Humoring the Righteous

I think I'm beginning to understand why humor is so unpopular an element in our serious discourse today. And especially in our political discourse. Humor is always politically dangerous, because it makes us aware of the fallibility - not to mention the unintended foolishness - even of causes we might otherwise deem good, or noble, or righteous. Including, yes, even political causes. And of course we always need our chosen cause to be as good as possible, if not more so. I mean, how can the thing we are opposing be totally black, if the thing we're supporting isn't totally white? 

And so there is a reason why we consistently hesitate, or refuse, to apply humor to a lot of what nowadays matters most to us. We of the 21st century don't much like the color gray. But particularly when it sullies the purity of the hill we've chosen to die on. Indeed, our solemnity often extends even to those issues where the most natural and obvious response would be at least one of satire, if not good-natured humor. E.g., to concerns, or even entire causes, that started off well enough, but which now we see carried to an extreme. And sometimes, not just to any old silly extreme, but one that seems to engulf whatever legitimacy lay in the original grievance. 

My point is that even the best causes can get carried away with themselves. That doesn't mean the good has now become bad; it merely means that it has become stupid, and thus blind to itself. Humor has many uses, of course. And it has never been more useful than when it allows us to see something clearly. But in particular, I think, is it useful in these Days of Rage, when - like nothing else - it permits us to see at once the absurdity of some ostensible good that has veered out of control, without making it irremediably evil. 

Too Much of a Bad Thing?

The way folks celebrate the Post-Human these days, you'd almost swear Modern Man desired nothing better than to supersede himself. And yet not, it would seem, out of a sense of his own insignificance. At least not in the way, say, that John the Baptist longed to be superseded by his cousin Jesus. But maybe - who knows? - just for the thrill of finally, irrevocably creating his own God?

Anyhow, and whatever might be old Adam's newest angle, the fact remains: Even in these aggressively posthuman times, everything we do still has a human dimension. A human face, if you will - however dour, grim and unwelcoming. Indeed it would seem, in many of our operational settings, that this particular human visage simply can't be too grim, too forbidding and demanding. After all, there's WORK to be done! And if the solemn importance, gravity and urgency of work - as twenty-first-centurily defined - hasn't got the right to drain every ounce of joy and spontaneity out of a human undertaking, what does?

And yet I wonder sometimes if we aren't making all sorts of working environments - at least visually - far more austere and harsh, more nought-for-your-aesthetic-comfort-and-good-cheer, than even the strictest, most rigidly hierarchical notions of utility would dictate. Yes, it's true that life is a serious business. And in particular those necessary and innovative disruptions of life that involve Profit and War. But is it possible these days that serious life is becoming a tad too much so? I.e., too serious even to make allowance for basic human refreshment, and restoration?

Now already I can hear the common business-like rejoinder:

"Well, I'm afraid that's just too bad - that's simply life in the real world! If something is necessary then at very least it is functional, and if so that functionality should be obvious. In other words, it should look the part:  there should be nothing in its appearance suggesting anything extrinsic to that function, however otherwise pleasant or restful or even delightful. The fact is, many things that may be refreshing to our so-called spirit are nonetheless distracting from, or even inimical to, the task at hand. And even where the reverse is true - where aesthetic pause and refreshment actually enhance a given task's end result - why, even then, surely there's much to be said for the kinds of adverse conditions - those, say, of a 'sterile', unpleasing, overly functional work and business environment - that, regardless of their effect upon the immediate result, nonetheless steel and fortify us for the real, wider and larger tasks of life? And in particular the most pressing tasks of all - those that require surviving and dominating a chaotically unpredictable, if not hostile universe?"

In sum (and assuming I'm reading this argument correctly), reality, whatever else it may or may not be, is not a friendly place. Or even necessarily a beautiful one. So why pretend it is, through our traditionally deceptive, palliative architectural and other arrangements of space?

At which point I can't help but recall an observation by T S Eliot - himself no mild critic of our human penchant for self-deception: namely, that reality was a thing that humankind, in the poet's own words, cannot bear too much of. I recall that he wrote this c. 1941. And then I consider the visual realities we have been inundated with these past c. three quarters of a century, and how we have been made to bear them: the starkness, the grim hyperfunctionality of not just our work, commercial, educational, and even recreational environments, but of so many of our most festive and ceremonial, and commemorative, public spaces. Just think of the bareness, not just of ornament, but of portraiture and imagery and statuary, in so many of these spaces both interior and exterior; consider how loudly it preaches our Western contempt, not just for our own history and tradition, but for all previous canons of beauty, artistry and taste.

Now I especially want you to note two things about these modernistic realities we have been made to bear. Think, first, how this sheer absence of visual memory, of reminder, has perhaps sharpened our perception of certain other vital features - technological, informational, monetary, manipulative - of our (hyper)modern real world. And then ask yourself - bearing in mind how architectural space continues to shape both the things we think and those we do - ask whether this visual and spatial puritanism hasn't blinded us to certain other deeper, more abiding human realities. Some of which - who knows? - may even exceed, and outlast, our most godlike powers of technology, and organization, and manipulation. 

Reflect on how in particular this ancient and resilient human core, as it were, has somehow continued to seep through, into the most enduring of our poetry and drama and other literature, not to mention the fine arts. Consider, finally, how all-but-globally universal our "functional" bleakness has become - along with its presumption of greater progress and rationality. And yet how poorly it has inoculated us against supposedly atavistic, tribal and territorial viruses like war, and ideological fanaticism, and terror. Almost as if there was something - I don't know, chronic? - in these latter human plagues: an element not just imbedded in our sordid and bestial origins - and so more likely to be dislodged or diminished with every human advance - but actually "progressing" in tandem with each forward step. Or perhaps even something -  making diligent use all the while of our organized violence - that's determined to render our public life more visually repugnant, even as it makes ever more "futuristic" demands on us? (As silly as that sounds.) 

At all events, might we not do well, do you think, to be suspicious of any "Spirit of the Age" that systematically erodes and outmodes the aesthetics "of the Past" - even as it multiplies, and organizes, and industrializes "the Past's" aggressions and conflicts?

Indeed, for my part I wonder, were old Father Eliot alive today, and able to survey with some thoroughness our busy post-Eliotic globe, if he wouldn't conclude that humankind, after all, can only bear so much ugliness, and aesthetic inhospitality, masquerading as reality.

The Arrogance That Awes; or, Ferris Bueller's Day On

As we all know from brutal experience, the person who has the most nerve  - or gall, or guts, or gumption or whatever - isn't always the one we most reliably depend on. Yes, there are some bold souls among us who do deliver exactly what they promise, and much more. And then there are those who boldly promise more than anyone else, and yet, somehow, deliver that much less. And yet for some reason - and seemingly against all odds - we may find ourselves giving these latter souls still more credence than anyone else. Sometimes even more responsibility. And authority. And even power. Why is not always clear. It may be that the bravado, the sheer audacity of their irresponsibility makes the areas in which they fail us seem that much less important. As in "Gosh, here I was thinking this was a pretty critical deadline; but could it be - given the sublime confidence and panache with which he's just blown it off - that it really wasn't so vital after all?"

That is why, more and more, it seems to me that the more a society commends and rewards arrogance - however undependable - the less patience, the less latitude and extenuation it's likely for have for those who are the opposite of arrogant, be they never so reliable. And even as it comes to rely on them more and more. Imagine a political, business and organizational culture that admires above all presumption, effrontery, chutzpah. I.e., a culture that, despite the, let us say?, repeated inferiority of your actions and your choices, consistently ratifies your sense of your own superiority (your intrinsic rightness or misunderstoodness or persecutedness or whatever). Such a social climate can hardly help but disrespect the opposite kind of person. And that no matter how much lip service it may pay to a sidelined and compartmentalized humility. In such a world there can be, in practice, no one more disliked and dismissed, no one more condescended to and despised than one who is modest and unpresuming; who is patient and prudent; who sees not just the ingeniousness but the problem in the solution, the impermanence in the victory, the question in the answer. Even as he consistently comes through for us, or "delivers the goods." And all, or mostly, because he lacks the imperturbable self-confidence of our arrogant hero.

God save us, then, from a state of affairs in which "reality" is, or is not, more or less exactly what the most arrogant among us, the most audacious and blithely dismissive think it is. And say it is. With the rest of us somehow going along with it, or even getting on board. Because after all, if their position wasn't "realistic," how could they have ever succeeded in convincing us? Or even conning us? And thereby "making it all happen"?

Pray for the peace of Kyiv, etc.

When War Becomes Peace (or so we hope;)

Russia and Ukraine. Israel and Iran. India and Pakistan. Is it just my (once again) overly sensitive historical imagination? Or is it always the height of idiocy to underestimate anyone whom you happen to find inconvenient, and want out of the way? I.e., is it always a danger to minimize, and dismiss, the pluck, determination, resilience, etc, of any country so-called (however otherwise inferior, regressive or fascist) that, more than it wants anything else, simply does not want to be You? Or any part of You? No matter how magnificent You may otherwise be - and thus fully entitled to shrink, destabilize, hegemonize every lesser country on Your periphery? Or else wipe it off the map?

Not that we haven't all been there. And I do mean that. Nothing is easier for most of us than to overestimate the fragility of some entity we've already determined has no right to exist (e.g., Israel, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, etc*). Still in all - and that being granted: Did these miserable pseudo-countries really have to string us along to the extent they did? Did they really have to pretend so convincingly? And, worst of all, to pretend to be so superfluous, or paper-tigerish, or wicked-yet-vulnerable-and-hence-SO-easy-to-push-over, that we their trusting foes had almost no choice but to seek that ever-righteous chimera, Total Victory?

*I haven't included the third pair of countries - India and Pakistan - in this analogy/indictment, despite what seems an equally stupid contempt each one has for the other's nationhood and prospects of survival. That is partly because they don't seem as yet prepared to go down either Russo-Ukrainean or Israelo-Iranian paths of glory. And also for fear of a legitimate worry becoming a fulfilled prophecy.

Again, have there ever been pairs of mutual antagonists whose claims to any figment of Nationhood, of national integrity and coherence and perdurance, seemed* not just more paper-thin, but more liable to perforation and shredding? And not just by the relative myriad of other geopolitical actors who wish them both ill (more on them presently) - but by each other? As if each of our contenders saw in his respective enemy a kind of Chinese paper-dragon kept alive and in motion by its handlers. None of whom, surely, would lift a serious finger in its defense, so long as (oh, if only) the right amount of scientifically calculated disintegrative pressure was applied, and (of course) in all the right places. Because as any serious technocrat knows (in this age of artificially-inflated intelligence), war is an exact science. Or at least it should be, for crying out loud?? I.e., provided the right calculations/logistics/ technologies, etc, are accompanied by the right degree of confidence in one's own indomitability, and in the incompetence, inferiority and utter wickedness of one's opponent??? As evidenced, remember - if you'll permit me the cheap shot - by Napoleon's scientifically enlightened France invading backward obscurantist Russia. Or by Hitler's ubermensch Germany against that same (worthless, and thus push-over) country.

*At the onset of these lunacies, anyways.

Mind you, I could almost understand the temptation to escalate, if in fact it further solidified the long-term sovereignty or self-direction of any of the combatants. Picture a miracle, if you can. Imagine if ever-widening and -deepening War actually did something to cement one's real, independent economic strength and viability (as war is always supposed to do and almost never does, especially if you're the aggressor). As opposed to driving you ever deeper into the loving arms - excuse me, fetters and coils - of supposed benefactors and allies. And in particular of certain - as I like to call them - Most Aggressively Homogenizing Behemoths (MAHBs). Like one, very prominent in the news these days, that quite proudly and indignantly calls itself Europe. Or another, that presumes to call itself China; or still another - most outrageously of all - (Sunni) Islam.

And yes, I'm aware that even the most besieged, fighting-for-its-life country is no monolith. Even the most "homogeneous" nation consists of elements that often have some brutally narrow, if not mutually exclusive, notions of their country's best interests. Or even of what an ideal version of their country should look like (at its worst - cf. Mao's China, or Pol Pot's Cambodia - one that bears as-little-as-possible relation to its historical reality). And of course one should never broad-brush any one political element as if it were the whole country. 

And yet, somehow, I find these days I can't always help it. When I think of certain - let us say, decisive? elements within Russia and Israel, and Ukraine and Iran, it's hard for me not to conclude that what one might call Righteous War-Expediters (RWEs) are practically the face, if not the heart of their respective countries. Except that that in turn only brings me back round to the rest of us, and our hardly negligible part in the proceedings, for better or worse. And in particular those of us who are more or less on the sidelines, cheering or denouncing or hand-wringing. And I wonder: How much calm rationality might be injected into our familiar diatribes against our favorite enemies, if we simply made it a habit to change our pejoratives? If we for a change made our epithets less moralistic, and more snide and cynical? Imagine if every time we started beating up on our most loathed Iranians, or Israelis, or Russians or Ukraineans, we prefaced each name with the word - not "evil" - but "stupid," or "clueless." As in, having no clue as to how much they're shooting their own feet, or slitting their own throats. 

And now imagine another set of much "smarter," and quieter, geopolitical actors, and how we might name them. What if, whenever we considered the Fatuous Four's supposed mediators and other guilty bystanders, we always talked of those deviously clever Chinese. Or clever Qataris. Or Azerbaijanis. Or Turks.  (Not, mind you, that even we bold righteous Yanks should disdain to work with these benevolent "mediators" as often as necessary. Beggars can't be choosers.)

In any case, one thing I keep feeling, almost within my bones: If our Four Happy Warriors could (fore)see, not just the full extent of the horror, the disgrace, the crippling dependency they're inflicting, and above all on themselves* - but who it is that's benefiting most from their ongoing self-perdition - they'd retreat, cowering, into their respective Halls of Shame faster than any tail-between-legged dog ever slunk into some  cardboard den of oblivion.

*Not to mention the rest of us. 

Meanwhile, you'll notice we Yanks continue adding more and more combustible ingredients to this witch's stew. Which, if nothing else, ought to lay one myth to rest once and for all: We Americans may indeed be the Exceptional Nation; we're surely not the Indispensable One.

All the more reason, it seems to me, why Today more than ever before you should want to:

Pray (with all your hearts) for the peace of Kyiv. And Moscow. And Tehran. And Jerusalem. But maybe most of all - while we're yet capable of it? - of Washington?

Random Late Eastertide Thoughts

So why does the World (continue to) crucify Love? Not because it doesn't know, from the very pit of its self-inflated misery, that it needs salvation. And not because it doesn't understand that salvation can be difficult, and costly, and even painfully sacrificial. Notice how our Great World today does not in the least shrink from ordeal, from the gauntlet, from tribulation, from the constant testing of its own mettle. As if there was nothing it desired more to flaunt, more to put on display than its own toughness, its "I-can-take-it-and-then-some," its own omnicompetent resilience and resourcefulness. Rather, what this particular world finds most offensive, what drags all its pretension, pride and dignity through the very mud, as it were, from which Adam was shaped, is the notion that it can't be the savior of itself, and in every minutest detail: that it cannot be in control of the entire process from start to finish. Imagine it: that God could so love the world as to redeem, to cleanse, to dignify and glorify it from the dregs of its worst insufficiency, from the pit of its most abject weakness and helplessness - in short, that He should save it with so little help from itself - that is something for which the Great World can never forgive God. Any more than Satan can.

Notice how hard it is - in a world where even what we call charity can somehow be competitive - notice how hard it is to love any being who loves us, first and foundationally, simply for who we are, and for all that we are. Which is to say, who loves us for the sake of our utmost joy and fulfillment, long before it loves us for any other reason. How hard it is to love a being who insists on enveloping us in his own nurturance, his own sustenance, his own substance, quite apart from, quite above and beyond any improvement he seeks from us, or any demands he will make upon us. How hard it is love a Being who seems to us so contemptibly weak, in a world so obsessed with our being strong.

In the Gospels we are warned all over the place that every disciple, no matter how diligent, is liable to stumble. And yet I wonder: Would we stumble so often, if we weren't looking SO far ahead, and moving through life with such overweening confidence, and at such aggressive all-consuming speed, that just about the last thing worthy of our attention was where we were putting our feet?

I suppose it's possible to demonstrate the Truth of Christ purely by way of argument and contention: by not only proving all your contenders wrong, but by exposing their foolishness, and even rubbing their noses in it. But to reveal how Christ loves, and why He loves, surely that is something altogether different? There is, it seems to me, one surest, simplest, humblest way of disclosing the Nature of Christ to anyone, be they proud or despondent, pentitent or indifferent: it is ourselves to emit the kind of light that makes any created thing - even one that's human - more alive and interesting and priceless by its glow. You know, as if it had been actually made by a God.

A strange yet possibly sensible prayer: 

Lord, give us such a poverty of reason and confidence, of intellect and will and resolution, as will leave us with nothing to offer, nothing to sacrifice but ourselves: nothing, in short, other than our own naked and helpless, yet altogether fertile, and immeasurably resourceful souls.

Between Two Ages? (let's hope not;)

Have you ever had the sense - say, in a dream - of a place long familiar to you that was somehow slipping away from your mental grasp? A place so slowly, subtly, insidiously changing, and to such an imperceptible degree, that any day now you expected to wake up and find that, whatever surface likenesses remained, its mood and spirit had altered almost beyond recognition? So that, regardless of its previous moral norms and expectations, the ones it now presented to you seem all but diametrically opposite? Except that, of course, no matter how jarring the seeming abruptness of change, it was understood that you needed to "get with the [new] program" as soon as possible.

I don't pretend to know how far this image might serve as a parable of our times - say, of the past 60 years. But this much I know for sure. I had for much of my life a rather comfortable stereotype of the world I grew up in (roughly 1960 to 1990). Everywhere I looked, the tacit assumption seemed to be that advanced industrial societies consisted of a certain very predictable, indeed natural majority of people. They consisted largely of people who, whatever their level of talent, ambition or achievement, were mostly content to help others, or even to help themselves, in ways that entailed reasonably light levels of suffering, hardship or challenge. At all events, the general run of people were not seen as likely to go out of their way to "knock themselves out" - either for themselves or for others. 

Whereas in contrast, for some reason I seem to see no shortage of busy, important, results-driven people, in this Great Global World today, who are willing, or even proud, to suffer. And not just on account of some gross, sordid vice to which they're either stubbornly or hopelessly addicted. The fact is: Not all self-harming people are compulsive gamblers, drinkers or drug addicts. Nor are they necessarily harming themselves, or risking real harm, chiefly for the sake of mere pleasure or self-indulgence. My point is that most of us want moral assurance, in one degree or another; most of us want some positive sense that we are, in fact, doing good, or doing the right thing. Often, too, the greater the good we think we're doing, the greater the (re)assurance we can easily come to believe we need. And have a right to demand. Indeed, we may at times be willing to go to immense, even world-unsettling lengths in order to get that assurance. Sometimes even just to prove our sincerity and altruism. Or the depth and authenticity of our love for even one person or family. (Whether the often narcissistic individuals who seem to demand such proofs are ever convinced by our efforts, much less softened and humanized by them, is another story; more on that below.) 

But now consider this further point: if bright, ultra-motivated people are willing to go to often wrenchingly sacrificial lengths for a mere handful of individuals, why, think what can be accomplished -  what can be stirred up - when they do so for an entire city or country, or corporation, or continent. Or global economy. And all for the sake of some incommensurably greater good. One not perhaps to be attained in our lifetimes. But surely decades, or even centuries, down the road?

Now this stirring-up is, I think, well under way. And has been for some time. By my reckoning, for at least the past 30 years or so. In short, the demands for often excruciating public sacrifice that were once most typical of the more idealistic and illiberal forms of communism, socialism, fascism, etc, now seem to have pretty thoroughly infected just about every strain of neoliberal capitalism. More and more I see talented people of every sort who are to willing to incur, and even to inflict on themselves and others, huge, painful sacrifices for the sake of an idea or ideology, a career or company, some model of productivity or progress or self-transcendence. Or even some vision of global progress, or holiness, or righteousness (however defined). Almost as if the entire planet were poised uneasily on a threshold Between Two Ages. And of course, the sooner we all passed over that threshold into the Glory Beyond, the better for all concerned. (Or most, in any case?)

I won't presume to guess as to what are all the upshots of this trend. But so far, the best I can tell, it has succeeded in creating - or at least accelerating? - a world of breath-taking, heart-pounding excitement. And hammering, if not harrowing, change. For me anyway, it's as if all sorts of otherwise responsible high-achieving people wanted nothing better than that the world should become, as nearly as possible, like some high-intensity video game, or blockbuster action film, or sci-fi/horror/apocalypse saga. 

Nor am I insisting that this is obviously a bad thing. We all know how boring life would be without lots of the kinds of attitudes - and people - that get things riled up. Without, e.g., bold dynamic sentiments like impatience and exasperation, and indignation (especially over what one KNOWS is a righteous grievance). Yes, even if those emotions sometimes lead to what might otherwise be described as violence. Indeed - one might ask - how would this world ever move forward, without the challenge and uncertainty of near-constant excitement? Or if not near-constant, surely always seething and rumbling on the rim, like a (supposedly) dormant volcano?

Most urgently, how else but by these challenges would we be able to test the mettle of anyone, and so find out what anyone is REALLY MADE OF (that sacred American question). How else can strong be separated from weak, so that at last we can determine who is most worthy of authority and power? Of prosperity and success? Or even of mere survival? 

And yes, I'll admit, the above arguments may quite likely succeed in creating a far more socially Darwinian world than anything we've hitherto known: a global social order in which only the most evolutionarily fit will shepherd (what's left of)  humankind into a gloriously indefinite future throughout the galaxy and beyond. And really, who can argue with a path - however "cruel" or harsh - that all but ensures the limitless prolongation and expansion of the human race?

But now recall what I said earlier about the place of love in all this. And in particular about the extreme lengths to which people may go in demonstrating love to those who in a sense despise it; who not only take far more than they give, but are only the more confirmed in their narcissism, the more vehemently we try to love them. And then consider the difference between two kinds of love. Between when we love vehemently - or even "aggressively" - and when we love patiently. Between strenuousness on the one hand, and gentleness, and hospitality, on the other. Between pleading with people who disdain us - even to the point of appeasing and accommodating them! - because, after all, we know we have the right answers; vs listening to and observing these same people, and asking the right questions. And then consider how often it is, that the more we knock ourselves out - and then brood on the nobility and sacrifice of our good actions - the more of a burden we become, both to ourselves and to those we're trying to help. Not to mention to our fellow-helpers.

Most of us know what it's like to love others in those forceful, definitive, decisive ways that give us both - lover and beloved - almost in equal measure, a foretaste of purgatory. And therewith, perhaps, no small amount of suffering on both sides. But now imagine that more Busy Important People were as willing to love as they are to suffer. And not just to love in some self-proving purgatorial way. As if the Father in the parable were to go not only chasing after his Prodigal Son into the far country, but immersing himself in his lifestyle - maybe even getting robbed or beaten by the son's companions! - just to prove himself sacrificial. But rather let's concede, for sake of argument, that these same BIPs were at last willing to love more nearly as God loves, and indeed longs to love us. Imagine if most of us were able to love, not just zealously, but appropriately. You know, as if the Way in which our loved one was originally created actually mattered. Or even secreted within its lowly depths some residual wisdom, and grace, and beauty of its own, apart from our micromanagement. Some primal giftedness that even We Globally Enlightened, with all our august learning, experience, expertise and holiness, might learn from: if only we could hear. As distinct from the way our beloved - not to mention most everyone else - must needs be recreated, reconfigured, etc, to conform to our modern operational or other global necessities. Imagine, in short, loving any human creature in such a Way as to give even our prodigals - nay, even our most hardened enemies! - the kind of foretaste of heaven as would make them actually want to go there. 

As opposed to, you know, their merely wanting to stay out of hell. Or even purgatory.

The  resultant world might not be nearly as exciting, turbulent or change-obsessed as the one we've come to enjoy these past c. two-and-a-half centuries. The devotees of real-life video games, for one, would most certainly have to seek their entertainment elsewhere. But I suspect the emerging human globe will be one far more capable of Real Progress - i.e., far more nearly a colony of Heaven than of any earthly empire - than any historic earth we've ever known.

The Pause that Refreshes

Not exactly a warm Christmas wish, or prayer even. But if I may be allowed an excuse, I'd like to think it's a reflection more or less in keeping with a season whose God became enfleshed in our world in just the Way that He did. So quietly and without visible glory (not to belabor the obvious). And whose Love, even at its "fiercest," somehow continues to respect both our frailty and our freedom. So here goes:

In a busily progressive world like ours today, where

1) the  depth of one's love is too often measured by the fierceness of one's activity; where

2) the purity and zeal of our activism is gauged by our determination to change the thing we love; and where 

3) the success of our change depends on the degree of our control, 

what a relief it is to know that love can also be gentle. What a comfort it is to know that even love, without the least dereliction of duty, is sometimes content to let a creature be, and be itself; and all so that it may be known and loved more patiently, more Divinely, for what it is. Last of all, what a grace and a hope it is, to know that no amount of even the most selfless, idealistic, well-intentioned control is ever going to disclose what any creature is, or what it needs, or even how it must change for the supplying of those needs: - in short, no amount of control is ever going to love or improve any creature better than that gentlest of all loves we call prayer.

So What Do I Mean by Man?

First of all, I would distinguish Man as that one creature, in all of creation, who makes no sense apart from the most close-grained, intimate, yielding, surrendering dependence upon God. He is also that one who makes less and less sense - i.e., becomes infinitessimally that much less both useful and beautiful to anyone - insofar as he flees from or denies that dependence.

Again, what makes us most distinctly human - which is to say, most resonantly, permanently, Divinely human - is not anything which makes us more independent of nature, or detachable or divorcible from nature. Even less is it that which disregards, distorts or subverts our human nature. (And remember, there's nothing like naked, unashamed derision and contempt of nature as a whole for eviscerating our own humanness). 

What makes us most like the First Man, then? It is that intimate, intricate, inextricable dependence on God which defined Adam from the Beginning - at the very height of his dominion over creation - as something radically distinct from either angels or beasts. Something that made him almost as pliant and yielding in the hands of his Father as, indeed, the Second Adam was to become, in that fulness of salvific time which we know as His passion and death. It is also, I'm inclined to believe, what may have inspired the first Scriptural authors to characterize us all, at our most truly and Divinely human, as by nature sheep, rather than goats.

(Everything) In its Right Measure

"Man is the measure of all things," says Protagoras.

And true enough, I suspect, as far as it goes. Only which man are we talking about? And at precisely what stage or chapter of his so-called progress? Is it Adam as he first discovered and explored, and personally named each one of the creatures of the Garden? Or Adam as he has since cacophonized every echo, rumor and haunting of Eden beyond recognition? 

More to the point of our present needs, do we mean that Man who, in grasping at the pride of life, succeeded only in fouling his own nest, and hopelessly defacing his own Divine image? Or do we mean that Man who, in accepting a sacrificial death, actually redeemed and restored that Image beyond anyone's wildest hopes? Be sure to make your choice prayerfully. Because in each case, which Man we take as our measure is sure to make all the difference: both in how we ourselves mete out either mercy or justice, and in how we receive the same.

"There is nothing good except a good will," says Kant.

Well, maybe. But just where does does that leave the rest of the visible creation, in the moral scheme of things? That same creation which (as presumably even Kant would attest) - while having nothing like a human, much less an angelic or Divine will - is nonetheless created by God? And which even the Scriptural author pronounces, with exquisite naivete, as "very good"? 

For me the question is simply this: Just how is man is affected - for better or worse - when what was "once" a goodness shared throughout the visible universe "now" becomes a human monopoly. Remember, monopolies, even with best of  intentions, don't always make for the sincerest humility in those who wield them. So what do you think? Is this exclusive prerogative apt to make man a more amicable or a more quarrelsome neighbor to earth's other creatures? Indeed, given his vantage-point of moral elevation, will he be that much less, or that much more, likely to set a fairly rigid, and presumptuous, agenda for everything else?

Consider what may follow, then, in a visible universe where only human beings, human priorities, human actions can be considered unambiguously good. Is it just me, or does that limit change irrevocably the nature and character of a well-lived, morally upright life? So that it becomes somehow more and more a question of control? A matter of bringing under our hegemony things that, left to themselves, likely will fail to conduce fully or adequately to the good we intend? Mind you, the rest of the non-human world remains stubbornly what it is the whole time. And worst of all in a way that, too often, not only eludes our control, but sometimes has the supreme nerve to impinge upon us, and interfere with us! Like most forms of weather, for instance. And so we build houses and other enclosures; we try, singly or collectively, to carve out an amenable space within these more humanly controlled boundaries, where all our goodness, our benevolence, our constructive desire for change can progress unhindered. The problem lies in that word, and realm, we call collective. The problem is that most of the good, and the change, we try to initiate rarely if ever concerns just one person. Even more rarely does it affect just one person. And even on the odd chance that everyone else in the room concurs with the good and the change you or I intend, they're likely already seeing the same goal from different vantage points. Or different priorities of pacing and timing. Or even more subtle differences - shades and gradations - of desired effect. 

Now of course, to get the project up and running there is rarely need for absolute and total agreement. The devil rather lies farther down the road, in what we call the details, or the execution. Disagreement is usually acceptable up to a certain point. But sooner or later (Action being the Emperor, or rather Dictator, that he is), sooner or later a majority in the room - or even I myself - will need to get on that famous "same page," or with that proverbial same program. Or so we may need at very least, in order for the change to proceed in an orderly and constructive fashion. And that's not always an easy thing to do. The transparently obvious good of my - or your - chosen method, or sequence, or timetable may be not nearly as obvious to others on the team as it is to us. So what do we do? One recourse is to try to negotiate without falling into excessive compromise - that ever-elusive tipping point. Sometimes various degrees of persuasion, or even pressure, may seem to be required. At the same time we don't want to rush to moral conclusions about our differences of opinion, at least for the moment; we continue, if we are sensible, to regard each other as well-intentioned individuals acting in good faith. Well and good. For now. Meanwhile, what about the rest of creation?

My point is that certain consequences arise, when we view the rest of the universe as morally foreign to us. Or morally opaque and unintelligible. Or as merely a hostile wilderness that we humans must morally and productively subdue. It's true that you and I now have a common endeavor. Or even, if you must, a common enemy. But that doesn't mean we will automatically see each other as natural allies. Or that our areas of common interest will be at once transparent and immediate to everyone. Or that the process of negotiating towards a common goal, even with the best of everyone's intentions, will get easier with time. Indeed, sometimes Time itself can seem to be the enemy. All sorts of things can come up, and get in the way of the best-laid plans. And even the most sound-proof, germ-proof laboratory - or conference room - isn't exactly sealed off from nature, from unpredictability, from life. 

Now of course this latter realization, on our part, too often only redoubles our efforts to make our work all the more air- and watertight, to seal "life" off from the "outside." The problem is that the more we do so, the more certain other unexpected guests are likely to crash our party. Everything from the failure of the heating system, to a sudden life crisis interrupting the schedule of a team-member whose absences have already been piling up. And so from seemingly out of nowhere, and often in the blink of an eye, we can find ourselves enmeshed in practical and procedural questions whose difficulty, and stubbornness, we never dreamed of at the start. Questions, and resultant differences of opinion, that can make even close associates seem less like partners than like parts of the problem, or obstacles to the solution. And that too, it seems to me, is how we humans - singly and collectively - can come to view ever larger numbers of people as, well, more or less tools. Or impediments, of one kind or another. Or incidental parts of the scenery, that we should be able to move about at will. It is how, I believe, we may often come to regard increasing numbers of people, whom we may otherwise love or esteem or tolerate, as either instrumental, or irrelevant, or detrimental, or hostile, to the good things we plan to do. With nothing much at all left in between those 4 iron categories, or beyond them: nothing of that deliciously God-designed, quirky, irreducible, unabstractable humanity that, as we all know in our moments of sanity, is worth so much more than the most expert execution of our highest human aims. That same human nature, mind you, which is capable of such extraordinary works: difficult, and subtle, delicate, and even delicately discerning and understanding works. Or so at least it may be, given a properly patient understanding of how that nature itself works, and what it needs. Not to mention a properly humble understanding of the God who made it. And even - dare we hope? - a lowly willingness to know ourselves, even as we are known. But now imagine it: all this fecundity, and present, or rather imprisoned, in each of one of us! Even as it remains so damnably hard for you or me to control. 

So what is it, do you suppose, that makes us begin so many of our most ambitious and constructive works, sure of nothing other than the goodness of Man, and of the works and the will of Man? And yet as we go along, growing less and less sure of anything except the goodness of Me?

As We Try the Patience of a Prince

I

I think I read somewhere once that patience - at least in human affairs - is inseparable from sensitivity to another's limitations. For instance, we may be tempted, and for reasons that seem altogether "legitimate," to drive someone else to move at a pace that may be wholly foreign to their nature. Or else inconsistent with their present level of energy or alertness (suppose, say, that they just got up). And so we hold back. We refrain from pressing them, or at least not too hard. We take care not to demand from them the "utmost" that we "know" them to be capable of.* Above all, we don't blithely assume there are no limits to how far we can go with certain other people, or to what we can, or should, get out of them. 

*As if, really, that were a thing one could know, or that could be measured and quantified. 

But if this modest virtue is inseparable from any sound definition of patience, then surely no one has been more patient with me than God. No intelligent being has been more forebearing of my halting, snail's pace, hopefully not non-existent rate of spiritual progress these past 10 years: my dismal attempts at fasting and abstinence and mortification. And worst of all during this present season of Advent: one in which, I'm told, we do well to look forward, not just festively, but penitentially - and soberly - to a second coming of the Prince of Peace very different from His first. 

But if He's been so all-but-absurdly patient with me, then how much more so, I wonder, with those who are far more "deserving" - or at very least, making far better use of the grace He extends to them. Let me consider, then, with utmost gravity how others' prayers are sustaining me well beyond any tiniest merit of my own. How these "little ones" are no slight part of the patience of God, but are indeed His continous, overflowing vessels and channels. And not just to me, of course, but to the whole world. Speaking of which - one might contend - let's not forget our Father's arguably vastly greater patience with the "undeserving" world at large. And how often, on our side, that patience is ignored, taken for granted, despised.

II

But now let's try approaching the whole question from a rather different standpoint. Let us suppose that some among us, in their wise human conceits, were to determine that such Divine patience is in fact wasted on such an undeserving world. That we have much too kind a creator-God. That He is far too considerate of our slowness and frailty; far too delicate towards our unreadiness to be goaded on to the race's proper excellence and perfection; above all, that He's far too little confident, and optimistic, of our capacity to be driven/expedited/accelerated to that ever-imperative "next level."

In any case (as some more globally courageous souls than I might argue), what a relief that the rulers of this present world are nothing like Him. Thank "God" that they're either: 

(1) far less patient with our poor human clay; or else 

(2) possessed of far greater faith in our power to transcend/transgress our human limits. 

Or, beyond all this, might it be they've convinced themselves that this boundless faith (optimism?) of theirs, in both our and their own limitless endurance/resilience, is just what the Doctor ordered? I.e., it is precisely the sort of strength best able to prepare our world for the entrance of a species of god to whom I've alluded before: one whose paramount virtue - and all that he respects, apparently - is strength. And not just any strength, but in particular a kind most clearly expressed by what most of us would experience as exasperation, and harshness. And impatience. And, of course, the fact that we masses experience "real strength" as these things is yet further proof of our ignorance, weakness and unfitness. And all because he, and they, are incomparably better judges of what we poor masses can handle, absorb, adapt to, than we ourselves could ever be. Including those labyrinthine wars round the globe that we peons seem to be finding more and more irksome and pointless, but which our betters know to be necessary.

You don't believe me? Why, look around you. Anywhere. Observe what a world of - not just "strongmen" (whatever that means) - but WAR ⁴LORDS we live in. All our Putins, Zelenskyys, Erdogans, Khameneis, Netanyahus, Sinwars, Macrons, Starmers, van der Leyens, Kagans, etc, who - whatever the merits or justice of their original position/grievance/crusade - insist on pressing either their own populations, or else some carefully chosen proxy-nation, ever deeper into the labyrinth of war. As if their own peoples and closest allies had, or were supposed to have, a limitless tolerance for military conflict. And not just for the hardships and uncertainties of war, but for its volatilities, atrocities, traumas, horrors. To say  nothing of runaway debt, rampant inflation, and an ongoing, razor's-edge proximity to the prospect of thermonuclear annihilation.

III

And why NOT? one may ask. After all, as Lady Gaga and others of comparable wisdom have attested,      "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

And yes, I'm aware that the normal human being can be a creature of extraordinary, maybe even superhuman resilience. And in the face, it may be argued, of every kind and degree of discouragement, degradation, atrocity, horror. Including, again, those of war, along with its most zealously uncompromising war lords.

But now picture for a moment a creature, and a person, at once so primally and extendedly helpless as the human. One who is from birth so radically unknowing and trusting, so utterly dependent upon environment, care, cultivation, dare we say nurturance? And now further imagine that one of such exquisite fragility and complexity can only be improved, as it were, by being brutally simplified and "streamlined". Imagine that it isn't just hardened and annealed, but actually made stronger, and even wiser, by trauma: by being bathed, from its youngest age, in all manner of shock and terror and horror; by being submerged, in short, in everything most destructive of what most of us would call innocence. 

To argue such a point isn't merely to trust in the social usefulness of cruelty: it is to raise most forms of cruelty into a sort of supreme and transcendent kindness. And yes, within the terms of its logic it does make a certain sense. A fundamentally hostile universe, we might presume, is one in which only the most reciprocally hostile intelligent species has much chance at survival. And what better way of withstanding and overcoming the world's cruelty than by learning and studying how to be cruel to one's own self, and to one's own kind? Especially when you consider that the testing is bound to come sooner or later. Better to start now and control the process, then to encounter it down the road and be unprepared. Indeed, suppose there's NO horror that - regardless of one's age - any human worthy of survival can not just survive, but fully rebound from, and even be strengthened by. Given that premise, it might well be asked: Can temptation, can testing ever start too early? And on a larger scale - and in the teeth of a radically adversarial universe - can any species ever be too hardened, too callused, too inured: in a word, too strong?

And yet there remains, I believe, something even the strongest among us fears. On the most elementary level, my best hunch is that the strong man's worst nightmare is the reaching of the limits of his own strength. Or worse yet, discovering beyond any shadow of doubt the insufficiency of that strength. Or maybe even its hollowness, and emptiness. After all, isn't the whole point and reward of being strong - and of progressively enlarging and extending one's strength, power, influence, etc - that one doesn't need to acknowledge limits of any kind? And so might it be argued that the ultimate human discouragement, and disappointment, lies in the discovery that there is any human limit we can't surmount?

IV

Shall I tell you, then, what I suspect our Great Global World today is most afraid of?

What that world most fears is the real nature of everything we are, and the real nature of everything we do. It is terrified that either of these things should be revealed in their true predicament - i.e., their real nakedness and poverty, and helplessness before God, and apart from God. Because then that Great World itself would also be revealed both in all its appalling uselessness (that most damnable of all modern sins) and in all its desperate, unassuageable need for God. 

And of course, what is true of the World is indelibly true of each one of us, from the least to the very greatest. Even among the World's most obdurately, prosperously wicked "great and good," there abides this need. I will go further than this. Even in the most evil of people, in the most (self-)imprisoned souls, and at back of the wickedest acts, there is a kind of transparency of need and lack, of simplicity, of orphanedness and homesickness, whenever these souls are brought into relation with God. And, of course, whenever God is brought into the heart of them.

My point is that we humans are creatures of need - creatures of whom need is our very essence - LONG before we are either creators possessing rights, or producers having duties. Upon this simple truth  - that we depend, and that we receive, long before we can either do or plan or arrange, create or produce - upon this hangs everything that makes us distinctly human, and that makes distinct the human things we do. In other words, in our human needfulness for God is contained:

1) everything that distinguishes us from both angels and animals (who do not "need" or "depend on" their Maker in anything like the way we do); 

2) the entire quality and validity of all our works, whether paid or unpaid. 

Not everything about our works, of course. Not everything that's proud and shallow, or cruel and empty. But rather, whatever in them is deep: whatever is storied and layered and rich, whatever is humble, whatever is kind and loving and true. Both in all that we humans create and, yes (if you can imagine it), in all that we produce.

At the same time, if that's not something most apt to strike terror in the heart of our Great Global World, I don't know what is.

Indeed, if I may venture to say so, I think it does well to be afraid. Because after all, if there is anything less equipped to prepare this World for the return of a Prince of Peace - whether to make good use of His long-suffering patience, or to endure His yet more long-suffering justice - surely it's the ungraced human "strength," the productivity, the all-sufficiency we've been laboring to acquire these past 30 years?

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 Global 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?