The Essence of Fatherhood Is The Giving Of Gifts
What is the activity of the father toward the son? He gives his son gifts. And Giving is not an incidental activity, nor even some chosen discipline extrinsic to the father’s core — the giving of good things to the son ”is” the father. God is love.
This giving is not for any purpose. The father has no particular end in sight, except the blessedness of the son. And the greatest the son can receive is to receive the father. They love each other, and will, forever.
What is a gift? An ability. A power. A skill, knowledge, sensitivity, perception. There is no limit to the list, for the sum of all the gifts is the father’s character, which, insofar is the father is a father, is infinite.
Since all gifts are abilities, and that means a personal ability which the father possessed before he could give it, then all true gifts are personal and to recieve a gift is to participate in the personhood of the giver. Yet each gift frees the son ever more to be himself, since his own personhood is bigger now, and not at all a reduplication of the father, but rather a variation on the father, subsuming all that the father is, and then more, because the gift in the son is now the father/son in the son.
I Taught Myself to Live Simply (Anna Akhmatova)
I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life’s decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.
Sex and Violence
I think it’s pretty clear that God made us to 1) enjoy our own spouses’ nakedness (but no-one else’s), and 2) be non-violent. The closer we can come to these primal conditions, the better. They are not unconnected, as it first appears, since both fidelity and peace are simply aspects of love. When Jesus changes the heart these expressions of love become more nearly natural to us. Otherwise, like all standards of behavior which do not carry grace, they make us despair.
Yes, sex and violence are connected in the all-embracing law of love but talk about them tends quickly to confusion, so let’s talk about them separately.
Sex: God draws bright lines. Inside marriage there is no restraint on full visual eros, but outside the nuptial bower He gives the gift of modesty, just as full. There is no biblical visual depiction of sex from the spectator’s point of view. (Contrast this with violence: there are many descriptions of violent acts, both just and unjust.) There are one phrase descriptions: “rape”, or “Adam knew his wife”. So sex was not made to be seen, from the outside. At all. (We might add that if you’re only watching, you’re falling short of the glory of God.)
In Orthodox iconography the the profile is the beginning of absence. The icon assumes a personal I-Thou relation between the viewer and the person(s) on the board. Likewise, God made the naked human form for an I-Thou moment. The female form is for the husband to look at. So in God’s visual vocabulary there are agnostic lacunae, and here is one of them. Sex is to be un-picturable. The two lovers look at each other, but no-one else looks at THEM. Why? For the same reason that hearing God’s voice is un-describable: the love is so pure the subject-object distinction breaks down — this is ecstacy — and in the midst of the act the perception of the beloved’s form is no longer distinguishable as a separate complex.
Technology births and kills culture
Technical progress yields leisure, which is liberation from the deperate pursuit of food and shelter. Leisure makes culture possible. Culture flourishes, which means the heart of man elaborates itself like a seed unfolding into a tree with good and evil branches. As culture develops, then, it’s parts are increasingly hostile to each other and in the end, the center cannot hold. The basis for common culture disappears into plurality and the culture breaks apart and dies.
Roman 8.3-7
The experience of victory in the NT hinges on something like “attention to the matters of the Spirit”.
The Most Direct Argument
How wonderful, though, that there are uses for the internet other than incessant arguments about politics and about religion. Flickr and other sites open out into a subculture of visual art which can be enjoyed in mental quietude.
What a change it is to decide your vocation is image rather than word! That every day there are jillion words crafted to move opinion and, for the most part, this is like planting your feet and pushing hard on the earth to move it. People’s opinions about God, politics, and radishes emerge from their individual precognitive soup.
But, ah, look again at the Sistine Chapel. There is a statement you either rejoice in or ignore. You don’t argue.
The Perennial Ignorance
In my judgment, the most destructive thing that any government can do, second only to hauling its citizens out of their beds and having them shot, it to endeavor to fix prices. The folly of price controls is as well established as heliocentrism, and, when a populace is ignorant on this basic point of economics, disastrous consequences can result.
