Holy Hunger

"For paradise we long. For perfection we were made. We don't know what it would look or feel like, but we must settle for nothing less. This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives; it drives our ambition." - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

Much to my surprise, I keep being led to reflect on passages in this book that I've never written about before. Not exclusively, but still. 

For most sins, it's easy to see something good that has been corrupted. They tend to represent some basic human need that has become a disproportionate priority. Each of the seven deadly sins has a corresponding virtue identified as its cure or counterpart. Those virtues are not the need grown out of control, but the approach to bringing balance back into our lives. While Fr. Neuhaus isn't specifically calling out sin here, what he's expressing is the longing that can lead to several of the deadly sins, including greed, gluttony, envy, and lust. And he seems to be saying to be careful not to throw the baby out with the disgusting bath water. 

"The hunger is for nothing less than paradise, nothing less than perfect communion with the Absolute--with the Good, the True, the Beautiful--communion with the perfectly One in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together at last and forever. We must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled." - ibid.

Don't let the longing grow out of proportion into sin, but neither squelch it out. I've skipped the part about how our friendships and loves are unsatisfactory, less than whole efforts to fulfill this longing, because to me it's more important to remember how they give us the greatest satisfaction when we receive them in the context of the greater longing for the Perfect. Each time we allow God's love to form a relationship in our lives we must avoid the temptation to grasp it and twist it into something that meets only our needs and desires. When we do, we find that those become part of how God works in and through us to create a fellowship that is the smallest insight into the perfect one we will finally enter into one day. Sometimes we are privileged to work on the twisted parts of those relationships and let God make them more conducive to his plan for our eternal lives.

When I come back to read these words, I want to remember that they were written in a time of great turmoil, as Russia has invaded the Ukraine. Even Putin's desire to recreate (his flawed recollections of) Soviet glory has roots in something not entirely evil. Our battle is still spiritual, as is our enemy. (That doesn't at all mean that we should let him have his way.) Even though I am now too old to be required to fast on this Ash Wednesday, I have entered into prayer and fasting anyway, and am offering the hunger in my belly as a further prayer for the protection of the people of Ukraine and an unlikely change of heart for those who have undertaken this invasion.

Yes, I believe her

Everyone acknowledges she was sexually assaulted.

If they think it's reasonable that she might not accurately remember who her assailant was, they should get on their knees and thank God that they don't know shit about sexual assault/abuse.

As any father would

Headline in my e-mail: "White House says Trump weighed in on son’s Russia meeting statement ‘as any father would’"

And still they don't understand the problem with nepotism.

Opioids. I hate opioids.

Drugs, in general, really. After all, it was mainlining speed that caused the staph infection that killed my sister.

This young man's life would have been loss enough even had he not left young children behind.

The Gambia

What a disconcerting event, which the developed world seems to be largely ignoring because, after all, This Is (only) Africa.

Regarding the word "Republic" in its official name: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

For the first time ever

I reallocated my retirement fund balances based on the news before the markets opened. I realize that probably won't happen that fast, but still.

I think that it's no coincidence that Brexit and the Trump candidacy are happening in the same year.

Neglecting our responsibilities, with cause

I suppose I could be referring to never having any time to express a worthwhile thought anymore. The new job is great, but getting out the door in time for work in the morning has put a damper on my early-morning writing, and accessing social media even on breaks is verboten in my new workplace. Evenings have been crazy busy, too. But at last I have a few minutes to gather a few thoughts from the last week.

My feelings are probably not sufficiently in touch with the citizens of Paris. But then, most Westerners' feelings haven't been sufficiently in touch with the citizens of Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan for entirely too long. The attack in Paris was supposed to be shocking, but I am not shocked anymore by what we will do to each other in God's name, or that of Justice. From our perspective, the perpetrators of terrorist acts have been primarily Islamic extremists, but those whose homes are destroyed by war may not make such a distinction in who they blame for their homelessness. Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that collateral damage in attempting to combat evil is the same as intentional attack on innocent people, just that I understand why those collateral victims might have a different opinion from mine.

I hope I always remember what the rabbi at the NYC memorial service after 9/11 said. The gist of it was that great threat of evil is not what it does to us from without, but what we become in response to it. And the evil that we have encountered over the past fourteen years has apparently made us a fearful, defensive people, incapable of understanding others' pain. I understand the feelings of my friends who refuse to extend a welcome to those displaced by war in their home country. But their anti-terrorist-cum-anti-Muslim fear prevents Christian refugees from taking shelter among us, too. We seem to have forgotten that the entire Sunni-vs.-Shiite conflict in the Islamic-dominated lands leaves Christians with nowhere to turn. "I don't care," they may protest; it isn't worth the risk, hunkering down in their shells in the middle of the highway.

Really, though, that makes it sound as if my motivation is the same as theirs - determining who best deserves to find a refuge - when I'm really just making an observation about a side effect of what seems to be a predominant view of the "religious right." I find myself disagreeing with their protectionist stance.

I could invoke Franklin, I guess, whose adage about those who would trade liberty for safety could probably be easily extended to those who would protect their own well-being at the expense of those who are far worse off. Or maybe we could talk in terms of lust-filled David, whose royal harem was insufficient to quench his lust for poor Uriah's wife.

But while I recognize that we have a responsibility to look after the safety of our own citizens, the image that keeps coming to my mind is how my Lord treated me when I was his enemy. He did not shrink back from the harm I would do to him, but in his great love and compassion ran forward to embrace the worst hurt that I had to offer, that he might thereby win me to himself. I have long held that it is impossible to simultaneously love another and protect oneself, and that is the true nature of the debate.

To hear us talk, I think it's time to scratch that inscription off the base of that wonderful gift we got from France almost 130 years ago, though. We've become to afraid to care any longer who else yearns to breathe free.

Transforming (phase 4) - Jesus appears to the disciples on the lakeshore (step 31) - session 1b

Jn 21 (cont.)

Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.

Jesus said to them, "Children, have you any fish?" They answered him, "No."  

He said to them, "Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some." So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in, for the quantity of fish. - (4-6)

"Have you found what you are looking for? Look here and you will find it!"

Assuming, of course, that we are looking for something good. We often don't. We ask God for things that are not good for us, and we get upset when he doesn't provide them.

But we also seek things that are good in the wrong place, or in a way that destroys their goodness. I can't help but think about those who are rioting in Baltimore tonight in the name of "justice." What was done to Freddy Gray was a terrible wrong, and those who did it should be held accountable. But what the looters and rioters are doing is not justified. The wheels of justice grind slowly; i

t took two years for a conviction on the Boston Marathon bombing. Rage, however, especially in response to powerlessness, is impatient. 

Societal light amid darkness:

(Where it is and where it isn't.)

Sometimes we just don't get it.

Jonathan Jones writes for the Guardian, and he's apparently having one of those moments. I've never read anything he's written before, so I don't know just how usual this is for him. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it is a rare slip, even as I observe that he has missed what is far and away the important point of this photo in his frustration over the viral status of the "hug felt 'round the world."

The cop appears to be comforting the boy. After all the anger, all the divisions, here is a moment of human reconciliation.

What nonsense. It is one moment among many, and the choice to look at it and celebrate it is clearly a choice to be lulled by cotton candy. It has got more than 400,000 Facebook shares. Each one of those shares is a choice of what to see and what not to see. 

He's right, of course, that anyone who interprets this photo as representative of the current state of race relations in America, particularly between minority communities and the authorities who are supposed to be - and who are largely dedicated to - making their neighborhoods safer, is choosing to embrace naivete, to don rose-colored glasses and sing Kumbaya 'round the campfire rather than take a hard look at the daunting work that remains to be done to address a huge set of complicated issues which the events of Ferguson (and Staten Island, and elsewhere in the U.S.) are calling into sharper focus. Or, as Jones puts it,

Liking this picture as a definitive image of America’s race crisis is the equivalent of locking yourself in and turning up the volume to weep at Frozen while the streets are burning outside. 

I was hoping that the majority of likes for this picture, which Jones decries as inherently untruthful, are for a deeper truth that we realize and he overlooks. But I've since seen this going around with text that underlines his concern, that seems to paint a prettier picture of the status of race in America. This divide is clearest to me as I continue to talk with my friends, most of whom are white and middle-class, who universally don't get what all the fuss is about. It is, therefore, important for commentators like Jones to continue to draw this picture for us.

But I suspect that, for many of us, our appreciation for this photo is not rooted in any assumption that it indicates the status of relations between minorities and authorities. Rather, we recognize that it offers an important part of the real and lasting answer to this problem. All of the systemic changes in the world are not going resolve this if they are not accompanied by real, person-to-person contact. That's the hopeful thing we like in this picture, not that "See, everything's okay!" but "Yes, this is part of what it is going to take."

And yet we still very much need to address systematic issues of inequality. It remains critically important to examine the many ways societal history has put minorities on a disadvantaged playing field and determine how to address them. It is important that we not repeat this history among the Hispanic population. We must understand that we can't have a just society when a whole segment of it has a well-rooted fear of the people who are supposed to be keeping them safe. Anyone who thinks that picture of one cop hugging one tear-filled boy changes that is indeed myopic.

And this afternoon in the news is another non-indictment that will make matters worse again. Just as I point out the truth that Mr. Jones claims this photo lacks, so too I must acknowledge the truth that he proclaims. Things are likely to get worse before they get better, and they aren't going to get better at all without everyone involved taking a hard look at their own part of the problem instead of blaming the other guy.

The encounter in this photo is still a good and, yes, a true thing.

If there are some who would use it to tell a false narrative, that has been the case even for the very Incarnation of Truth.

Nobody has asked me, but:

What do I think about the latest Ray Rice news?

• I think what Ray did was reprehensible. 
• I think there's good reason why the justice process is not generally played out in the public eye. Everyone is distraught about this assault, which was bad. But the police see way worse domestic violence every. single. day.  Should it be that way? No, of course not. In one sense I am glad of the outcry: we should feel offended.
• I've never been more glad that my own worst moment can't be broadcast nationally.
• I'm completely tired of people's self-righteous indignation. Our lack of grace is appalling.

I knew a guy once who served six consecutive weekends for what I heard him describe as "beating the crap out of my old lady." This was a misdemeanor conviction, and the dude was no celebrity. He didn't get the same diversion program as what Ray is in, as our state doesn't believe in programs that leave no conviction record, but he was able to serve his time in a way that let him keep his job and provide for his family. I'm pretty confident Ray didn't get more lenient or severe treatment from the state because of being a football player. What: he shouldn't have been eligible for the program because he's famous?

The more commentary I read on this - professional and otherwise - the angrier I get. Most of it has just been self-righteousness dressed up as righteous indignation.

If my son-in-law ever faces his issues as he needs to, I hope I respond to him with more compassion than Ray is getting. Now the Ravens have cut Ray. I hope he and his wife can get on with their lives, healing what they need to and becoming the people they need to be.

A problem I don't have

I just read an article about the trend of politicians deleting items from their Twitter feeds and websites that were posted prior to their having all the facts on their subject. The latest example concerns the recently released POW who has been in the news, who some politicians anointed as a hero before learning the murky circumstances of his capture.

I sometimes delete posts from my Facebook page (rarely) or from here, but my reason for doing so isn't usually the same. Usually it's just a matter of realizing that the particular thoughts I've expressed are potentially hurtful to someone. Increasingly, I tend to realize this prior to posting them in the first place. On rare occasions, though, I just need to know that there's at least someone, somewhere in the world who knows what is on my mind before I delete a post.

Today's word

Well, sort of. It wasn't from one of my usual sources, but was based on something I read from a recent interview that I haven't had a chance to rant about. And it isn't a "word" so much as a "term."

Civil disobedience - Refusal to obey government demands or commands and nonresistance to consequent arrest and punishment. (Concise Encyclopedia entry)

It seems to me people are lately ignoring the second half of this in favor of the mere dictionary definition -"refusal to obey governmental demands or commands especially as a nonviolent and usually collective means of forcing concessions from the government" - but it's this willingness to bear the consequences which distinguishes 20th century heroes like Ghandi, King, and Mandela from this recent news maker and interviewee. The key attitude must be "I believe in what I am doing so thoroughly that I am willing to go to jail for doing it."

The interviewee seems, rather, to suffer from delusions of heroism.

I am blessed to know people in the pro-life movement who have gone to jail for their actions. In each case, it turned out that they hadn't really broken the law, and were merely being persecuted. But they were willing to bear this persecution in consequence of the actions in which they so thoroughly believed. And even when those consequences were proven to be unjust, they maintained a peaceful heart toward their persecutors.

150 year anniversary

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. - Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, PA, November 19, 1863, as subsequently autographed and signed by Lincoln

The piece that the right is ignoring:

"If you start insuring a bunch of previously uninsured people, without any choice but to take them no matter what health conditions they bring to the table, then the average costs per customer have to go up." - this is the gist of the "simple math" argument against the ACA.

And actually, that's pretty undeniably true.

In the short term.

But the financing of the (heretofore) uninsured will shift from hospitals (and other providers) to insurance companies (along with the premium subsidies from the federal government). Hospitals have been trained over recent decades to inflate what they charge to cover the significant percentage of uninsured patients whose treatment they often eventually have to write off. Of course, this is why they've been able to offer insurers far lower pricing for the same procedure for which they charge private citizens a far higher rate. For many of these, they never receive any payment at all; the ones that do pay usually require service from an inflated staff/paid external billing service to deal with all of the follow-up payment issues. So in the short term, yes, the cost of insurance is going to increase. But in the longer term, if health care providers should be able to reduce their charges because there will be a higher percentage of treatment for which they are paid. If they don't, new providers should be able to step in and improve the competitiveness of the marketplace, which will reduce what insurers have to pay.

The real trick is going to be to get insurers to return this money to the pockets of customers in the form of reduced premiums, rather than lining those of stockholders. But if they don't it won't take long until new insurers step in to address this inflated market, too.

So I still don't know how I feel about the whole program, but I'm not going to jump to a conclusion based on the short term increase in premiums, even should it prove to be significant.

Tragedy

Praying this morning for all of the OKC-area tornado victims.

My mind keeps coming back . . .

. . . to Michael W. Smith's Agnus Dei. As it does, I keep being tempted to scold myself a little for not having a more practical or somehow more appropriate response to yesterday's events in Boston. Then I realize that this is precisely the first response I am supposed to have, and that all other responses must flow from it. Yes, I must lament with those who have lost loved ones, who have been brutally wounded. God certainly does. But the terrible statement that yesterday's bombing makes is against us, not against God. Nothing diminishes God.

O God, come to our assistance! Lord, make haste to help us!!

Newtown and the 2nd Amendment

It has always been true, and it always will be: we can be safe, or we can be free.

I think this debate needs to be held, and we need to understand as much as we can what is at stake in both options.  As we discuss it with each other, we will undoubtedly invoke all the passion that we feel on both sides of the issue.  I have strong feelings on both sides warring within me, in fact.

We need to understand the 2nd Amendment's intention - which has never been to protect our right to hunt.  And we always need to be very careful about what rights we are willing to yield to our "benevolent government," particularly in these days in which the governability of the people - our own citizens and those who enter our nation from abroad using the transportation means which are available today - may be at an all-time low.

The freedom which we may yield because of our fear will be sorely missed should the tyranny of our government ever rise to the level from which we seized our freedom by force. And we should never trust our government to be immune from such tyranny.

With all that said, I do not know what the wise path is in the face of today's challenges.  I know I must trust God for my security, but do not know the degree to which he would call me to defend this freedom which our founders found so essential as to give it second place in our Bill of Rights. But why should we expect it to be sacrosanct when those listed first are themselves under assault?

Has the American experiment already failed, overcome by some combination of the threats of technology, population boom,  mental health issues and lack of good sense, and we have simply not recognized it yet?

Which loss will our posterity mourn more acutely: their fallen peers, or the right to take up their own arms when necessary?

I fear the wisdom of Solomon is insufficient for this dilemma.

God, help us to know the way that is truly wise, and to trust you in it.

I believe I'll wait . . .

. . . until after the Mayan apocalypse to catch up on any new words-of-the-day I missed while on vacation.

Casting stones

Bobby Petrino has lost his job, and deserves to lose his family, though I hope he'll be able to make the changes he needs in order to reconcile with them and be the husband he should be.  He has admitted to an inappropriate relationship with a young woman, and although that only occurred after he tried to cover up his dalliance, it is now an established fact.

So why was there a news article yesterday outlining the number and timing of phone calls which serve only to confirm what he has already admitted?  And why is there another today outlining the series of text messages that occurred prior to his firing?  Why are these things considered newsworthy?  (Did the reporter also have access to texts with Petrino's paramour?  If so, he or she at least deserves credit for not including them in the article, too.)

Let the man do what he needs to do, and leave him alone.  What more is to be accomplished by airing his weaknesses in public?

The verdict is in

The angels were stunned, the stars hid their light, the universe went silent at the audacity of it, the wrongness of it, the outrageousness of it.  The Judge of the guilty is himself judged guilty.  Here now at last, in all the thick catalogue of human rebellion, is the lie so brazen as to surely bring down upon the heads of the insurrectionists a punishment swift and terrible. But no, the prisoner standing in the dock calmly responds, "For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice." - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


The judgment to which Fr. Neuhaus refers is not merely the judgment carried out upon Jesus of Nazareth. He spends a couple pages developing the idea of how we conclude that we are not to blame for the wrong in the world, and that therefor God is guilty, or nonexistent. But our audacious judgment meets its match in Jesus' willingness to accept it.

But how, we must ask, is God glorified by the humiliation and death of God? This great reversal of everything we think we know is too much to bear. Dark is light and light is dark, right is wrong and wrong is right and a lie is recruited to the service of the truth. The order of things is shattered. Precisely so, our disordered order is shattered so that things might be restored to order. - ibid.

I'm not sure we've ever been so insistent on our own idea of order, on the rightness of how we understand the world to be, on fairness as we insist it must be, on our right to determine for ourselves (and impose upon others) what is really right, as we find ourselves in this day. God will not insist on restoring order for us. As long as we insist that we know best, we will be allowed to continue in our disordered order. But if, gazing upon the injustice of Jesus on the cross, we quietly consider why a just God might have accepted it even though it was so exemplifyingly unfair, perhaps we get humble enough to reject the logic that screams how justice must be, and that any opposing voice - no matter how tender - is that of oppression, and must be silenced.