technologically and spiritually. He might just as well have termed them two aeons, or two epochs. Everywhere he seemed to suggest that the spiritual, no less than the technical and economic, implications of this new age were utterly revolutionary. So much so, indeed, that as it unfolded, there was no telling what ostensibly permanent truths (or even "eternal" revelations?) might prove themselves more or less obsolete. Or at best, mere artifacts of some narrowly agricultural or industrial phase of mankind's upward march. And so, of course, largely unable to survive the rigors of a "transition to technetronic society." 

Which is not to say (at least as I read Brzezinski overall) that for him all pre-technetronic cultures were equally ill-equipped and unprepared. Years later, as an esteemed foreign-affairs guru and global geostrategist in the decades following his Carter Administration stint, he would go on to discern in both Chinese and Islamic civilizations a certain resilience, or perennial relevance, to the coming Age that might well be found sorely wanting in many Western traditions. Certainly he would show none of the elegiac pessimism towards the former's survival prospects that he displays, time and again, for what he calls Western "traditional religion;" possibly Western territorial democracy; but above all, Western traditions and practices of national sovereignty.

Now among these "endangered" traditions of the West Brzezinski nowhere, to my knowledge, directly specifies Christian orthodoxy. Rather, he seems merely to presuppose the durability, and enduring relevance, of core Chinese and Islamic traditions, as against the transience and fragility of their Western counterparts. But I find it interesting that, among our foreign-policy elites of the past generation, not a few have accepted what I like to call the Brzezinskian premise of a most-justly-aggrieved-against-the-West China and Islam: a Dynamic Duo to whom we Westerners owe at very least a kind of penitent deference, if not outright accommodation. And these even to the point of the very closest geopolitical/economic convergence and collusion. Certainly this accommodation has seemed to be a strongish current among certain of our Western elites at least up until, say, the watershed year 2016. My point is that, for much of the recent past, these elements seemed quite buoyed by the cultural resurgence and renewed confidence of mainland China and Sunni Islam; they appeared, and continue to appear, nowhere near as concerned about the challenging - some might say beleaguered and endangered - demographic prospects of Christianity throughout much of Asia and Africa today.

Anyhow, more and more I find it convenient to see 1970 as a kind of Great Turnaround Year for our time. A year in which at least we Americans began a long, slow progress - arguably culminating in the decade 2005-2015? - towards something that I myself (prejudiced observer that I am) can only call self-infatuation. A year in which, if not the majority of us Yanks, possibly the greater part of our elites? began to exchange hope for optimism. Or rather, more precisely, the point at which an influential many in the West started becoming more and more hopeless about everything God has made of Man, and ever more feverishly optimistic about everything Man could make of himself. 

And not without reason, one might contend. After all, the latter was something we could see and touch, possibly even measure, document, predict. But above all, act upon (that sacred modern imperative). As for the former - the Divine making of us - well, it's not like any of us were actually present when God (assuming there is a God) created man. So just how, then, do you gauge, and gain access to, and utilize productively the effects of an event that you never saw take place? And which might never have even happened? Much less try to assess, or retrieve, its supposed fruits, benefits, virtues?

By a number of measures, then, one might plausibly argue that the period since 1970 has been  one of immense progress. But in particular if, by "progress," one is measuring the extent to which loss of faith in Divine providence has been compensated by a proportionate increase of faith in human ingenuity, and audacity, and optimism. But especially, I think, when we consider this "new" faith against the backdrop of the kind of universe we were then coming to believe in: a world in which one's confidence and preparedness for the future are only as strong as one's contempt for the past. Or, to put it less starkly, a world in which one's power to accept, embrace and productively exploit change - aka PROGRESS - is only ensured by the degree in which one looks critically, skeptically, or even dismissively at what previous ages might have deemed permanent truths. Or perhaps even at the very notion of a permanent truth, accessible to all human beings?

Of course, just what all this might portend for a new papacy, or for the global and geopolitical future of the Catholic Church, I won't presume to guess. I know next to nothing about the new pope, and haven't got the faintest notion of whether and how far he will be either relevant or redundant to the challenges facing this present strange, extreme time.  A time in which, one might argue - and wherever its masses throughout the world may be trending - its more globally-minded elites persist in putting their faith in truths that are continually evolving and "improving," rather than truths that are permanent. My one prayer and hope, then - though it's a prayer in which I invite all Catholics and other believers to join me - is that our new pope is, and will remain, a man of hope, rather than optimism; a man of permanence, and not of Late Twentieth-century Progress.

Pray for the peace of Kyiv (however it may be found).

Make Russia Catholic Again.

A Most Complicating Elite

Competence is most always a good thing. But there are times when it's not exactly the best predictor - much less guarantor - of prudence, or judgment, of proportion and restraint, of discernment, or even of humility. And sometimes it can seek out extreme ways of testing and proving itself, and others, the implications of which may be very disturbing. And not always in a good way.

For instance, these past ten years or so,* I've been struck by the sheer glut of highly competent people - both in churches and out of them - who like nothing better than a good stiff challenge. And sometimes the bigger the better. In fact (if I didn't know better), I'd say they may even seem depressed, or demoralized, when they find an otherwise efficient procedure running a mite too smoothly. To the point, indeed, where many seem almost driven to insert a fresh challenge, or to hunt or scrounge around for one, in situations where in fact little or no pre-existing challenge exists. Almost as if (as I've ranted in other places), there were nothing really worth doing except in the degree that it's difficult.

*So maybe it is all Trump's fault?;)

But now imagine that more of the world's visibly effective people were to choose simplicity as often than they chose heroism. Imagine if, for a change, even a bare majority of all the conscientious, focused, purpose-driven people in the world simply did the simplest, most obvious, most humble duty lying in front of them. Even if it meant nothing more than holding a stiff, heavy door open at the right moment for a person on a walker. Instead of seeking out - say, for the purpose of distinguishing themselves - some task that's more complicated and challenging, which might lay two or three or four steps down the road. Which latter task they choose, not because it's the one most natural to them, or reflects some innate gift or propensity or talent. Or even the one that gives them the most joy.  Rather do they choose the more difficult (heroic?), less immediate task, because it's the surest way, these days, of being taken seriously by certain People Who Count. And of gaining the confidence of these People Who Count. And of being lauded and promoted by them. Because, in the final count, isn't it only through these latter's earnest mediation, and intercession, and sponsorship, that any of us can be effective at all? 

Or maybe even just keep our jobs?

The Return of the Naive; or, My Hopeless Unfitness for this Great World

Yes, maybe I'm just naive, on these recondite matters. (As no doubt I am in so many of the ways of this most wisely elitist, esoteric, complexity-loving Great Global World.)

But why is it these days, I never fail to be amazed at all the various podcasts out there - most but not all of them hosted by women - which presume to dispense every sort of urgent advice to lovelorn young men. Or if nothing else, love-perplexed young men.

What I notice - and again, it may be just my incurable world-dullness - is that, however wide-ranging the prescriptions may be, they seem in general to boil down to tips on one vital issue: how to succeed in being everything (and why should she settle for less?) - EVERYTHING every self-respecting attractive woman supposedly wants in a man. Everything except, of course, for being oneself. Because everyone knows how limited, how hopelessly quaint, how pitiably antiquated that resource most always turns out to be. 

What bothers me most is the compulsively analytic, break-it-all-down, almost chemical focus of all this. Really, since when did masculinity - or any other component of male personal attractiveness - come down to something as simple and manipulable as a lab formula? As if what any of us has been made were a thing somehow elixir-able, distillable, reducible to something else, that we in our bold shrewdness "create", or concoct, and control. And so may freely spice and doctor up. Usually, I notice, more or less to the death of any real flavor. Again, as if any bottling we do, any mere potion we make of ourselves didn't cut us off irretrievably from an illimitable Source. As if, indeed, any reduction we perform on what God has made, however well-seasoned, weren't always a thing done at immense risk, and inconceivable cost, to both chef and preparation. But all the more, as in this case, when the latter two are one and the same creature.

And yes, I know there are lots of love-perplexed young women out there who seem more or less obsessed with control. (Which in practical terms often translates into obsession with a controller.) And that is commonly rooted in a kind of horror of anything hinting at real vulnerability, whether in themselves or in their prospective partners. At least in the relationship's so-called initial phases. Which ensuing clash of Titans typically not only erodes any basis their (mis)union might have had in friendship; it pretty much precludes any possibility of friendship between them in the future. With famously glorious results for our 21st-century Western stabs at marriage and raising families. Indeed, I wonder if our modern attempts at bringing "up" children would be half so hellishly hard if their parents weren't so busy trying discipline each other.

Again, I realize this is the glorious world we have made, whose latest Great Global version comes with the same old injunction, only this time still more imperative: ADAPT OR DIE. My question is, What's all this got to do with adapting to the God who made us? Except, of course, as a brilliantly efficient method of driving us ever farther away from Him?

On Being Maritally Perfect

These past 2-3 months, my good friend of 34 years has been living through the rapid - in fact, accelerating - implosion of his marriage of 40 years and 4 children. 

Saddest of all, it seems to be moving fast in the direction of a fairly punitive divorce. A divorce he's done nothing to contest. A complicating factor is that they're both evangelical Christians, who have been attending the same church for decades, and who share roughly the same views on theology and politics. To paraphrase Bernard Shaw, here are two very different people divided by a common religion. Neither does it help, in getting a grasp of the broader situation, that she is a pillar of the church: esteemed, respected, admired, listened to, confided in, sided with, by almost everybody. Plus she's also my friend.

So I tried to explore with her, in a recent conversation, how he might over the years have been unduly critical, or what might have been his more unreasonable demands and expectations. And I think she made it pretty clear that there were none. At all events, he wasn't channeling, or siphoning, or stifling their marriage in a way that made it harder and harder for her to be herself. No, again and again she made clear that the real sticking-point was not any demands he made on her. Rather it was his non-compliance - or more often, imperfectly willing, or imperfectly affectionate compliance - with what, surely, any serious Christian would have considered minor and reasonable requests for favors. And these, yes, in addition to any shared household chores he likely had already completed; but again, utterly reasonable in nature. And yet for some reason he persisted in feeling, and reacting, as though he was being nagged and hounded, whenever these issues came up. And kept telling her: "Stop treating me like a child." Her reply: "But you are a child."

When I asked her what he seemed most to expect from her, or from their relationship, apart from  those moments, passages and periods of real warmth and affection where they genuinely seemed to understand each other (and when all his duly appointed tasks had been completed), her answer was: "To be left alone."

Lately it seems to me that, at least here in America, a lot of married people expect from their spouses a strange and distinct kind of perfection. A standard that, however limited it may be in its particular sphere and range of expectations - say, household chores, emotional attentiveness, responsiveness, mind-reading, mood-gauging, etc - is nonetheless very exact, and exacting. The assumption seems be that one's spouse,  while not exactly a god (except maybe of his/her own personal and immediate perimeter), is nonetheless a radically free agent with regard to two key areas:

1) all moral endeavor they undertake - or are asked to undertake - and 

2) all moral outcome. 

In other words, within this limited sphere of defined expectation ("Gosh, ALL I was asking was . . ."), spouses are fully capable of being every bit as good - as appropriate, sensitive, responsive, reinforcing, completing, etc - as they want to be. With no margin for failure. Because, after all, they have absolute control over themselves. And therefore can safely be considered the gods of themselves. Such that in the event they fall short, it can only be because they've been either not trying, or trying not nearly hard enough. Thankfully WE, being (at least by comparison) the perfect husband or wife, are always on hand to help. Better yet, our help is essential to their grasp of their duties, for a huge variety of reasons. But especially given that we've already been applying ourselves so rigorously, and thoroughly, not just to framing the standard of excellence we've set for them, but to living it, weighing and measuring and judging ourselves by it. To the point where by now it practically breathes through every pore. Why on earth, then, should anyone - and least of all our spouses - be so ungrateful, so mean-spirited, so distrusting of US (of all good people) as to refuse our help?

After all, we're only doing the best we can.

Yet surely the proverbial fact remains: the race isn't ALWAYS to the most swift. Nor even to the most morally certain and sure. Worse yet, sometimes the result obtained isn't even directly proportionate to the effort expended. Or to the exertion and strain and heroism of that effort. Or, worst of all, even to your own self-consciousness, as it were, of how much you're really trying to do your best, to be the idealest imaginable husband or wife. Sometimes the BEST result - the best anyone could ever have wished for or imagined - is proportioned most directly, not to the fury of your fretting and striving, but to the patience and quietude, the attentiveness and heedfulness with which you consider the limited creature in front of you. In short, sometimes you achieve your best results by understanding first the nature, the needs, maybe even the yearnings?, of the one you're trying to change. Rather than by treating him or her as someone almost incidental, or experimental, to what may be the real project at hand: i.e, your use of your spouse as a gauge, as it were, by which to measure the moral worth or progress, or moral perfection of the story's real hero - namely, You the Changer. Almost as if You, and your Moral Integrity, were the fount from which all other good flowed; so that any good coming even from God must pass through you. Or indeed, as if striving to "be perfect" yourself were always the best way of helping someone else attain perfection. Whereas there may, in fact, be times when even husbands and wives don't need a strenuous moral exemplar, much less preceptor. Sometimes all they may need is someone to listen, and observe, or even simply pray. And in any case, always trustfully and expectantly, resting in the knowledge of that One who alone can perfect any of us with fulness of wisdom and love, and not just abundance of urgency, or zeal, or expertise.

It's a rule, I'm told, that has been known to apply even to marriages of 30, 40 or 50 years. Because after all, what is it you're really trying to achieve, with your husband or your wife? And how will you know when success has been reached? If ever?p Most importantly, is it chiefly your own moral integrity that you've been called by God to secure, demonstrate, vindicate? Or rather, is it the real spiritual growth, maturity and happiness of your spouse? I.e., that same one whom (presumably) you've been doing your very best to love and be patient with, and pray for?

A Gabbard Worthy of the Sword

Ah, you ask, but is the sword - i.e., this present US administration - worthy of the scabbard?

There are some things only time can tell, of course, and likely that is one of them. But I do find it more than a tad significant that the once-doted-on ex-Democrat is without even well-wishers - much less fellow-travelers - from anywhere within her former party. Including the man whose 2016 presidential candidacy she apparently risked a good deal to endorse. 

Then again, one may dislike - or distrust? - her for all sorts of reasons and agendas. And I suppose not all of them unreasonable. (Though I do feel something like pity for anyone who presumes to doubt her - as opposed to, say, Samantha Power's? - professional competence.) But more than anything else right now I'd like to know who are her most visceral haters. And more to the point, what are their real, most visceral motives and agendas. Oh, I'm sure they have something to do with what we used quaintly to call "foreign affairs", and America's "standing in the world." Still I wonder: Just what does it mean to hate, detest, despise, revile, etc, a political figure whose only political hatred, to the best of my knowledge, is directed towards something perhaps most accurately described as jihadism. In short, her one most pressing foreign crusade has always targeted those who are, at least as much as any other contenders - and conceivably far more than even those lame, vile, pathetic, diabolic, retrograde, brilliant, bestial,  omniconspiratorial, omni-incompetent Russians (3rd paragraph from bottom) - the enemies, not of this or that country or bloc (or even of God's Chosen Country), but of the human race. 

Again, say what you like, wring your hands, clutch your pearls, what have you. I for one will continue to be relieved that, after what seemed like an interminable Senate confirmation process, the best woman finally, actually won. As opposed to the worst available woman being merely handed a nomination.