"Come to Me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden"

Read on a young girl's T-shirt at the local Jewel:

"BEING A PRINCESS IS SO EXHAUSTING"

And you know, really, I think she's got something there.

In fact, I wonder if that very thing - the "exhaustingness" of pride - is one of the humbler reasons why humility has been so popular down through the ages. (And also - given how much we celebrate the Strenuous Life in these times - why it's so hugely unpopular today?)

(And, no, I didn't say any of those things to her.)

Musings of a Christian Elitist; or, The Roots of Calvinism?

"May I be forgiven, Lord God, for marveling at the sheer glut of human beings you've made, in your unsearchable wisdom. So many miserable creatures with nothing to distinguish them, much less redeem them from the great mass of inert, faceless, featureless humanity. Men and women so tiresome, so pointless, so utterly redundant in anything useful they might have to offer, to anyone, that more than once I've been moved to wonder - again, Lord, please forgive me! - why you should have bothered to create them at all. Because, frankly, I find it impossible to see what difference they make in the vast sweep of things, for better or worse. It's as if they had never been.

"Then again, when I consider the sheer overwhelming glut of souls who are destined for nothing but the monotony, as it were, of eternal punishment, I think I begin to get the picture:  Why should you even pretend to equip so many who are lost with anything worth finding - any distinguishing gift or talent, usefulness or loveableness? Or indeed any quality even remotely interesting?

"I mean, it would all be for nothing, right?"

The Longing of the Ages

Once again, what an unprecedentedly glorious world we live in. So vastly superior to any previous age, civilization, culture, nation, religion, therapeutic formula, etc, one can think of. With the possible exception of China in the Ch'in Dynasty. Oh, and the Beijing-centered, global-reach Neo-Ch'in Dynasty gathering momentum even now, as we speak.

I say that with no small confidence, in spite of the political turmoil, if not low-intensity civil-war conditions, currently engulfing places like the United States. Or rather - let me see here - is it because of those same conditions, that the world is so much better and wiser than ever before. I forget. Local communities throughout the US, convulsed by hate and misunderstanding (though deliberate mutual incomprehension might be an apter phrase): - maybe those are just unfortunate concomitants, or even the necessary collateral damage, of Global Aggregate Progress. Why, just you wait. There may yet prove to be a direct, unvarying proportion between
(1) my willingness to hate my neighbor politically, and
(2) my real, profitable connectedness to non-neighbors half-way round the globe.

You still don't believe me. Seriously, what other Age than ours could have succeeded in raising both India and China - and from the all-but-total prostration of that unspeakably vile Mid-Twentieth Century - to the threshold, if not the heights of - what? Global-reach Economic Superpowers? ("Lifted WHOLE CIVILIZATIONS out of poverty we did.") And all within the span of little more than a generation. And at an advancing pace even now, as we text.

Whew. China and India, both practically on top of the world. Besides being globally-connected. Now if only someone could get them to start peacefully and patiently connecting with each other. And in such a way as to help them see some small part of their, yes, common, and mutual, interests. Particularly with respect to certain (no doubt mostly stable and quiet) backyards they both have. Places like Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean. Or regarding certain long-term dangers they both face, in concert with a hopefully one-day (dare we hope?) more sensible, eastward-looking Iran and Russia. Dangers starting with a post-ISIS - and globally much smarter - Sunni jihadism. One that's already been known to despise most generously and impartially both Hindus and Confucianists - not to mention just about every other variety of Indian and Chinese out there, including the "lukewarm" Muslim kind.

"Oh but now wait a minute: Haven't jihadists been known to be sometimes - I mean, well, USEFUL - albeit marginally or indirectly - at loosening those awful strangleholds of national/regional/local sovereignty? And so advancing the Sacred Tide of Globalization? And in precisely such crude impenetrable places as the borderlands of China, India, Russia? OK, well, maybe not exactly useful to everybody. But surely to those who count the most: Globally-minded Yanks, Brits, Euros, Saudis, at least some mainland Chinese and Pakistanis . . ."

Thus far the Establishment globalist view, as I understand it. But to return to China and India:

Might that just be the glorious fate of two once-and-future-mighty civilization-states: to be locked in a more or less permanent contest for elbow-superiority? After all, in any Radically-Interconnected Globe, it stands to reason that even civilizations may overlap and interpenetrate. Well then, if neighboring individuals and local communities can nowadays more or less peacefully hate each other, and all without prejudice to higher global efficiency and productivity (all for the sake of a Higher Love, of course), how much more may neighboring civilizations . . .

Or, finally (and to take a worse-case scenario): Is mounting Sino-Indian tension merely one of the many prices to be paid for real, radical global connectedness - including an ongoing willingness to risk nuclear confrontation. Or even, occasionally, nuclear destruction? Help me here . . .

A Fixers' Utopia: Some Thoughts on Our Modern Ministry of Love

I swear. Sometimes I think I envy those folks who see all the really vital things in life - the most basic, elementarily necessary things - as being in essence, well, simple. And straightforward. And pure. Or even innocent.

Take charitable love, for instance. What could be more simple and pure? or more protective of innocence? What could be more constitutive of Real Life, lived well and usefully, than that Will by which I desire the fullest, most complete happiness of someone else, as only God can know and make it? Especially seeing that it is God, after all, who does the actual knowing and making, not me. How could anything so straightforward possibly get confusing, or convoluted?

Then again - as we're perhaps discovering more and more in our volatile 21st-century America  - maybe it can get more messy. And ought to. Maybe even less pure and innocent. At least if love wants to keep on growing, and becoming bigger, more productive, more global in scale. (You know, like pretty much everything else we do these days). Not to mention more truly engaging - i.e., challenging - of the human, and not just the Divine, graces and other inputs involved. No progress without challenge, as they say; no challenge without adversity; no adversity without that old and perennial departure from Eden. Which in turn can take us humans deep into all sorts of unexpected places. And even unexpectedly ugly places - to put the matter politely. The question then becomes, Are we manful enough to take a stand and fight - if necessary all by ourselves* - once we get there?

*Can't depend on God forever, you know.

Certainly by now, to all recent appearances, the Fight seems well underway. If not well on its way to the proverbial Next Level. As I understand it, this is an Age that believes passionately in Love. But here's the catch. What we've been discovering is that there can be no hard, effectual love (as opposed to the soft sentimental kind) without truth. And there can be no abiding truth without hatred of untruth. And sometimes even hatred of the holders of untruth - I mean, if that's what True Love of Truth should end up requiring. Which in turn, as one might imagine, can only mean unprecedented opportunities for serious love to grow, evolve, become more efficient and productive - or even re-educating - by all sorts of globally dynamic leaps and bounds. Though sadly, it is true, not without a few unintendedly brutal, albeit necessary results.

Witness, e.g., the many classes of global refugees, whose freedom and dignity have been under assault in their home countries, and whose pain can only be assuaged, in some cases, by the freedom of spontaneous sexual assault upon women in their host countries. Or take, more generally, the many growing, and growingly militant, categories of oppressed people, whose suffering can only be remediated by the counter-oppression of other categories of people. In short (and assuming I read it correctly), our modern Hard And Effectual Love is fast becoming a most vehemently, if not vengefully righteous thing. The sort of discussion to which you might want to bring a few blackjacks, helmets, steel boots or baseball bats - not to mention cars and other high-powered weapons - the better to silence or otherwise intimidate the unrighteousness of your opponent. But either way make no mistake: this modern love thing is already grown into a mighty complicated business. At least compared to where we started.

And so I continue to be fascinated with the immense strides being made by charitable, unselfish love in our times. Neither do I mean chiefly the more familiar (if not clichéd) brands of charity being produced by organizations. I mean even more so love as coming from single individuals, or as exchanged between individuals. Or even clusters of them. Such people as married and cohabiting couples. Or parents and children.* Even (or especially?, as I suggested earlier) between and among groups of highly agitated political idealists.

*Some definition may be in order here: By charity I understand That apart from which all other loves - erotic, romantic, familial, affinitive - have no life at all; have nothing, indeed, to distinguish them from the merest self-interest, except so far as It is present.

The Progress of Love. Or surely, at all events, of what we modern humans think is charitable love? Which, when you (not only think but) pray and ruminate on it, may be exactly the problem.

The question is whether we mere humans really can know what charity is, or is like,  from the inside - as opposed to knowing it merely externally and observationally. It seems, for example, all but second nature for many of us to think of charity as a product or procedure we can freely fine-tune, according to our latest knowledge and expertise; or as an operation we must rigorously oversee, in which the operatives can be fired at will. Much harder to imagine is the kind of love that can be more fruitfully compared to a plant, of which the one indispensable Soil is God. A plant which can in fact, by the mercy of Divine Grace Incarnate, be each one of us; and may even embody - who knows? - the secret yearning of all of us. Indeed, I suspect it is only as we get more and more of our Maker inside of us, that we begin to know love more than externally, or even become love - and more than operationally. By being enclosed and sealed, within the garden, as it were, of the one Mind that truly loves. 

No small proviso, one must admit. All the same, I doubt that even the blithest disregard of it has ever stopped the most devout secularist from giving love his best shot. I.e., I doubt that such a constraint has ever deterred someone who, say, didn't believe in God, or who saw Him merely as coach, or clockmaker, or jihadic commander-in-chief - or chief enemy - from trying to love "on his own," to the best of his ability. And even from the bottom of his heart. Humans have always found good, compelling humanitarian reasons for believing that God is more or less unreal; or that He is the enemy of our Moral Progress; or that He has indeed taken us so far, but must be now got out of the way - nay, He's begging us to get Him out of the way! - so that we can at last progress even farther on our own.

Meanwhile, as for whether these latter, go-it-alone kinds of love are the ones most often at the forefront of our Global Modern Life, who can be sure? All I know for sure is this: I keep on being amazed, as I said in Par. 5, by the extraordinary progress caritas is making today, under the ever-encroaching conditions and demands of our 21st-century world. The way it continues to mutate, and permutate, and produce all sorts of wildly unexpected, if not downright unintended results. The way nowadays, for instance, that many of us love (some might call it suffocate, but never mind) our pets, our children, even, I'm told, not a few of our employees - one might easily get the idea that real love simply can't function apart from the most hovering, hectoring kinds of fixing, interference, micromanagement.* As if it were some grievous sin - or at best a gross negligence - ever to let anyone or anything be. Or be itself. Or worst of all, be happy being itself ("Not when it can be IMPROVED, buster!"). As if, indeed, there was nothing God-made that couldn't be improved continually by our taking thought, and so adding to its stature at least an inch or two. So that even our ostensibly most generous loves risk becoming - the busier we make them, the more worriedly invested we become in them - a kind of tyranny. 

*I'm aware that, even nowadays, there continue to be all sorts of less caring, less conscientious pet-owners, parents and employers; I'm talking about the other kind.

Of course we didn't intend them to become tyrannical. In any case, why should it matter? The important thing is that we stick to our principle, our agenda, our ideology. To hell with where it takes us.

And naturally it goes without saying: If the way I choose to love is one that gives me great worry or even anguish, is it asking so much that the creature receiving it should partake of some of the cost involved, as well as the benefit?

Still in all, I can't help wondering if it was always like that. Seems to me I remember a time when people knew how to care, and even expend themselves, for others without overwhelming them with the fact, and making them more or less miserable. Or was sacrificial love always this fretting, nagging, self-dramatizing thing? 

Anyhow, as I've said before in many places, ours is a busy dynamic Age. One of great ferment, unrest, turmoil, creativity. Remember, no creation without destruction. And so I have one more thing that continues to amaze me. It's the way a great many of our commentators, mediacrats, pundits, bloggers, agitators, prognosticators, and countless other "fixers," profess to be astounded - shocked, they tell you - at certain of the many things busily fermenting in America over the past several years. And in particular, all the many garden and other varieties of political hate, and still more often contempt, that keep boiling over. On Right (isn't that where the trouble always begins?), on Left, on pretty much everywhere in between. As if, really, all the good busy loving people - Hillaries, McCains, Soroses, Merkels, Musks, Kochs, etc - had been just going along minding their own business. And they being the real creators of our time, there could hardly be an era more innocently undeserving of such viciousness than the Early Twenty-first Century.

But what if, in fact, the whole process is following the most direct and express logic, from Alexandria to Charlottesville to Barcelona? Suppose our hyper-vicious politics is, I mean, a wholly natural consequence (if not a wholly owned subsidiary) of our busy modern fixing, micromanaging loves - as inflicted on everyone from our most "helpless" animals and children, to our most hapless employees, to our most immiserated immigrants and refugees. To say nothing of - at least if we are to believe ISIS et al - an apparently surging number of infidels. AKA Muslims In Name Only (MINOs).

In short, if you love something, don't ever let it go. Kill it if necessary, terrorize it as the opportunity presents itself, but by all means don't . . .

Conversely, what's the point of loving anything that can't - or, worst of all, refuses - to be fixed?

(Edited.)

Nietzsche - and Dilbert - Revisited

Insanity is rare in individuals. In large 21st-century organizations, it isn't just the rule: it's something they call global stability.

Why Our Winning Formula Is Trump-Proof: A Tale of Two Anglospheres

Here's something I think I more or less grasp. But as is often the case, I may need some help in one or more areas.

What I've been noticing is a certain historiographic(?) tendency at work, in recent years, in the English-speaking world.

The tendency is for the last third of the Twentieth Century to really beat up on the first two-thirds. Or rather, more precisely, for certain educated people in our century, who read, study or are interested in history, to use the last third of the Twentieth as a stick (or at least a rod of comparison and correction?) with which to beat up on the first two-thirds. Almost as if the earlier part of the century had been everywhere, without exception, so very much stupider, and more evil, and in general more grossly inferior in every respect to the later part that - lo, the period 1900-1966 has virtually nothing at all to teach us wise hypermoderns. Except, of course, by way of negative example. In short, a true and brutal wasteland, from start to finish - and in ways that even dear old Father Eliot (our Age's literary founder?) could never have conceived, much less calculated.

And not just in the world at large. Or in admittedly awful places like most of Europe and Asia at the time. But even - and sometimes especially - in what is nowadays often called the Anglosphere.*

*And perhaps deservedly so? After all, if the penchant for, say, totalitarianism was bad enough in oppressed places like Germany, Russia, China and Japan, think how much worse - how much more insidious and deadly - it must have been in those Anglophone and other white imperialist countries whose oppression drove those poor Germans, Russians, etc, to such madness?

Now I realize that not every apparent bully is wrong. And sometimes the seeming victim fully deserves the beating he gets. All the more reason, it seems to me, why we should try and understand how much more racially, culturally, economically, sexually enlightened times like ours can feel tempted to look down on other eras that are less enlightened. And even feel amply justified doing so. And especially when the previous era's want of enlightenment makes it seem less productive, by today's enlightened standards. Or less efficiency-driven. Or less willing to assign, to those main drivers (as we all know today) of both innovation and customer satisfaction - namely, the Executive Management Levels of Business - a more deservedly central place in the human scheme of things.

So, at least, runs my understanding of the dominant rhetoric of our time.

Now I also realize that any rhetoric - even of an official or mainstream kind - may be at best a very poor mirror of what's actually happening in a culture. At the same time, I think the official rhetoric often reflects pretty accurately what many or most people want to be happening in their culture. Or what they think or believe is happening. Or if nothing else, what they'd like other people to believe is happening.

Anyhow, here is the message I've been getting, concerning a principal difference between two historic Anglospheres: (1) that of our time - including that latter third of the Twentieth Century which, I would argue, we moderns have mostly inherited and maintained - and (2) that of the first two-thirds.

And I have yet to be convinced that the message is essentially wrong.

In the English-speaking world of roughly 1900-1966, business was generally understood to have a key place and a necessary function in society. So it was understood, I take it, by many if not most people - including not a few who disliked capitalism, or at very least thought it ought to be run differently (e.g., by the State, by workers' co-operatives, by management-labor boards, etc). Whereas in the period roughly from 1966 to more or less the present, it became almost axiomatic to most people - including many who didn't especially like or trust business - that the place of business was in fact everywhere. And particularly incorporated business. And that a progressive, dynamic, innovative society was one that did not so much understand business as having a key function within some larger social scheme, but rather understood itself - the society - as being but one of the many places, facets and functions of business.

In the first two-thirds of the century there arose an expectation that was to some extent fulfilled. The expectation was that business would use technology, innovation and growth (TIG) to correspond itself to, and to integrate its products ever further into, the lives, first of its customers, and then of consumers generally, in its host countries. Whereas in the final third of the century the expectation was almost diametrically the opposite. It became more and more widely assumed that business - and in particular global business - would use TIG (technology, innovation and growth) not only to conform but to integrate, first its immediate customers, and then consumers in general throughout the globe, ever more fully into the life, needs, procedures, schedules, products, etc, of business. Alpha and Omega, you know.

Now I'd like you to note two (2) chief points from what I've discussed. The first is beyond dispute. The second is - well, in any case it ought to be beyond dispute.

1) How much more globally egalitarian and non-discriminatory business has become in our time as compared to the earlier period. Because while it may be true that in the earlier 20th century business was expected to conform itself to its clientele, the fact is that the clients themselves were largely drawn from its host (i.e., mostly oppressive white imperialist) countries. Whereas in the period leading up to our time, the assumption is that business will naturally try to conform to itself customers and clients of every description throughout the globe, in a way that does not merely disregard, but overcomes, and indeed dissolves borders.

2) If you've been wondering why business - and our economic culture in general - has in our time become not only so much more dynamic, inventive, innovative and productive (than in that bad old barbarous earlier 20th century), but so much better at improving the real quality of life of both workers and consumers everywhere (and not just in places like China and India) - well, now you have your answer.

The Road Back from Emmaus

While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

And he said to them, “What is this conversation that you are holding with each other as you walk?” And they stood still, looking sad.

Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” And he said to them, “What things?” And they said to him, “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see.”
                                                                                       Luke 24: 15-24 (ESV)


Notice, the hardest road is always the one to Emmaus. We only know Jesus in the here and now, and what He has been to us in this only-too-limited, 3-years-or-so space of our puny lives. What we really don't know (in those immortal words, not of Luke, but of St John the Evangelist) is where He has come from. And from whom. So how could we possibly imagine - much less draw hope and solace from - where He's going to?

We - you and I, Cleopas and his companion - have only known Jesus as one adult among so many others, among all the rest of us, however exalted-yet-incredible that one unique Life. And that's the crux of our predicament. That's why no amount of tales of an empty tomb or a (surely?) grotesque resuscitated corpse could, even if true, ever be of any real comfort or reassurance to us: we haven't yet seen His whole Divinity, doing what it alone does best - imbuing, refreshing, revivifying the whole of His humanity, and ours. In order to know physically, sensibly (assuming it were possible) His entire God-in-manhood, we'd have to be able to see something like - I don't know, His entire human life? from conception to crucifixion? - simultaneously. But now suppose you had known Him from the very onset of His life, or indeed the very instant of His conception. Would that have given you what is in a sense the supreme faith, the knowledge that a Divine humanity is different? That it is Something so instinct with love as to be able to outlast, rebound from, overcome, defeat, even this unspeakable horror, that you saw with your own eyes just yesterday?

The question as I see it, then, is whether, if we had a certain Mother's kind of love, we would be able to believe through the nightmare of crucifixion, to the ecstasy of resurrection and ascension.

As usual, I can only offer my own opinion.

In a sense, origins are everything, because only they encompass everything that follows. In a sense, every oak is its acorn. Even redemption itself would fail to pierce us to the Chaucerian root, except that like its God it is retroactive, and so changes us wholly, in every room of the expanding house of our lives. Which is to include, of course, not just main and showcase rooms, but attic, cellar, larder, etc. To say nothing of those most exquisitely green, secret, shadowy surrounding grounds and pools (at least when their Gardener is allowed to breathe and rain on them). Redemption always accompanies us to our beginnings, because only from there does any thing move forward. Thank God we have a God to whom time is merely a point on a line that can be shifted at will. How else, indeed, are we going to grasp the totality of any creature (much more any creator), than by loving and knowing its first breath, its most vulnerable and receptive, its most longing, hungering, remembering point? So why the dismissal of infants? Why refuse them, of all creatures, Baptism?

We orthodox Christians confess the Incarnation. Which is to say, our God didn't choose to become and redeem only the pristine, complete humanity of Adam. Notice how He doesn't come barging in on us, Athena-like, as a full-grown, fully-wise adult; rather does He slip in largely unnoticed, He comes "all so still": an all-needy infant, a playful curious child, a difficult adolescent, with real, worrying parents. Jesus embraces the whole of Adam, not just as he came forth from God, but as he comes down to and from us. And so of course the Son encompasses, descends into, excavates, irrigates, cultivates our whole human nature not just at its Edenic pre-eminence, but at its most fallen lowliness, and its most infantine helplessness. Nor does He leave His Deity standing in the doorway (as we might imagine it) - tight-lipped, arms folded, tapping foot - but takes It with Him! through every furthest, most forgotten room, closet, passage-way, window and staircase. Jesus enters into, He immerses Himself in the "very least" of our humanity, so as to saturate every merest cell with no ordinary divinity, but One even we can digest.

Milk for babes, as they say, before there can be any question of solid food. But if the childhood of God leaves us cold, how are we ever going to warm to, embrace, digest, His maturity? If we can't the taste the savor, the riches, the abundance of His mere birth (or even His conception?), how will we ever stomach the poverty of crucifixion?