On Socialization and Homeschooling

In a room of 100 public school teachers, do this little thought-experiment (don’t tell them what it is about):

1. Ask them to write down 3 traits they like about themselves, and the people who, in each case, they most learned that trait from.

2. Ask them to write down a moment in their lives when they started down a path they now regard as a wrong path. Then, ask them to name the one person who was most influencing them at that point in their lives.

If they are sufficiently unaware of your agenda as to not bias the answers, the overwhelming majority (perhaps all) of the answers to #1 will NOT be friends from school, and the overwhelming majority (perhaps all) of #2’s answers WILL be friends from school.

Case closed. THEY don’t believe the “socialization” in public schools is positive. It is simply a religious dogma they have required themselves to believe.

Memorial Day 2007

In the flowered hills God is easy to believe in, but what we know as religion is unnecessary. The flowers are what they are: wondrous, but not morally complex. When the flower dies, it effortlessly becomes life for other flowers.  It does not raise the question of the rightness of its death.

But with people, death raises the question of justice, which demands an entire moral context.  As you walk  into the suburbs from the countryside and then into the great cities you need a moral matrix for the blood.  It is the city which demands a religion from God — not the other way around.

Jesus, among the country peasants, talks in agrarian parables about the omnipresence of the Kingdom. He asks us to see and hear deeply, and act as if all moments are tiny seeds of something that will grow overnight into richness. But when He enters Jerusalem (The City) His talk evolves into dramatic liturgies of wine which is really blood and blood which is really love. It is not enough to see and hear deeply; an Exchange must be made to answer the weight of blood.

I walk in a country graveyard. The unanswered bloods of the nearby city are tucked away here in the landscape, out of sight and sound, but weighing like debt weighs on principal. The texts tell me that God has also died ignominiously and out of time, that God has also had His days amputated, suffered the loveless look in the eyes of the prosecutor.

I believe that He must have, or else this graveyard would explode with its own outrage. That Jesus died and won the right to judge the quick and dead — this, I suppose, is why they still sleep under their stones and the bees still buzz hypnotically. From the beginning till now, the mocker in my head says, the flowers and bees have woven their simple contemplations. Where is the promise of His coming?

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In the flowered hills God is not difficult to believe in. He seems close, without analysis. People in the country tend to believe in God not because they are simple but because nature simply laves the eyes and heart with no intermediary — look, the sunset!

But in the cities He is far, far away. We have gathered here in order to not need Him. We reject His law as the artifact of a childish age and decide we can relate to one another directly, with no intermediary structure, just like we can see the sunset. As our numbers rise we produce massive quantities of words, thoughts, art, psychological commentary, even new subjects. We are complex to one another. He is on the far side of all that, somewhere. He is buried beneath the layers and layers of amorphous junk that people exude in their relational spaces. It ends in Sex and the City. It ends in reality television.

You want to see people relate to each other directly, without intermediary? Watch one of those reality shows where two people sit in a “house” and try to sort out their “relationship” in the utter freedom that is modern urban secularity. With no moral laws. As they talk, type the transcript in your head, and be amazed at the inarticulate subhuman structure of the thought. Their language literally fails. When there is no moral (read: legal, imposed by a bigger Person) — when there is no legal structure, there is no way to love. All that is left is the self.

When both are selves whose trump card is self-actualization, neither “friend” can make any claim on the other. Without a claim, all the one can say to the other is “like, I feel like you don’t respect me” answered by “like, I do respect you, but I gotta do my thang, you know, like…”

There you have it. We thought we could just have each other, and forget Him. I’m not always sure God exists, but I have metaphysical certainty that we need Him to.

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What does this have to do with Memorial Day? This secular city life is more plausible the further away death seems. These inarticulate blatherings are the voice of the young, and the voice of a city where life is getting longer and longer and richer and richer. It is not the voice of Manhatten after 9/11.

Am I rooting for catastrophe to bring God back, then? No, I’m discovering anew the wisdom of yet another monkish piety: momento mori. Remember your own death, every day. and live accordingly. Is this morbid? No, try it. You might discover in it a path to human love.

Wilson v. Hitchens, part 5.

Wilson and Hitchens continue to debate God’s existence over at the Christianity Today blog, here.

There are about 5 rounds now, all good.

I agree with Wilson’s side but I enjoy Hitchens’ writing just as much, even when he is making arguments I consider silly.

Act without wanting

We possess singleness when we are not pulled in opposite directions and when we act without wanting.

– unknown

Romantic nostalgia (posted at Boar’s Head Tavern)

The Boar’s Head Tavern » Francis Beckwith

Meh. I have this theory that a large plurality of evangelicals who become Roman Catholics think they’re becoming Lutherans. I mean, a lot of them think they’re getting a historic liturgy, ancient practice, and an evangelical understanding of grace with a sacramental package providing assurance. But what they’re really getting is crappy Marty Haugen rites, medieval novelty, and dogmatic doubt. I mean, you almost never see evangelicals swimming the Tiber because they’re really excited about being able to get indulgences, sacrificing Masses to get their grandmas out of purgatory, or doubting whether they’re in the state of grace.

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“Liturgy without sacrament just doesn’t work”

Cruising Down the Coast of the High Barbaree: Liturgy: The Treasure of Lutheranism

The liturgy first of all has the Real Presence at its heart. That’s why Protestants desperate for the steadiness and objective piety of Christian liturgy are destined to either not remain Protestants or see their liturgical renewal movements wilt quicker than a morning glory. Protestants try to co-opt the liturgy without restoring the Sacrament at its heart. It just doesn’t work, and when it doesn’t, they often go to Rome. But that’s because they don’t the other crucial aspect of the liturgy, either.

If the liturgy’s heart is the Real Presence, its lifeblood is the proclamation of the Gospel. So when you have an edifice of dogma that militates against the Gospel of the God who justifies sinners freely for the sake of Christ through faith alone, it’s going to damage the understanding of the liturgy as setting in which God comes to his people and forgives their sins. People are going to tend to understand it as law-keeping, a sacrificial act, cultural expression, the calculated creation of an “otherworldly” atmosphere, or something along those lines. And thus, the occasionally necessary acts of liturgical reform and adaptation will generally have something other than the Gospel at their heart, and do as much to damage the liturgical tradition as to help it.

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excerpt: The Derriere Guard

Stefania de Kenessey — The Derriere Guard

Until the opening of the twentieth century, Western music had offered, at its best, a perfect blend of emotion and intellect, with the heart and the mind governing and assisting each other. With the onset of modernism, that balance was jettisoned in favor of a carefully calculated rationalism. Can beauty, after all, be proven to exist, with absolute certainty, beyond the shadow of a doubt? The answer of our age, sadly, has been (in the arts as in philosophy) that we cannot know beauty to exist, ergo, beauty does not, in fact, exist. The pure rationalism that provided the background for the spectacular success of all the sciences from astronomy to medicine became the undoing of the arts. Because the arts are the traditional repositories of values that may be ultimately ungraspable, but without which human life is also unimaginable: beauty, truth and love.

(bold mine)

The central logical error of modern man, in all areas of thought, is to arbitrarily reduce the data set by the criterion of certainty.  The function of that criterion is nothing other than intellectual ease.  We declare that what is not repeatable in controlled environments does not, therefore, exist.  The reason we so declare is that we prefer to work in controlled experiments.  We find it more convenient.

A Response to Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great…”

No, not by me, but by Douglas Wilson, who is writing a chapter by chapter response over on his blog “Blog and Mablog”. His posts are here.

God’s Grandeur (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

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Gift (Czeslaw Milosz, 1911–2004)

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

Milosz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.