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LACRIMAE RERUM, the tears of things

Posted by Zentrist on Thursday, January 22, 2009 11:32:17 PM
Back in my grad school, hard-drinking days, a pious man occasionally, out of pity perhaps, tried to save me.  He said __________, you have to remember the "tears of things."  Many years later, after a real job or two, I hit bottom.  I went to AA.  My eyes welled with tears as I listened to a Californian visitor "tell his story."  He talked about "the way it was, what happened, and the way it is today."  This is the AA way.  It works.  As they say, "we want to help you save your arse, not your soul."  Well, they helped me with both issues, and this May I'll probably make it, one day at a time, to my sixth year of continuous sobriety. 
     Those first few months in AA were utterly emotional and utterly real--both.  Sobriety is a good thing for a body and a soul. 
     Hannity's concerns notwithstanding, our tears all during the Inauguration Events which culminated yesterday in Amazing Grace indeed--these tears have been "emotional," obviously.  But they have also been in touch with something utterly "real."  Something True and something Beautiful.  The Prayer Service was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life, right up there with the Inauguration Events.  The Service brought back memories of President Clinton's first National Prayer Service:  the one at the Baptist Church, the Black Church (and I'm sorry I don't remember the name of the place).  But I'll never forget the shot of Clinton attending, sitting in his seat, listening to one of the more moving performances--and a big tear rolling unashamedly down his imposing cheek.  The sight of this almost always brings tears to my own eyes.  Inspired by Clinton's "call to service," I asked myself, in my then sobriety, What Should I Do?  I'd been turned away from the monastery I "applied" at; I'd been rejected by the Jesuits.  Then, in June of 1994, I was accepted at the diocesan seminary. 
     It is now almost fifteen years since then.  I'm happily married.  Sober in a major new way.  Doing worthwhile work.  (Manual labor, just like in the monasteries I visited in 1991, mostly Benedictine and Trappist, but also Carmelite and Carthusian.)  We are not even "middle class" if by that one means a combined income of over 100k, give or take.  We are, by that standard, very poor.  But sofa sogood, as one blogger signed his name. 
     Anyway, there were tears and more tears during the Inaugural Buildup, the Inauguration Aftermath--and then again at the National Prayer Service (I'm off on Tuesdays and Wednesdays).  Michelle Bernard, with Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, spoke movingly of her conversation with her five-year-old as she left the house early that morning.  I wish I could reproduce this--it's on tape somewhere.  Then, watching the great Juan Williams reflect on Reverend Lowery's prayer...this moved me to join Juan Williams in his tears.  I felt closer to God and I'm overdue for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. 
     Not much has been said about the amazing poem by Elizabeth Alexander.  That moment was timeless, couldn't catch my breath.  Rick Warren's prayer was incredibly beautiful in his own emotion and awe before the Hand of God clearly holding all together for us, here, now.  The music by Williams was perfectly suited for this occasion and it perfectly caught and raised up to the sublimest heights this experience beyond words.  The performers, Yo Yo Ma and Itzaak (the name means laughter) Perelman and Company transported even while they themselves wer transported and "translated," as a famous Shakespearean character put it in "Midsummer Night's Dream." 
     Obama said yesterday, in his commanding yet simple and direct way:  "This is quite a moment, quite an opportunity." What an understatement.  Mr. Hannity is foaming at the mouth today on radio. 
     Finally, Hillary brings hope, I hope, to those who know the Holocaust and all who know oppression and abuse.  Today she came out swinging after--Thank God--being confirmed.  She insists her staff get serious about the business of doing "something for America" and not for their "turf" and not necessarily for those towards whom we've kowtowed irrationally, in prejudice and thoughtlessness. 
     The "tears of things" as I recall comes from Vergil, "The Aneid."  But I could be wrong.  Anyhow, it's interesting how Hillary has been refering to Terence and other classical writers of late.  My own eyes surely welled up with tears, finally, during the supernatural singing of "Amazing Grace" by a man whose voice, face and preternatural sublimity I'll never, ever forget.  First he hummed it--I said he hummed it...in a voice so rich and resonant and deep that even just watching and listening to a 20-inch TV screen (albeit turned up loud) sent chills of joy and mixtures of thoughts and emotions all through the body and soul.  Just the thought that two (Clinton and Obama) among many giant souls were equally and superiorly enjoying to the max this magnificent piece--just the thought enhanced in Nietzschean fashion (not the nihilistic side) the simple and unadorned Rapture of this musical and vocal Event.  AMAZING GRACE. 
    And really finally, the thought that this National Prayer Service, with its transcendental beauty--I didn't mention the angelic choirs--or the spine-tingling Homily by Dr. Sharon E. Watkins---the thought that this event revolved around our new President while giving Glory to God--bodes well for the future of this Unusual Country.     
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Unto Caesar

Posted by Zentrist on Wednesday, January 07, 2009 1:28:50 AM
We are to give "unto Caesar" that which is his.  It's a pretty minimal amount.  I guess it depends who Caesar is, where, what period in history.  Imagine the decisions that had to be made and were made by countless thousands, millions of citizens during WWII.  I'm thinking especially of German citizens.  In one memoir (it happens to be our Holy Father's) one German citizen reliably spoke out, albeit not on a national stage, against Hitler and his regime.  This person was the current pope's father, a police officer in Bavaria.  (Read Ratzinger's /Milestones./ )  One wonders how, with what one knows today, one would have behaved in that time, in that place. 
 
"Render unto God the things that are God's."  We actually have a remarkable, living-lesson in this ancient dichotomy, Caesar versus God.  Our President is unusually eloquent in his Oval Office interview published today--with Cal Thomas.  With so many having "piled on" in the attacks against "W," you would never know that the jury is still, still out on his Decision, Bush the Decider's humongous and extraordinarily bold decision.  It may well turn out that this decision was, all things considered, a good one for America, for the Middle East and for the World.  Or it may take longer to know for sure.  Or we may never "really know" due to the complexity of the subject and the constantly changing historical "facts" and realities. 
 
About one thing we can be pretty sure, though.  President Bush did his level best to do right by his faith, by his duties as he perceived them, and by his country.  The way he "rendered unto Caesar" was not minimal or stingy--he gave a lot.  And it kind of shows in the grey hairs he now sports on his way out the door.  Bush rendered generously unto Caesar.  His contribution matches the one he made to "the Almighty." Let us all continue to hope and pray that these sacrifices have been pleasing to God. 
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City of God, City of Man

Posted by Zentrist on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 10:14:25 PM
It is one thing when you see your already paltry 401k go down and then down some more.  It is another when, due to a "glitch," your substantial deposit into your checking account, one week later, does not appear.  It's just not there.  It has disappeared--a good percentage of your nest egg has just disappeared. 
 
Folks, keep an eye on your bank, your receipts, your paperwork.  Don't be too distracted by the Holidays! 
 
This event shook me up a bit, but I watched my soul during the process.  I was alarmed at what I saw.  I'm inordinately attached to the things of this world, to the City of Man.  The "glitch" was corrected.  A "credit" was made to my account.  But it took two and one half hours of Kafka-esque tension and anxiety and even paranoia.  The banker who was "researching" the issue was using both bankers jargon and ordinary language--and a speakerphone, which after a while, one interlocutor asked to be shut off--truly Franz Kafka had been suddenly "translated" to this 21st century branch bank, a major, major bank.  "I've already asked five or six people," the banker said, "And they keep sending me to another person."  Shortly, as I'm listening to these incredible occurrences, the person at the other end, the teller's station or whatever, asks the banker to turn off the speaker phone.  "Mmmhhh....mmhhhh...."  My banker sits there for what seems an eternity saying this;  the person at the other end, whom now I cannot hear, goes on and on and on.  What in Sam Hill is going on here?  I've got the reciepts; the banker has checked out the fact that the receipt matches their internal record of the transaction, including the time of day and the transaction number, yet still this, "mmmhhhh.....mmmmhhhhh."  "We made the transfer," he says.  Lawsy mercy, I'm thinking, this is cut and dried and yet two hours into this they still cannot find my money.  People, are the banks running low on funds?  Is this country in even worse shape than we've been led to believe?  Well, our current credit crisis leads one to just such thoughts, very negative, panic-stricken thoughts.  Enough.
 
In the City of God, where nothing after The Happening is new, constant joy should pervade the soul of one who "understands"....who understands in faith this "new heaven and new earth" (Rev. 21).  Would someone please help me?  I found it hard if not impossible to realize this Truth when the stuff seemed to be hitting the fan.  I was sitting with this kindly personal banker in this cold office, literally very cold office--and kafka's truth was staring me in the face.  The truth of this implacable "man" out there who is REALLY RUNNING THE SHOW.   He has been out to get you, and now he's got you--and your money.
 
Except for one thing.  I know, or believe I know, that the real man, our Lord, is right smack dab in the middle of all this.  And he's wondering how I'm going to respond to it.  I'm also watching as it happens and wondering if I'll be able to maintain, let alone conquer in the Christian sense of the term.  Did I achieve any "victory"?  At best, it was a draw, so to speak.  On the one hand, I did not lose my temper.  On the other hand, my anxiety was off the charts for a body who supposedly "believes." 
 
After about fifteen minutes of this speaker-phone-now-off business wherein my new best friend continues to periodically say, "mmmhhh....mmmmhhuuh"  I sort of lose it and say, "I need to intervene at this point--we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way."  (A total bluff on my part.)  "What is this bank's choice?" 
 
A few minutes after this intervention, he showed me his computer screen:  the "credit," the little "nest egg" had finally been posted to my checking account.  I don't care, I don't think, about any interest I may have lost.  As I sit here, I'm grateful to God.  I'm hopeful that the City of God is ever near the City of Man.  I'm bound and determined to improve myself with the grace and mercy of God, a grace and mercy I'm all too eager not to dispense, at times, to my fellows. 
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First Things

Posted by Zentrist on Wednesday, December 24, 2008 12:59:52 AM
Again a recent "First Things," a mostly Roman Catholic monthly about "religion in the public square," has an informative piece about the challenge Islam poses to the West and the world.  One point, in particular, stands out:  those "disputed lands" were not always the property, so to speak, of the Arabs and the Muslims.  Today's Turkey, for example, was mainly a Christian land before the Muslims "conquered" it.  Today's Greece, Ethiopia and Armenia had been Christian and today remain Christian, but many countries in the Arabian Peninsula and Northern Africa had been Christian.  Saint Augustine, we recall, was bishop of Carthage, in Northern Africa.  The writer of this particular article does not claim to be an apologist for Islam.  In fact, he avers that Islam has done much damage to Christianity in terms of our "real estate," let us say.  But he clearly admires Islam's strength, if I have to find one word.  And he wants to see Europe remembering its roots, not forgetting them.  Christendom needs to try to remain strong in the face of a very, very strong "neighbor" (my word, not the author's).  We must realize that we are not going to convert Islam; we're not even going to visit, much.  (My interpretation.)
 
Those, like the civilian writing this, who have "sympathized" with the "enemy," need to remember that the "disputed lands" were, originally, Christian.  Jerusalem, originally, did not have its current look.  The fighters of Islam over the centuries have been remarkably successful. 
 
As for "First Things," it seems to be taking a stand:  "face to face with Islam," yes.  "Fight to the death," no.  This November/December issue reminds us all that many trained Islamic minds have responded with reason to our Holy Father's affirmation of Reason delivered at Regensburg on September 12, 2006.  "First Things," if I may put it this way, is encouraging Dialogue.  Not dialogue between two major world religions.  That, as our Holy Father realizes, would not be the best approach.  The more pragmatic and useful approach is dialogue between two very different cultures that yet have some common societal ground.  Some common moral ground.  A "conversation" between two mutually opposed doctrines is just not going to work, and our Holy Father realizes this adamantine fact.  Yet one crucial doctrine our First Things author brings to the fore:  interestingly enough, it is a "first things" type of doctrine, the teaching about the One Creator. 
 
In casual conversations at work with my Muslim buddies, there is a sort of "understanding" that there is a God, and that we are not it.  (I keep to myself the knowledge that I am personally on my way to becoming One with God by taking Eucharist, in a state of Grace, as often as I can.)
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Leo Strauss and the Arabs

Posted by Zentrist on Tuesday, December 16, 2008 9:53:38 PM
The survey course on Medieval Political Philosophy (including Islamic Political Philosophy) can be found in Strauss student Allen Bloom's (general editor) "Medieval Political Philosophy," edited by Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi (1963, 1972).  Part One is called "Political Philosophy in Islam" and includes selections from the following Islamic philosophers/commentators:  Alfarabi, Avicenna, Avempace, Ibn Tufayl and Averroes.  In light of the alarmingly violent shoe-throwing incident, let us look back  with Professor Strauss, his students and associates.  Let us think about, let us reread the great Muslim thinkers of old.  Alfarabi, sort of the Plato of Muslim thought, lived roughly from 870 to 950.  He studied, among other places, in Baghdad (p. 22).  Averroes (1126-1198), born in Cordova, has a treatise entitled, "The Decisive Treatise, Determining What the Connection is Between Religion and Philosophy"  (pp. 163-186). 
 
My memory of the course is not real good except for two things.  One, the compliment I received for my paper and presentation on Ibn Tufayl.  And two, the overarching emphasis by the professor on the bottom line:  the Muslims are holding up Reason and Philosophy as a standard of equal or greater importance than the Muslim Law.  This emphasis or teaching would appear to contradict the "literal level" of the text in certain places, no doubt.  Yet, with Strauss and Straussians, presumably, there is in the text, due to the "art of writing" (and the fact of persecution) a "core" teaching that obtains over against the "surface" teaching.  The deeper, inner teaching of these commentaries (not to slide over the uniqueness of each interpretation or commentary) at the very least, again, points up Reason/Philosophy as part and parcel of the twin Muslim School Teaching, the other pillar of course being Koranic Law. 
 
Before I die I hope to reread these timely and relevant texts, including the Judaism and Christianity ones.  I'm told that Leo Strauss knew Arabic, along with seven or so other languages.  A Zionist in his youth, Strauss lived to see that mission accomplished.  I'm not quite sure if he lived long enough to witness the 1973 war, about which I know very little.  All I know is that there is more to Arab Culture and the religion of Islam, much more, than we saw in the infamous Throwing of the Shoes.  Shame on this man for his swinishness in the face of human decency.  Shame on those who celebrate such violence--the violence alarms me much more than the insult. 
 
Finally, shame on those--and this would include a lot of people--who in any way support the desecration or even in many cases perceived desecration of holy lands and places.  Such desecration, if it occurs, cannot be in accordance with the Will of the Higher Power.  Such desecration will then in the Plan of Justice be addressed, one way or another.  For example 9/11, for all we know, may have been a kind of Divine Retribution.  But here let us recall Tolstoy's epigraph to, not "War and Peace" but "Anna Karenina":  "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord."  Personal responsibility, in my book, does not permit killing except in defense of oneself and one's family.
 
Everything, therefore, depends on the interpretation of "defense of oneself and one's own."  As for those passages in the Koran I keep hearing about (I've not read it and could not read it in the original), passages that exhort believers to "kill the infidels," all I can say is I'm grateful to the late Leo Strauss for underlining the principles of Reason and Moderation as standards for Decency over against swinishness.  (Another text everyone should read in this connection is the awesome "August, 1914," by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.)
 
 
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Lincoln/Richmond...Bush/Baghdad

Posted by Zentrist on Monday, December 15, 2008 10:32:32 PM
Bush's visit to Baghdad at this point in the war is reminiscent of Lincoln's visit, in April 1865, to Richmond, Virginia.  Except for this:  instead of being greeted like a liberator as Lincoln was--I'm thinking of a poignant episode with a former slave recounted by Stephen Oates, I believe--President Bush is greeted by a barbarian who believes Bush is the barbarian.  With that shoe, this man could have seriously injured our President.  The brute should be prosecuted for the appropriate level of assault. Like Lincoln before him, Bush made some mistakes in the prosecution of the war, which itself may have been a mistake.  George Weigel, a fellow Catholic, believes the war was justified.  Thomas Friedman, a liberal journalist, also believed the war was justified.  A believer in Christ, Bush must now believe that, like our Savior, he has been attacked for practicing truth.  The true believer, the true apostle, must suffer for his faith in God.  Jesus knowingly took on this agony, this ultimate sacrifice.  Bush, too, an apostle in his own way, deliberately did the unpopular thing.  Very few men have the courage to do what Bush did.  I'm still not sure it was the right thing.  Our Holy Father's office opposed it.  But I am sure that President Bush will go down in history as a man who bravely did what his inner light told him was the right thing to do.  He did it not for personal gain--as the shoe-throwing surely shows.  (Lincoln too, could have cared less about money.)  Our forty-third president took his job seriously and did right or tried to do right by the Constitution and a statesman's sense of decency.  Shame on the journalist who, having the right to speak his mind, nonetheless took matters into his own hands, not unlike John Wilkes Booth. 
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Liturgy and Advent

Posted by Zentrist on Wednesday, December 10, 2008 12:00:00 AM
Last night my wife lit, a little late, the candle for the second week of the Catholic an Christian season of Advent.  Our Holy Father's homily of November 30, 2008, inaugurating the season, amazes one with its incisive wisdom:  Hebrew, Biblical, New Dispensation, new directions for our time.  Hope is not naivete.  For Benedict, the abiding hope of Advent immerses itself in Psalms 141 and 142, psalms about human affliction in the extreme.  I think we in our time can relate to this.  We are in a bad place.  The Holy Father does not wish to put rose petals on this awful situation, the tragic situation each one finds himself in.  Nor is it unique to our time:  it is the human condition.  Tragedy.  History.  Time.  Mortality.  Suffering and death.  These facts, this net in which we are caught is oftentimes forgotten in attempts to escape--in drugs and alcohol, in sex, in porn, in every kind of materialism.  The pope elegantly exhorts everyone to walk soberly in hope in the Future, nonetheless.  There is possible and necessary to each of us this walk, now, in sanctification.  The light of the candle symbolizes this purity of mind, heart, body and soul.  As the world waits for a Saviour, light, Light, slowly but surely increases in intensity along the way to December 25.  Just a little light contains the whole blaze of the first and second coming.  Right now, we have, in grace, this experience of "help being on the way."  Benedict speaks deeply of the colour, a new colour of the "organism" of the Mystical Body.  Is he referring to the bright reds and whites of the ribbons, the shirts, the candy canes?  Is he thinking (our Holy Father is ALWAYS thinking) of our world-historic Barack Obama?  Just a thought. 
 
The par-ousia, the Presence of Christ obtains in the Liturgy of the Day (in this case, Sunday, November 30).  The incense rises upward even as our prayer, Jewish or Christian, rises up to God.  "Oh Lord make haste to help me."  I will never, ever forget the words of this psalm as sung in Gethsemani Abbey, Trappist, KY.  Advent, 1991. 
 
(I visited the gravesite of Thomas Merton, Fr. Louis.  I did work, daily, with the brothers, work that has prepared me for the manual labor I'm doing now, and hope to do, perhaps, till the day I die.)
 
Hope is about waiting, but not only that.  The real is already there, at hand, so to speak.  We are already in the real.  Yet there is more to come.  The nunc et nondum, the now and the not yet.  This biblical tension, this Pauline walk, characterizes the very structure of the Hope a mature Christian tries to live out.  Again, there is no "wishful thinking."  No rose-colored glasses.  I disagree with Bill Oreilly, who calls Dr. Deepak Chopra, to his face, "naive."  Oreilly is the true pinhead in this case.  Deepak, the true believer (his faith, I think, puts Oreilly's to shame) knows something about the par-ousia, the Presence, here and now, of God.  Would that Bill had had the decency to let Chopra speak about the conditions of success for the "war against terror," what Deepak calls an oxymoron.  I suppose the wise man would say we need to have peace against terror, peace against war.  Certainly Deepak Chopra knows, as our Holy Father knows, that true peace begins "at home," so to speak, in the human heart.  And there, and only there, will this battle be won. 
 
We are now approaching the third Sunday in Advent.  Today is December 10, 2008.  On this day, in Bangkok, Thailand, Thomas Merton died in 1968.  Forty years ago today.  (Thomas, Holy Thomas, put in a good word for us.)  The monks at Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, KY., knew all about Vedanta and many had no problem with the fact that this aspirant had been doing TM (Transcendental Meditation, Deepak's Way) for years.  Would that I'd never left my Catholic Faith.  But I'd come home.  Nowadys, I've come home yet again, this time in Holy Matrimony.  In the sacraments, in Matrimony, in Confession, in the Eucharist, we intensify our prayer, our hope.  For hope is worked out, as it were, in prayer.  I was moved, this morning, listening to Dennis Prager dialogue with a Rabbi Wolpe (sp?) from the Congregation in Los Angeles.  Their prayer is very much like our own (it would have to be--it derives from the Faith of Abraham). 
 
Advent or par-ousia means "coming."  On the Way.  The Way.  Advent means holy waiting.  But we are not just sitting around.  We are working.  The Divine Office is the main work of the monks.  Our brothers in the monasteries are working, 24/7, for us, all through the year.  They, too, enact the beautiful liturgies of light and darkness throughout the liturgical year.  I'm trying to get at the essence of the Pope's beautiful homily.  That's it!  It is Beauty.  The Coming of the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, is the most beautiful thing.  There is a sweetness in the beholding of the images--so beautiful.  Pick your own image, so long as it is beautiful.  I think of the unutterable beauty I behold when watching a re-run of one of Bishop Sheen's presentations, "Live is Worth Living."  (See the program guide for EWTN, Mother Angelica's global network.)  I think of my wife, my bride.  I think of friends, of the people I encounter at work, mostly "strangers."  I think of this book I'm reading entitled:  "Eros in Plato, Rousseau and Nietzsche:  The Politics of Infinity."  I'm amazed at the learning.  I'm amazed at the ever-trickling-down Influence of Professor Leo Strauss.  I'm truly humbled by the works listed in this tome's bibliography.  Then there is the surprising beauty encountered, again, on TV.  This morning's interview, a re-run of a 1998 interview on C-Spann, with journalist par excellence Philip Gourevitch.  His award-winning stories "from Rwanda."  It occurs to me now that Beauty has arisen from this crucified place, this once God-forsaken place.  There was a photo taken by Gourevitch of the lake.  Rwanda, amazingly, is one of the most beautiful places on earth.  Beautiful, yet, still, poignantly, empty.  This co-existence of Beauty and Emptiness was the Art that struck me.  Struck me down.  For a Moment.
 
The first "advent" was promising yet at that time still empty of the kind of Meaning it would have after the birth of the Baby Jesus.  Nowadays, during these Last Times, the many moments after the Death and Resurrection, we are strangely full yet still strangely empty.  we are still hungry and thirsty.  Still waiting, re-enacting this cycle on a straight line towards what we hope will be a more meaningful fulfillment and completion, a Final Vision.  Nowadays, we have these little augenblicks, these little intimations of immortality--infinity rather.  We hear Mozart or Bach during Advent.  E Power Biggs on the organ.  Magestic.  Magesty.  Or we look for that Lennon CD, the one with the incomparable song after song after song, including beautiful, to me some of the most  beautiful Christmas Music. 
 
"Whatever gets you through the night," Lennon sings, "is alright, is alright."  Minimalism has never been so beautiful.  Or, listen to Imagine, that "godless" song.  It is not really atheist or godless.  It is one of the most spiritual songs.  A man like Lennon, with all his failings, cannot have gone to hell, if there is a hell.
 
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and W:  What do these three great men have in common?  They all three know about advent, about Hope.  One is from Hope; one is all about the Audacity of Hope; and one was bold enough to go way out on a limb, and take his nation with him, like Moses, in Hope.  How did they do all this?  One day at a time, as we say in the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous!  I trace my personal experience of concrete, not abstract, not cerebral hope--to the year 1986, when I gave up beer for the first time.  From the very moment I heard those Twelve Steps read out loud at the beginning of my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. 
 
Talk about Freedom and Obedience, I means Suggestions....for Recovery.  The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and the Twelve Concepts--of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Gratitude to Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, the twin pillars of this Beautiful Spiritual Growth Movement.
 
December 10, 2008 (Fortieth Anniversary of the Death of Thomas Merton)
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Our Holy Father

Posted by Zentrist on Monday, December 08, 2008 12:00:00 AM
Our Holy Father's life is a beautiful example of the inner Unity of Freedom and Obedience.  Cardinal Ratzinger did not want to become Pope.  Rather, he wanted to retire and write his magnum opus.  With whatever time God would leave to him.  Even before this new mission was thrust upon him--he could not have said no--John Paul had asked him to join his team at the Vatican.  This was not long after 1978, the year in which Karol was elected.  Here again, as he himself says, you cannot say no even you'd really rather not give up your own ambition.  (Read the memoir, "Milestones.")  Joseph Ratzinger's personal desire and ambition was to write a systematic theology, pulling together into a definitive text his theology of the Bible, of the Liturgy, of the Fathers, and of the Church.  The Unity of this Fourfold, if I have it roughly right, is what we might have received had he not been tapped to become Pope John Paul II's priest in charge of Doctrine.  It will be up to others to pull it all together.  This work is probably being done as we write.  Anyhow, we know the pain and grief, yet also the Christian joy, in Joseph's saintly "yes" to each and every call he has received. 
 
Irony of ironies:  the young (fifteen) Joseph Ratzinger was called to duty by the Nazis under Hitler.  This alarmingly recent regime (which was killed only a few years before my birth) speaks to the perennial problem of Freedom and Obedience.  A Christian is supposed to give the Kaiser (Caesar) his due.  We are to love our country.  We are to respect its laws, its traditions, history and legitimate aspirations.  Imagine yourself a Catholic during the time of Hitler, starting even in 1933.  I'm not sure what I would have done.  One lapsed Catholic, Professor Martin Heidegger, saw something deep and profound in Hitler.  Heidegger's friend, the philosopher Karl Jaspers, was not near as impressed.  He could not believe that people were so enthusiastic about a man who was so clearly "uneducated."  Here, you have to understand what a German professor of philosophy at that time meant by the term, "educated."  Hitler was not very well educated.  In Jasper's mind, he was a vulgar, pathetic thing as soon as he appeared.  But Heidegger saw things differently, Heidegger the "superior" mind, and he was the superior mind.  For him, apparently, Hitler was reaching down deeply into the "soil and blood" that Heidegger, in a sense, worshiped.  Hitler was, to the "Swabian peasant," an epiphany.  He was the manifestation of Being itself, much as Obama today, for many, including me, appears to be a magnificent embodiment of our national principles and history and promise.  Now here, we have a deep theoretical and practical problem or "issue."  In terms of practice and in light of what we know, Obama is to Hitler what Jesus was to Satan.  Heidegger did not, in 1933, have all the facts.  He did not yet know about the genocide.  Yet, in terms of theory, Heidegger clung, even in 1956, to the notion that National Socialism, as idea, as archetype, had an intrinsic greatness.  Heidegger's Being, apparently, is truly beyond good and evil.  At this point, I don't follow Heidegger anymore.  But like one of my mentors, the theologian par excellence, Hans Ur von Balthasaar, I can see some value in Heidegger's overall metaphysics.  As has been noted by leading existentialists, Heidegger's "Being and Time," for all its "German Philosophy," has the same "inner structure" as the Bible.  Without getting into it, there is, first of all, the tragedy of original sin, the fact that we are beings-toward-death.  I'm not sure what all Balthasar retrieves from Heidegger, but he sees, with his intensely Catholic mind, truth in Heidegger, enough truth to underline his greatness, his contribution to the Dialogue.  My guess is that the encyclopedic Swiss theologian appreciated, among other things, Heidegger's readings of Rilke, Hoelderlin and Nietzche.  Balthasar read all of this.  Absorbed it all, somehow.  And baptized it.  The tension in Nietzsche between the Will to Power and the Eternal Return of the Same could become a lesson in The Glory of the Lord in His aspect or attribute of (we are in the season of Lent)...coming. 
 
In this light, readers are encouraged to look up a recent homily by our Holy Father.  Google Vatican, then follow the links to the pope's "homilies" and look for the one in late November or so, the one on the Season of Advent.  Balthasar would tell you, and I'm telling you, that the incredible influence of Heidegger can be seen in this homily and in many of our Holy Father's approaches to theoretical problems.  That is to say, practical problems as well!  If I'm not mistaken, our Holy Father even alludes, in this homily,  to our new President-elect, Barack Obama!  But even if I'm way off on this, it is a fact that Benedict reads the news, and sees in it glimpses of Being and Beauty and Truth, sometimes in the most unlikely of places.  (I'm referring to the fact that Senator Obama does not have a great "pro-life" record in this narrow sense of the term, "pro-life.")
 
Now a word about what I remember of this magnificent sermon or teaching.  Benedict makes much of the meaning of Advent in terms of the idea of the Coming of the Lord.  He is coming.  Christ is our Hope.  Philosophically, and in terms that show the influence of truly great Continental Philosophy, Benedict discusses briefly the structure of Hope.  (Again, I think he has Obama on his mind, Obama as, ironically, a great sign of Hope for our time. Why "ironically"? Again, because of the discordant note that Obama seems to bring to the abortion issue in the Catholic arena.)  More than Obama, of course, our Holy Father has Christ on his mind.  Christ and the Psalms.  The readings in the mass of this day included psalms, the great teachings about our anxiety, our dread, our fears.  Psalms that also point up faith in God as the shield against all fear, or most of it.  Benedict, as is appropriate here, reads Christ into the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures.  Better, he draws Christ out, he appropriates Our Lord.  The sense of holy waiting for the Lord is what consitutes the structure of Hope.  We want relief from our cares, our suffering and our fear.  Our obsessive worrying.  A chronic state of worry that results from an existential loneliness gone mad, gone sick and hell-bent.  The word Immanuel means, literally, God is with us, if I remember well.  The fact, if you will,of God's presence, somehow, even in the waiting-state is what characterizes the structure of Hope.  Benedict also speaks creatively of a "new color."  This part I'll have to reread, reread to see if he really has Barack on his mind for all the world to see, or if he is just thinking of the liturgical color of purple, the color of advent, the "color purple."  Pardon my denseness.  (We all have blind spots and many kinds of real stupidity.)  This theme of the "new color" can easily distract from the philosophical structure of Hope present in the Liturgy even of this day, the day the wondrous homily was delivered.  Christ both is and is not yet.  He is on the way.  Help, Barack says, is on the way!  (I love the way Obama's simple words have a way of cutting through all the crapolla; do you recall his derision of the idea that he was a Communist?  "They say it goes back to when I was in kindergarten--I wanted to share my peanut butter sandwich"!)  Here is something very Heideggerian and something Barack and Benedict have in common:  a taste for simple and direct language that uses the idioms of the people.  (In accordance, of course with their respective stations in life.)  The audacity of hope and the color purple is that they promise a king, that is, a new leader who is righteous.  Not that the old leader was not righteous.  He, too, was just in his own way.  But, like some of the elders, he made mistakes.  Now is the time for a new color, purple, the color of the one whom we have been waiting for.  He is here now, but not yet.  There can only be one king at a time.  And there is only one Eternal King, Christ the King. 
 
Tonight at supper my beautiful wife lit up the Second Advent Candle, signifying week two--of the Coming of the Lord that will culminate in the Celebration of the Incarnation of God on earth.  The Fourfold, the four weeks of waiting for God.  And even while we wait, we know that he is here among us.  Already.  That "in which we live and move and have our being" is already here in the here and now.  Yet the very fullness of time has not yet arrived--for that we are still waiting with great joy--and sadness.  He is not visible yet among us. 
 
Here is where Batlhasar's "Glory of the Lord" comes in.  In historical event we find the Glory of the Lord.  Beauty, goodness, truth, justice, joy.  What the ebullient Chris Matthews called "a tingle" boils down to this:  in Barack Obama we have some tangible evidence of the greatness of our country, evidence that at times is so besmirched that it seems to disappear.  But in the unlikely election of Obama we see clearly the hand of God.  The hope that fills us will have to sustain us in the trials ahead.  Bishop Sheen, not one to remark about the "thrills" of life in terms of "tingles," nonetheless spoke beautifully about the "sparks" of life.  "If the spark is so beautiful," he said, "what must be the flame!"  Sheen, whose very name seems to say, shine, seems to have been speaking about the beauty of the marriage bed.  Among other, more celibate beauties.  Senator Obama seems to me now the latest, best beacon to behold, the "shining city on a hill"--its prophet and Solomon, rather.  Its Moses who has been called by God to lead us, once again, to the Promised Land. 
 
Lord we are dying in this desert whether we have a job or not, whether we have faith or not, whether we know you or not.  We fear for our future, both personally and in terms of the generations to come.  In this season of hope, let us allow you to guide us.  Guide us through the perennial wilderness that afflicts us with thorns and thirst, so to speak.  Even in the terrible affliction to come, be it sudden, brief or prolonged, give us the strength to obey your will.  For in this obedience we will know the freedom, the "peace that passeth understanding." 
 
Immanuel.  Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
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At the Plow

Posted by Zentrist on Sunday, December 07, 2008 10:58:37 PM
I'm plowing through a scholarly book, "Eros in Plato, Rousseau and Nietzche:  The Politics of Infinity," by Laurence D.Cooper.  Do not try this at home unless you're interested in the subject.  What does the book have to do with the title of this blog, "Freedom and Dignity"?  Eros or human love has everything to do with freedom and obedience, I meant to say.  Freedom in its most radical sense is the freedom embodied in our Saviour, Jesus Christ (I believe, with difficulty, but I believe).  Just think on the portrait of Jesus' life as depicted in the Bible.  He was utterly detached from the cares of this world, cares I mean that we call cares:  women and gold.  Neither symbol, neither reality, was for Him.  He lived without women and gold.  Don't disagree with me--I'm talking symbols here.  He loved women, but never made love to them.  He had rich friends, for example Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimetheia.  But he was not driven by material things.  Obviously.  The perfect freedom Jesus lived was part and parcel of his perfect obedience to the Father, his Father--and ours.
 
But Cooper is not interested in all that.  At least, not at first glance.  Maybe not at all.  As I said, I'm plowing through this difficult book which refers to many great books, some of which I've read.  Heidegger's Nietzsche, I recall, points up What Nietzsche-Heidegger together, so to speak, call Rapture.  This Rapture derives, theoretically, from a certain tension in Nietzsche between the Will to Power and the Eternal Return of the Same.  If I remember well, one wills (desires beauty, desires love, desires the good) the recurrence, that is, one accepts all of reality, including this very moment, this very Augenblick.  One wills or loves everything, especially "fate."  Amor fati.  The love of fate, for Nietzsche, symbolizes, in a nutshell (I'm going on memory here):  a release of "controlling" to the point where one is no more--in a sense.  Cooper sees Socrates in just these terms; I mean, Plato, according to Cooper, thus sees Socrates--or Socrates sees hmself as "nothing."  Beyond.  Infinity. 
 
At this point Cooper touches the Infinity that I'm interested in, the only Infinity I can relate to-- the one that is accessible to some extent in the here and now.  The freedom of Jesus is similar to, but not the same as, the freedom of Socrates.  Now this is the subject of another book.  Let me just say here that one might well aspire to such freedom in one's daily, humdrum life.  Think of the joy and simplicity of not being obsessed with women or money.  A worthy goal.  Life would indeed be, as Bishop Sheen says it is, "worth living." 
 
Socrates says the "unexamined life is not worth living."  Many non-Christian philosophers think they know what he means, and do know what he means.  For Socrates, at any rate, a life without questioning, without philosophizing, would be unacceptable.  The saintly and knowledgeable Sheen, however, would counter to this reading his sound-bite that life as such is worth living.  Sometimes, I don't really know who is right.  But I'm bound and determined to land on the side of Bishop Sheen on this matter.  Life as such is indeed worth living.  What a difference Christ has made; what a difference these Last Times have made.  The ages of man since the death and "resurrection" of Jesus Christ.  I believe in Christ, yet I put his resurrection in quotation marks.  Not sure why.  It somehow does not make that much difference.  I've read a great deal, lately of our Holy Father, his books and recent Audiences and Homilies.  It is the beauty of Bishop Sheen, the radiant beauty of our Holy Father, the astonishing example of Pope John Paul the Great...these "moments" in my life help me "get into" an incredibly scholarly book like "Eros in Plato, Rousseau and Nietzsche:  The Politics of Infinity." 
 
I've touched on Plato, on Revelation; I've name-dropped Nietzsche and Socrates and Plato and this gifted contemporary American scholar.  Now let's talk about Rousseau, briefly.  It's after nine p.m.  And I've got to work tomorrow.  Rousseau clearly has made a huge impression on Cooper.  One of Rousseau's books, no, two--no, three--I've not yet read:  Social Contract, Heloise, and the Dialogues.  But the First and Second Discourses along with Confessions, the Preface to Narcisse and Reveries...these I have some memory of, along with parts of Emile.  The Rousseau that links to Plato and Nietzsche is the one I remember well:  Jean-Jacques the lover.  The lover of himself and others; of beauty; of books ancient and modern; of music; of solitude and philosophy.  Not to mention Rousseau the lapsed Catholic, for, as a youngster, he had converted to Catholicism, only to renounce it later.  He was, you might say, overtaken by events, by fame, by ambition, by philosophy and letters and society and still more ambition and more love in the ordinary senses of the term.  Not as pure as Nietzsche, jean-jacques was nonetheless a person of considerable integrity.  A humanist genius of the highest order.  The Reveries of a Solitary Walker fascinated me for its style and substance--but also for the connections it made to Paul Tillich's eternal now.  This "pure sentiment of existence" that Rousseau celebrates and universalizes sounded and sounds a lot like the Immediate Consciousness of Hegel and Schelling.  The Zone before the setting in of thoughts of all kinds.  Rousseau's version of the state of nature:  pure, not dirty; innocent, not calculating; simple, not complicated; exalted, not frightening; noble, not primitive and barbaric.  Or rather, primitive, but not loathsome and violent.  The "pure sentiment of existence" is the top of the ladder upon which the romantics loved to climb.  Later loved to climb--for Rousseau seems to have been the very first of the Great Romantics.  (This is sooo ironic; Rousseau loved the ancients, the Athenians and the Spartans, especially the Spartans.) 
 
To return to Tillich for a moment:  the eternal now in his theology was all about his reading of the Fullness of Time.  The "nunc et nondum" that our Holy Father writes about recently in a homily on Advent, the season of the Now and the Not Yet, the Season of Hope.  I believe it is Saint Paul, especially, who teaches Tillich about this phenomenon.  For it is a phenomenon.  It is an experience.  An experience both in time and out of time.  An experience of both comedy and tragedy.  A Shakespearean Experience of the "all in all."  A down to earth epiphany on the subject at hand.  Life is worth living in its details, all of them.  Patience, endurance, forebearance, perseverance, kindness in exhaustion, kindness in pain, kindness in frustration and misery and negativity.  For Tillich, as I recall, the Eternal Now involves the very depths of depression, on the one hand, and manic explosions of joy, on the other.  In other words, the human, the everyday--no, not the everyday.  Not just chronos or time, but kairos or grace.  Here we have stumbled upon the fundamental tension of life, the tension between clock-time and real time, the eternal now.  Rousseau, with his "pure sentiment of existence," foreshadows the redeemed Nietzsche, with his encounter with the spider web in the foreground (the moon in the background).  I mean, pure experience, the kind of experience the poets of reality wrote about (Wordsworth, Shelley, Conrad), Being:  all of this and more constitutes an intimation of immortality, Rapture, Ecstasy.  One thinks of the pure sentiment on the mind of Pericles in Shakespeare's play, Pericles listening to the Music of the Spheres after being reunited with Marina, his daughter-goddess. 
 
The Music of the Spheres, the Eternal Now, the thing that "speech," in Plato's Seventh Letter, cannot "say."  The "nothingness" vis-a-vis Socrates, especially when, very still, he seems to be having an "out of body" experience.  Yet, he is very much embodied.  Socrates' stillness, his "visionary posture" comes to mind, his reason for being "late" to the Symposium.  This "revery" of Socrates looks a little like the Music of the Spheres I've just mentioned, the striking event of Shakespeare's "Pericles." 
 
So in this way Rousseau indeed seems to link up with Nietzsche and Plato, Heidegger and Socrates, Tillich and Cooper. 
 
At present, I've skipped some of the Plato discussion in Cooper's book out of anxiety to get to Nietzsche.  Disappointing it has been to find that Cooper is interested in a strange connection between Plato's "Republic" and Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil."  A discovery like this would have been considered heresy in my dogmatic teacher's Plato's Republic seminar.  Nevertheless, I'm bound and determined to plow through this book, "Eros in Plato, Rousseau and Nietzsche:  The Politics of Infinity."  I want to learn more about freedom, its philosophic side and its Christian side.  I need to learn more about Obedience, both in its politics and its religious sphere. 
 
When the time comes, say, tomorrow morning at work, I want to be able to say and to live, "Not my will, but Thy Will be done."  As Jesus Christ in His time said when he went to work.
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Ben Shapiro's Article

Posted by Zentrist on Wednesday, December 03, 2008 1:33:37 PM
You've got to admire the spiritedness and fight in the article submitted recently by Mr. Shapiro:  He has heard the "statement" delivered recently in Mumbai, and he is responding with "reason" and "force." 
 
Enough is enough.  Period.
 
The only language the killers understand, as Mark Levin said recently on radio, is "a bullet between the eyes."  Indeed, if I were bin Laden, I would watch my back vis-a-vis Obama.  Our extraordinary president-elect said over and over that he will kill bin Laden if he gets the chance.  Obama means what he says.  Every time he appears on camera or delivers a sound bite or writes and delivers a speech--he proves it.  Change has come.  Just look at his appointments to date.  Bill Bennet is in awe of them, and so am I and a billion or so others.  The world has already witnessed a remarkable change in the way things are done and the man is not even in office yet.  Mark my words, fellow Americans and Citizens of the World:  Change has come, will continue to come--and it is long overdue.  But thank God for this epiphany, this New Direction and Tone. 
 
Ben Shapiro agrees with the provocative, smart and tough James Carville:  politics is about "stickin."  You need to be "stickin" it to your enemies and you need to be "stickin" with your friends.  (I haven't read the book by Carville, the one with "stickin" in the title, but he shared the gist of it way back when, when he was on TV promoting this stickin "philosophy.")  Well, pardon me, but BS!
 
It's a dangerous, primitive approach.  It's the way things are done even today in the Revenge-Society-Mideast.  If this is the bottom line of your theory and practice, prepare yourself to be perpetually at war.  Not me.
 
Having said that, I think we should enlarge and improve our military.  We need to be ready for the hit(s) before it/they come.  We need to be prepared, like good boy scouts all grown up.  Otherwise we are reacting, not enacting a plan.  Plan A; Plan B; Plan C.  We need to revisit and review and memorize if necessary--our Machiavelli and the Straussian promoters (for America First) of this useful theory.  Machiavelli has been underlined in our time, in America and the West, for a reason.  The reason is simple.  Open societies are especially open to vicious attacks, like the ones Mr. Shapiro almost exhaustively lays out in his brilliant piece.  Something needs to be done about this.  But what?  Well, if you follow a tiny little fraction of Machiavelli's prudent advice--like Bush and Cheney did--you get attacked by liberals for not being Liberal in the classic sense of the term.  "We are better than that," they tell us.  Indeed, we are better than that.  Have you read recently, what Machiavelli's definition of torture is?  It is excruciating just to read about this stuff.  Or, take wiretapping.  If Obama forecloses wiretapping, I'm moving to Canada or Australia.  It's curtains. 
 
No, we Westerners, we Americans and Israelis...we are quite soft in comparison to what Machiavelli was advocating.  He invented the term, hardball.
 
He was all about toughness, hardball, even cruelty if necessary.  Certainly, hard power--lots and lots of bullets and tanks and jets and bombs, all kinds of bombs, including nukes.  It's my way or the highway with Nicolo Machiavelli--at least that's the conventional Straussian wisdom, the undergraduate classroom tack.  What Leo Strauss was really about...What was Plato really about?  What is that old conflict, ancients versus moderns Really About?  One interpretation, let's call it the Bill Kristol Take, is that America needs to disabuse itself of soft ideas.  Soft ideas are the bread and butter of the following:  Democratic Party; Left Wing; Liberals in the Daily Kos sense of the term.  Oooops.  I made a mistake.  Truman was no softie; FDR was no softie; Kennedy was no softie; Johnson was no patsy.  The Democrats, except for Carter, have launched things heavy and destructive.  So have the Republicans, especially George W. Bush who even surpasses his old man, who (#41) could have launched quite a different war, one for energy independence, if he had had the courage and knowledge and foresight.  But no, the likes of Kennedy and Johnson and Bush Senior, insecure all about their "manliness," have to "be somebody."  Barack, you can do better than that.  Barack, I believe you will do better than that.
 
Here's an idea, a practical idea.  I'm offering a solution.  Mark Levin, you'll like my straight talk even if my approach makes you vomit. 
 
When President Ahmadinejad offered to debate George W. Bush, why did our prez turn him down?  Don't give me the conventional answers about legitimizing terror, not in the face of the prospect of EDUCATING THE WORLD.  I'm talking about the over-arching principle of education to virtue.  Education to the best that the ancients and the moderns have to offer us in a decent liberal education.  There could have been a dramatic and epoch-making and world-historical DIALOGUE.  Perhaps President Obama will Dialogue?  He's much better at it, by far, than just about anyone I've ever seen!  This would be a dramatic and potentially effective way of beginning the process of actually CHANGING THE WORLD.  Which is what Barack Obama has been called by Providence to do. 
 
When bin Laden offered America and the West a "truce," Why did our President and the "Best and the Brightest" ignore him, as if he were nothing?  Don't give me your tired and useless answers about "dignifying" that which is inherently lacking in dignity. 
 
The ones who do not respect themselves or others are the ones who hit you, out of fear, fear that you just might hit them.  They are, in some cases, vicious killers.
 
President-elect Obama:  Time is short.  And you were absolutely right.  The same old same old aint gonna cut it anymore.  We need a new direction, for example, dialogue with our enemies.  My limited world history tells me that those willing to work, to talk, to try new things, to get rid of the ego and bring in the pragmatism--these people "did some good," as President Clinton bragged on his last day in office. 
 
Mr. Shapiro, at one point in your article you seemed to embrace the very extremism that is enacted by the killers.  You said words to the effect, "it's time for action." But you offered nothing but cliches, nothing new:  only a certain worn-out "toughness."  The killers in Mumbai have quite likely succeeded.  The tide of public opinion could now, as we speak, be turning all directions toward a hitherto unseen Dichotomy of Violence.  Your article, Ben, smacks of vengeance-society rhetoric.  It is understandable.  It will land us all, sooner rather than later, in hell on earth. 
 
I'm saying this, and I repeat myself:  Let's really make our Army strong.  I mean that.
 
But even before that task is finished, a worthy project that will help keep us all safe, we need to address at least some of the written down "issues" that bin Laden has put on the table.  To remain in denial about this, to remain stiff-necked about it, is not a sustainable, rational approach.  Historically, enemies make deals, or they have perpetual, one-hundred-year wars.  What is so encouraging about President-elect Obama's ego-eclipsing appointments (he reduces his own ego for the larger good of America and the world) is that we now have the experience, brains and creativity to perhaps really chart a new direction, a new approach--a more practical and a less ideological approach.  Mr. Shapiro's article brilliantly lays out the case for a new direction, a new attitude, a new imagining, if you will, of hitherto unheard of concrete steps toward reconciliation and eventual peace.  I haven't even scratched the surface with my admittedly non-expert advice--in this fit of nothing more and nothing less than desperate brainstorming.  But, as Ben argues so well, we are out of time.  We are running out of patience as well.  We've got to do something.  Something bold.  Something that has never been heard of before except perhaps in the late plays of William Shakespeare.  In the context of embracing and encouraging Personal Responsibility in every sense of the term, we have to imagine and put forward a New Reality.  If helpful, invite our Holy Father to the talks.  Invite bin Laden.  Invite President Carter.  Invite Bibi Netanyahu.  Bill and Hillary will be there along with Dennis Ross.  The spokesman for Hamas might be there. 
 
In the background, as a last--I mean last--resort, our Army will be there.  Last but not least, Americans will be there, each and every one, willing and able, man, woman and child...to fight to the death if talks break down yet again.  Of course, by then, Israel will have already been obliterated.  I repeat, we will fight to the death for our principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.   
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The Political Problem

Posted by Zentrist on Tuesday, December 02, 2008 1:09:12 AM
The political problem, Leo Strauss writes, "consists in reconciling the requirement of wisdom with the requirement of consent."  I'd say Barack Obama has mastered this sine qua non truth.  We have reason to hope that his presidency will continue on as the campaign has been and as the transition has been.  Successful.  One pundit put it this way today:  "President-elect Obama is the type of person who does not like to fail."  Indeed, the man even wants to keep his main promise, the promise of change.  The "old law" of "stickin it" to one's enemies while "stickin with" one's friends--this old saw has come to an end, or so it appears at present and we have every reason to hope and believe this flourishing trend will go on. 
 
Barack Obama has proven himself, already, to be a wise man.  Like Lincoln before him, he brings wisdom, deep and abiding American Wisdom, Perennial Wisdom, to the works he performs.  For example, the way he responded to McCain's abrupt decision not to attend the first debate.  I was waiting, sort of on the edge of my seat.  Then came Barack's decision.  And it was so utterly simple and solid.  Presidents, he said, have to be able to do more than one thing at a time.  "We're looking forward to the debate on Friday."  If there was anyone out there who didn't already know it, he now knew that this was a serious man, a strong man.  And that it was Barack himself making the decision, not the advisor. 
 
Consent.  After wisdom and prudence, smarts in the thick of action, comes the perennial requirement in republics of consent.  Another word for consent would be "winning over the people."  Now of course, Hitler won over the people--amazingly enough.  But his political smarts, in reality, was zilch.  He crashed and horrifically took millions of people with him, "innocent" people (as a conservative Catholic, I say no one is innocent, in my book).  Barack does not have it in him, I don't think, to become a dictator.  Yet he clearly is, as Bill O'Reilly shrewdly observed, a very "determined" individual.  Also a very "cautious" man.  What he was saying, in effect, is that Barack Obama, despite his "roots," is in part a conservative man.  Bill you didn't realize you were saying that, did you? 
 
Now, as for Freedom and Obedience, this is what I learned while in the monasteries.  That experience was realized as well in some pretty good books about the monastic life.  Books based on the Rule of Saint Benedict.  Which rule is based on the Bible.  The other Great Traditions know this rule; they know it well.  Any happily married man or woman also has first-hand experience of this conundrum.  This wonderful paradox:  Inner Freedom is directly proportional to Inner Obedience--to the Will of God, or, if you don't believe in God, then a kind of "obedience" to what the situation calls for in its--let's say common sense requirements.  The Common Sense, I mean, of a G.K. Chesterton.  Or even, I'd go so far as to say, the common sense of sharia law--minus its brutality or its extreme practices, practices unnacceptable to our Western sensibilities.  For example, laws that land adulterers in the stoning pit.  Or laws that cut of the hands of those who steal. 
 
As our country's economic woes seem to  deepen, we'll need to learn once again to obey.  Obey the laws of man, the laws of God and the laws of nature.  I was reading recently in Proverbs, maybe Proberbs Three:  The Lord afflicts those he loves and holds dear.  I'm not comfortable with the idea that America is an "exceptional" nation.  Not anymore.  India, with its great spiritual theory and praxis--is just as exceptional if not more so.  Just look at what happened recently at a Wal-Mart.  How ignoble can we get?  How craven?  How vulgar?  You or I either one--we could have done this, this shameful thing. 
 
So, you don't like the word Obedience?  Niether did I.  And I lived out an incredibly shameful life for many years, drinking, womanizing, drugging, stuff worse than that. 
 
These days, for me, I'm comfortable with the word Obedience.  When I think about my old friends in the abbey; when I think about the serenity that pervaded the abbey.  Sure, it was a very human place.  But the vibe was clearly different.  They had something that I wanted, and it would take me far too long to get even a glimpse of it. 
 
These days, I'm still a common laborer in every sense of the word.  But at least there's that conscious, determined aspiration towards real freedom; and hence an openness to the words and the dignity and the humanity of others. 
 
God bless Barack and Hillary and Bill.  God bless America.  And President Bush:  Thank you for the many, many good deeds you have done, not least of which is respecting yourself and your wife and family and countless others.  In spite of everything, your respect for the individual, your striving for excellence, has come through. 
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Freedom and Obedience

Posted by Zentrist on Monday, November 24, 2008 8:33:20 AM
This is a Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, sort-of-post.  Remarks on events, opinions, readings, interpretations and perceived lies or distortions of truth, be it factual truth or philosphical truth.  By the way, my bond with some Republicans or conservatives in my past derives from our mutual enjoyment of Albert Jay Nock's "Memoirs of a Superfluous Man" (1943).  More about "freedom and obedience" later.
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