Blog Mirror: January 20th: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream and Donald Trump's MAGA Nightmare.

 

January 20th: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream and Donald Trump's MAGA Nightmare.

Well that's odd.

Venison meatball day?

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Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Everyone once in a while, daily readings end up being particularly personally relevant for one reason or another.  

I'm finding today's to have that feature:

October 8, 2023, Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 139

Reading 1

Is 5:1-7

Let me now sing of my friend,

my friend's song concerning his vineyard.

My friend had a vineyard

on a fertile hillside;

he spaded it, cleared it of stones,

and planted the choicest vines;

within it he built a watchtower,

and hewed out a wine press.

Then he looked for the crop of grapes,

but what it yielded was wild grapes.

Now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah,

judge between me and my vineyard:

What more was there to do for my vineyard

that I had not done?

Why, when I looked for the crop of grapes,

did it bring forth wild grapes?

Now, I will let you know

what I mean to do with my vineyard:

take away its hedge, give it to grazing,

break through its wall, let it be trampled!

Yes, I will make it a ruin:

it shall not be pruned or hoed,

but overgrown with thorns and briers;

I will command the clouds

not to send rain upon it.

The vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel,

and the people of Judah are his cherished plant;

he looked for judgment, but see, bloodshed!

for justice, but hark, the outcry!

Responsorial Psalm

Ps 80:9, 12, 13-14, 15-16, 19-20

R. (Is 5:7a) The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel.

A vine from Egypt you transplanted;

you drove away the nations and planted it.

It put forth its foliage to the Sea,

its shoots as far as the River.

R. The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel.

Why have you broken down its walls,

so that every passer-by plucks its fruit,

The boar from the forest lays it waste,

and the beasts of the field feed upon it?

R. The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel.

Once again, O LORD of hosts,

look down from heaven, and see;

take care of this vine,

and protect what your right hand has planted,

the son of man whom you yourself made strong.

R. The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel.

Then we will no more withdraw from you;

give us new life, and we will call upon your name.

O LORD, God of hosts, restore us;

if your face shine upon us, then we shall be saved.

R. The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel.

Reading 2

Phil 4:6-9

Brothers and sisters:

Have no anxiety at all, but in everything,

by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving,

make your requests known to God.

Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding

will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers and sisters,

whatever is true, whatever is honorable,

whatever is just, whatever is pure,

whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious,

if there is any excellence

and if there is anything worthy of praise,

think about these things.

Keep on doing what you have learned and received

and heard and seen in me.

Then the God of peace will be with you.

Alleluia

Cf. Jn 15:16

R. Alleluia, alleluia.

I have chosen you from the world, says the Lord,

to go and bear fruit that will remain.

R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel

Mt 21:33-43

Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people:

"Hear another parable.

There was a landowner who planted a vineyard,

put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a tower.

Then he leased it to tenants and went on a journey.

When vintage time drew near,

he sent his servants to the tenants to obtain his produce.

But the tenants seized the servants and one they beat,

another they killed, and a third they stoned.

Again he sent other servants, more numerous than the first ones,

but they treated them in the same way.

Finally, he sent his son to them, thinking,

'They will respect my son.'

But when the tenants saw the son, they said to one another,

'This is the heir.

Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.'

They seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.

What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?"

They answered him,

"He will put those wretched men to a wretched death

and lease his vineyard to other tenants

who will give him the produce at the proper times."

Jesus said to them, "Did you never read in the Scriptures:

The stone that the builders rejected

has become the cornerstone;

by the Lord has this been done,

and it is wonderful in our eyes?

Therefore, I say to you,

the kingdom of God will be taken away from you

and given to a people that will produce its fruit."

The End of the Reformation II

I started this thread some time ago, put it aside, and then oddly a few weeks later, heard a Parish Priest make the observation during a homily.

Synchronicity at work?

I've since linked the theme in to another post, which then ends up being published, as it were, prior to what should have been the original entry, that entry being here:

The End of the Reformation I. Christian Nationalism becomes a local debate. . .

So we return to finish our original thoughts.

St. Augustine of Hippo, in The City of God, describes the fact and the era of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Rome, it is often noted, wasn't built in a day, and it didn't collapse in one either.  People living through the horrible experience knew things weren't going well, but they wouldn't have necessarily thought that "well, it's 450 and Rome is over".  They wouldn't have thought that in 500, or 600 for that matter.

And they might not have really noticed that a lot of old things were passing away.  Christianity was only in its third century when Augustine was born in 354 and still twenty years away from Rome's disastrous 450 when he died in 430.  All sorts of heresies and competing religions flourished in the era.  Indeed, the Council of Nicea had occurred as recently as the summer of 325 and the birth of Mohammed was only a little over a century away at the time of his death.  Looking outward, it would have been hard for Christians of the era to appreciate that many of the early heresies were about to pass away along with the European pagan religions and Christianity explode as the religion of Europe, North African and the Middle East.

Clearing out the thick weeds of the Roman era turned out to be necessary first.

Human beings, having fairly short lifespans, tend to see all developments in terms of their lifespans.  In True Grit the protagonist Maddy Ross states, "a quarter-century is a long time", but in real terms, except for our own selves, it isn't.  Things that occurred only a century ago, and I used only advisedly, didn't really happen all that long ago in terms of eras and changes, although here too we are fooled by the fact that the last century has been one of amazing technological development, which is not the human norm, with this being particularly true of the middle of the 20th Century.

I note this as the entire Western World is in turmoil right now, seemingly without any existential or metaphysical center, which explains a lot of what we're enduring in the world.  How did we get here?

There's a good argument that it's due to the end of the Reformation, or rather, it's collapse.

St. Augustine lived at the beginning of Rome's death throes.  That same era was the birth of the Catholic world, and I say that advisedly.  Some would say the Christian world, but they'd be wrong in the way they mean it.  Christianity, all of it, was Catholicism.  It would be right up until the Reformation.  Even the Great Schism, which was a schism, really only had its final act in 1453, quite close to Luther's famous apocryphal nailing on the Cathedral door in 1517.

The English-speaking world is a product of the Reformation, and while it now seemingly regrets it, the English-speaking world was the major, influencer of the world's history and cultures.  By extension, therefore, the Reformation influenced the entire globe.

That's not praise for the Reformation.  Indeed, I'd have preferred it never have had happened. That's just a fact.

The Christian Era is usually calculated to have commenced at the time of the Crucifixion of Christ, which occurred sometime in the 30s, but it might be more instructive for our purposes to look at the 200s or the 300s, but a person could go earlier. The very first council, a general gathering of Bishops of the Church, occurred in about the year 50, and is reflected in the Book of Acts.  It dealt with some issues that had come up in the very early Church, but for our purposes one of the things worth noting is that it was a Council of Bishops, which means that there were Bishops.  This shouldn't be a surprise, but due to the way the Reformation attacked the history of the Church, it might be to some.  Peter, the first Pope (that title of course wouldn't have been in use) was there.  

The Council of Jerusalem is not regarded as an ecumenical council, as Church historians would note.  The first one of those was the aforementioned Council of Nicea, which occurred in 325.  Some Protestants would date the founding of the Catholic Church to that date completely erroneously, a Reformation era lie, as it's been one that has been particularly attacked by Reformation Protestants at some point. The reasons are fairly obvious, really.  The Council gathered to address heresy, put it down, and it did.  It's noteworthy as a Council for the additional reason that it was the first to occur during the reign of a Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great, who stayed out of it, as is often not appreciated either.

Indeed, going forward, that reflected much of the history of the Church.  If we date the Christian era from, let's say, 100 and go forward to 1517, generally the Church was independent of the state and defined the metaphysical.  

This is significant in that it was universally agreed that there was a metaphysical, or an existential, that was outside human beings, greater than it, independent of it, and which humans had to conform themselves to.  In other words, it was accepted that reality defined humans, and not the other way around.

Luther didn't mean to attack that core principle, but his actions set a revolution against it in motion.  Luther didn't even really mean to separate from the Church at first, but rather to criticize what he saw as abuses.  Things took off, however, mostly as German princes saw this as an opportunity to say that they could define certain things locally, rather than the Church.  After a time, Luther, who didn't find German bishops following him, claimed in essence that the clergy could independently interpret all matters theological, although he himself only attacked a limited number of principals.

Luther was a cleric, of course, and he didn't really start off to, and in fact did not, establish a Church that departed from the Catholic Church in all things.  Indeed, Lutheran services today strongly resemble Catholic ones. But following "reformers" did.  The logic was fairly inescapable.  If Martin Luther, who wasn't a bishop, could tell the bishops what doctrine ought to be, anybody could, or at least any Christian could.  More radical species of revolution, therefore, followed Luther.

In the English speaking world, the Reformation got started with King Henry VIII's desire to secure an annulment, not a divorce, from his wife.  When the Church found the marriage to be valid, he declared that it was he, not the Church, who was the supreme religious figure in England.  That was really a different position than Luther had taken, but Henry opened the door to challenging the Church, which would play out in a particularly odd form in England as various regimes teetered between radical Protestantism and Quasi Catholicism, before settling in on an uneasy truce between the two in the form of the Church of England in England.  In Scotland, which England had heavy influence over, Presbyterianism set in as a form of more radical Protestantism.  In the form of the United Kingdom, coming officially into existence in 1707, the Crown would spread both faiths around the globe, with the unwilling Irish taking Catholicism with them.  In Europe south of the Rhine, of course, Catholicism remained, so French and Spanish colonialism took Catholicism with them as well.

English-speaking colonists were often religious dissenters early on, holding to the more radical form so Protestantism, while later English colonists tended to bring in the "established" church.  In neither instance, however, was it ever the case that there was a rejection of Christianity.  The Enlgisih had, through their leaders, rejected Rome, but they hadn't rejected all variants of the faith.  Be that as it may, the concept of rejection based on independent belief was firmly established, first in 1517, and then in 1534.  The door was open.

When the United States came into being, it did so as a Protestant country.  Canada as well, in spite of a large, but marginalized Catholic population, and so too Australia and New Zealand.  Indeed, anywhere the English went, and they went everywhere, Protestantism went with them.

This is so much the case that American Christians tend to think that Catholics are simply a minority all over the globe and that "Christians", which is how many define themselves, represent the Christian Faith. 

Far from it.

Conservatively, 50.1% of the Christian population of the globe is Catholic.  Another 11.9% of Christians are Orthodox.  Given this, over 60% of Christians are Apostolic Christians who, while not united, generally recognize each other's Holy Orders as valid, and who moreover share the overwhelming majority of their tenants of their Faiths.  I've seen estimates, however, that place 80% of all practicing Christians as Catholics.  Indeed, while Protestant missionaries frequently work to convert Catholics in poor countries, calling into question really their status as real missionaries, the Catholic Church has large numbers of underground Christian members in its ranks all over the globe, and local Protestant conversions in some areas are in reality probably often conversions of convenience and not really all that deep in any form.

Protestants are estimated by Pew at 36.7% of the Earth's Christians, if the Pew figures are otherwise correct.

Maybe that's right, but as noted I've seen other figures that skew the Catholic figure upwards significantly, and the Protestant figure downward.

In the U.S., however, 48.9% of the population is Protestant and 23% are Catholic.  That makes Catholics a large minority, but a minority.  Orthodox are an even tinier minority at .4% of the population.  It's most strongly represented, not surprisingly, in Alaska.  It has been growing, however, due to what we're noting in this threat. As the Protestant faiths collapse in on themselves, some abandoning them go into Orthodoxy.

Indeed, one entire congregation in Gillette did just that.

Luther's biggest accomplishment, one that is acknowledged and celebrated today in some European countries that underwent the Reformation, was to bring about the modern world of individualism.  Reformation Day, for example, is a public holiday in five German states and even Lego put out a Lego variant of Martin Luther in 2017 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.  What's really being celebrated isn't so much his theology, but the concept of radical individuality.

That same individuality, however, has led to the collapse of Protestantism, or at least a massive contraction from what it once was.  This is constantly in the news, but rarely understood.  In the English-speaking world the urban British began to lose their attachment to the Church of England long ago, which after all had a strong connection with the English establishment, not the English underclass, something that was really the opposite of the oppressed Catholic Church.  Put another way, Henry VIII did not destroy the monasteries to benefit the poor, and they didn't.

Elsewhere, British imported Protestantism was strong, with this particularly being the case in North America, with this most particularly the case with the United States which had large numbers of adherents to Protestant faiths that the British Crown had oppressed.  But by the turn of the 19th/20th Century, things were very slowly changing.  The collapse of the Progressive movement, which was strongly tied to Protestantism, accelerated it as more radical reformers on the hard left pitched for social change.  This trend was strongly in place by the 1930s. 

It took the post-war economic boom to really set it in, however, even thought that, like so many other things, was not apparent at the time. Following World War Two, in fact, main line Protestant churches grew, as newly monied middle class Americans went into them.  The last gasp of Catholics converting to main line Protestant churches as they'd economically arrived occurred, something that came to an end with John F. Kennedy arrived.  By that time, however, the Baby Boom children were coming into their own.

Raised in a Protestant culture but coming into massive societal wealth, much of the Boomer ethos amounted to nothing other than being allowed to do what they wanted to without hindrance.   The table was already set for that by the increased wealth of the post-war era and the arrival of the Playboy era starting in 1953.  They took it and ran with it, rejecting anything that got in the way with license.  Protestant churches, which already had the concept of being democratic, responded by getting on board in many instances.  "Liberal" theology spring up and took root in some, followed by the widespread turning of a blind eye to many other things.  

For example, as late as the 1930s the Anglican Communion rejected divorce to the same extent that the Catholic Church does. As the Sexual Revolution came in, it started to turn a blind eye to this, and now it'd be extraordinarily difficult to find any Protestant Church that cares anything about divorce, something clearly prohibited by the New Testament, at all, save for some very conservative Protestant denominations or semi denominations.

This, in fact, provides a good example.  Christ prohibited divorce.  St. Paul condemned not only sex outside of marriage, but listed specific sex acts and behaviors.  The Anglican Communion now has bishops who engage in the very activities that St. Paul condemned.

It can't really be justified, but it's occurred as these institutions are, at the end of the day, democratic. Religion is not.  And those sitting in the pews, in their heart of hearts, know the difference. The leaders, like leaders of democratic institutions, attempt to do the obvious, which is to modify doctrine to satisfy the cravings of the electorate.

Because religion is existential by its nature, it's not working.

This has seen the massive drop-off of membership in some Protestant denominations.  I'ts also seen ruptures in others, as "conservative", by which is really meant those adherent to basic tenants of the Christian faith, split off.  At the same time it's seen the growth of "non-denominational" churches, some of which chose not to challenge the behavior of the congregants and focus instead, broadly, on the theme that everyone is going to Heaven, something that the New Testament doesn't support at all.

Naturally, as part of all of that, people have been just dropping out, with WASPs dropping out most of all. The white upper middle class, which reflects more than anything else the spirit of the 60s and the Boomers, would rather sit comfortably behind imaginary gated walls and not be bothered with having to have restrictions of any kind.  Not all of them, of course, but enough to have impacted and still be impacting the culture.

It shouldn't be imagined that Catholics have been immune from this, in European cultures.  The spirit of the age took hold to a very large extent, but not the same universal degree, in the 1970s, impacted it as well, with the stage being set, in the U.S. in the Kennedy election of 1960.  Kennedy's election heralded the end of open public prejudice, for a time, against the Catholic Church in the U.S. and Kennedy's Catholic on Sunday declaration essentially muted differences in the Faith from Protestant faiths, which were and are very real, to private ones, rather than the open and obvious public ones they had been. The spirit of the age that took hold in the late 1960s led to blisteringly poor catechesis in the 70s, and a generation, or more, of Catholics that didn't understand that there really were massive differences between Apostolic Christianity and Protestantism. The term "Cafeteria Catholic" came in, in no small part as younger Catholics weren't told they weren't in a cafeteria.  Catholics were almost informed that major tenants of the faith, including the need for Confession, and the prohibition against marrying outside the Faith, were merely options in the 70s and 80s.  Clawing the way back from that has been difficult and massive damage has been done.  Moreover, as Western Catholicism suffers from the same Baby Boomer control that so many other things do, the process of recovery has been slow as those who came up during that age have yet to yield control.

At any rate, this is where the spirit of our age comes from.  It turns out that given time, and money, people's thoughts don't go to higher things, but only to themselves.  Even people immediately around them can be a bother.  Ultimately the generation that had calimed to be for "Love" turns out to be for self love in every way describable, including to its own destruction.

Of course, as noted, people know that something is wrong and that's creating massive social disruption. The problem ultimately comes to be that reconstruction is very difficult.  People lead down the road so far, that then realize they're being led to where they don't want to go, will often just sit down and demand that the new world be built right there.  I.e., divorce was okay. . . but we'll stop here.  Or, homosexual marriage was okay, and we'll stop there.  The problem is that you really can't stop anywhere you want, as it suffers from the same intellectual deficit that going further on the road that you are on, if it's a false road, does.

Hence, as noted, the inaccurate contemplation of Susan Stubson in the NYT that we wrote about the other day.  Not realizing it, her departure from Apostolic Christianity didn't go deeper, as she believes it did, but took her on the path to where she is right now, and where's she's now uncomfortable.  Some roads get rocky.

At the end of the day, however, what this really is, is the collapse of the Reformation.  It's in its final stages.  Having attacked the existential nature of the Church in favor of clerical liberty, and then that in the name of individual theological liberty, it ultimately has to be for radical individual liberty.  But, as we don't actually exists as planetary mammals of our own description with our own universe, to which the laws of the existential must bend, that can't work.

And it isn't.

Collapses are horrific messes.  

At the time that Augustine wrote City of God, the collapse of the Roman world wasn't close to being worked out.  The long slow developments that gave rise to the Great Schism still hasn't been worked out, and it started prior to the Reformation.  The Reformation was a revolution, and looking back from a distant future, it will have been seen to only now being playing itself out.

Revolutions cause causalities. There have been many, and there will be many more to come.  The entire Western World was impacted, to some degree, by the Reformation, some of it more than others.  Its collapse is being particularly felt in the English-speaking world, and interestingly also in the Lutheran world.  This will get worse before it gets better, but as the Reformation turned out to be anti-natural in the end, or took that turn at some point, it will get better as a new Counter Reformation correct the errors now being inflicted upon us. That too is already starting.

Related Threads:

The End of the Reformation I. Christian Nationalism becomes a local debate. . .

Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World

In the West, we just celebrated Easter.  In the East, where the Old Calendar is sometimes used, it's today.  This might mean, for the observant, that they were in Church the prior Sunday, in which case, for churches using the Catholic liturgical calendar, they heard this.

Then Judas, his betrayer, seeing that Jesus had been condemned,

deeply regretted what he had done.

He returned the thirty pieces of silver

to the chief priests and elders, saying,

"I have sinned in betraying innocent blood."

They said,

"What is that to us?

Look to it yourself."

Flinging the money into the temple,

he departed and went off and hanged himself.

We all know, of course, that Judas was Christ's betrayer.  Not too many stop to think that he was seized with remorse and hung himself.

Why was he so miserable?

Probably for the same reason that Western society, on the whole, is.

He thought of himself and chose his own inner wishes rather than being willing to sacrifice.

It's struck me recently that this is the defining quality of our age. We won't sacrifice and don't believe we should have to.  It explains a lot.

Interestingly, in a matter of synchronicity, after I started writing this I happened to listen to an episode of Catholic Stuff You Should Know on Augustine's City of God and Lewis' The Great Divorce that ties in perfectly.  It's here:

The one that explains exactly where we are.

CAN WE BUILD THE CITY OF GOD?

And I do mean exactly.

Also, a matter of synchronicity, we passed the 111th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic after I started this.  

The wealthy men on board the doomed ship, and a lot of the other men, stayed on the sinking ship so that women and children would be saved.  The men who went were largely the crew, needed to man the lifeboats as part of their tasks.  Otherwise, men didn't complain, they just stepped aside so that as few women and children as possible wouldn't die. A Catholic Priest stayed with them to prepare them for entry into the next life.  All of them were living up to a standard, but the interesting thing to note there is that it was a standard.  They were heroic, but not because they exceeded the standard, but rather because the occasion came to apply it, and they unflinchingly did.

Now we shove women into combat, something that in any prior age would be regarded as an outright societal act of cowardice and a complete failure of male virtue.

We've come a long ways, all right.  And not in a good way.

Sacrifice was almost the defining quality of any prior age, or at least those that preceded the late 1960s, and very much the defining quality of the 18th through mid 20th Centuries.  Men would die before they'd let women and children be injured, and if they didn't, they'd be branded as cowards for the rest of their lives.

Most people married, and marriage was understood to have a sacrificial element to it in numerous ways.  People didn't "write their own vows", the vows were part of the ceremony and they were, well, vows.  Promises you weren't getting out of, in other words.

Latin Rite English wedding vows still reflect this.  The entire series of events reads goes as follows.

First, the Priest asks a series of questions, to which the couple responds "I do", or words that effect:

(Name) and (name), have you come here to enter into Marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly?"                   

"Are you prepared, as you follow the path of Marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live?"                       

"Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God and to bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"

Only after ascent to that, the Priest reads:

Priest (or deacon): Since it is your intention to enter into the covenant of Holy Matrimony, join your right hands, and declare your consent before God and his Church.

Groom: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.

Bride: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my husband. I promise to be faithful to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love you and to honor you all the days of my life.

The element of sacrifice is so strong in marriage, that in Croatia, a Catholic country, an added element is present, in which the Priest states:

You have found your cross. And it is a cross to be loved, to be carried, a cross not to be thrown away, but to be cherished.

That's really heavy.  That's not a fuzzy bunny, flowery rose, type of view of marriage at all.  You're signing up for a real burden.

But one to be cherished.

And that's the thing that the West has lost. 

We don't want to sacrifice at all.

If you look at life prior to the late 1960s, sacrifice was darned near universal.  Everyone, nearly, married and divorce was rare.  People sacrificed for their marriages.  Most married couples had children, and having children entailed sacrifice.  Reflecting the common values of the time well, the screenwriter of The Magnificent Seven summed it up in this fashion in a comparison of family men to hired gunfighters:

Village Boy 2 : We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are cowards.

Bernardo O'Reilly : Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery. That's why I never even started anything like that... that's why I never will.

The line, "And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground." was literally true for many.  Indeed, it's been noted that up until some point after World War Two Finland, which rountinely comes in as the happiest country on Earth, had a very early male death rate, simply because the men there worked hard, and basically worked themselves into the grave for their families.

People were not, of course, perfect, and therefore children naturally arrived on the scene with an unmarried origin.  Depending upon the age of the couple, that often ended up in a marriage before the child was born, adding an added element of sacrifice in which the couple sacrificed, in essence, an element of freedom or even their future for what they'd brought about. When that didn't occur, the child was more often than not given up for adoption, which involves an element of sacrifice, but because it arises in a different context, we'll not get too deeply into that.

Things tended to be focused on that fashion. There were people who didn't follow this path, but they were a minority.

This has been portrayed, since the 1970s, as some sort of horrible oppression.  But the surprising secret of it is that people seem to be hardwired for it, and when it's absent, they descend into, well, a descent.

None of which is to say that sacrifices aren't present in the modern world. They are, although by and large society tries enormously to avoid them.

It's tried the hardest in regard to the natural instincts of all kinds.  People are able to avoid nature, and so they do, least they have to sacrifice. But that's a sacrifice in and of itself, but for what?

The self, is what we were told initially.  But the self in this context turns out to be for the economy.  In a fairly straight line, we're told that you should avoid commitments to anything requiring commitment, so that you can get a good career, make lots of money, and go to Ikea.

Very fulfilling?

Ummm. . . 

No, not at all.  

In The Great Divorce, which I haven't read but which Catholic Things summarized extensively, Lewis placed a self focused Anglican Bishop in the role of the self-centered intellect.  Self Centered is the epitome of the current age.  And that self-centered role placed the figure in Hell.

We're doing a good job of that figuratively for the same reason, and literally as well.

Prior Related Threads:

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 1. A thought on community

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 3. Our lost connection with animals.

"Drip". Synchronicity.

Fighting On Film, one of the podcasts I listed to, just dropped an episode on The Professionals.  Like all of their episodes, this one is well worth listening to.

In this episode, one of the hosts compliments Lee Marvin's "drip", and then going on to explain that "drip" is British slang for sharp and cool clothing. The phrase is used numerous times in the podcast, with it also noted that Marvin is "just dripping".

When I came home (I was listening to it while driving) I noted the phrase to my wife.

This morning 

Oddly enough, this morning new Alaska Congressman Mary Peltola used it in a tweet, showing herself in an outdoor photo wearing a purple native parka.  Her tweet stated:

Is this what the kids call… drip?

What are the odds?

"If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt."

If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us.  Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings. 

Fr. Joseph Krupp.

Fr. Krupp's Facebook post here was synchronicitous for me.

I didn't take much time off last year.  And my not taking "much", what I mean is that I took three days really off, just off, because I had surgery and was laying in the hospital.

That's not really good.

I'd like to claim that it was for one reason or another, but truth be known, i'ts something I imposed upon myself.  And I do this every year.

Indeed, I'm much worse about it than I used to be.

All the things you hear about not taking time off are 100% true, if not 200%.  You become less efficient, for one thing.  And if you work extra hours, sooner or later, you'll acclimate yourself to working the extra hours to the point where you need to. That's become your work life.

Christmas in my work place essentially always works the same way.  We work, normally, the day before Christmas, December 24, until noon. At noon, we dismiss the staff and all go to a collective lawyer's lunch.  That institution is, I think, a remnant of an earlier era in our society in general, when it could be expected that most professional institutions would remain a certain size and everyone who worked there would have a sort of collegiality.  It sort of recalls, in a way, the conditions described by Scrooge's original employer in A Christmas Carrol, in the shop run by Mr. Fezziwig.

This use to really prevail in firms when I was first practicing.  I recall being at lunch on December 24 at a local club restaurant in which other firms would also be there.  Everyone was doing the same thing.  I haven't seen another firm at one now, however, for years.  Maybe they just go somewhere else, but I sort of suspect that they're not doing it.

Well, good for us. It's hard not to have a certain feeling of sadness about it, however, as three of the lawyers who once were part of that are now dead.  Others have moved on long ago.  New faces have come, of course.

Anyhow, that institution sort of ties up the afternoon of December 24, but it's an afternoon off.   If you are a Catholic with a family, it's always been a bit tight, as we normally go to Mass on Christmas Eve and then gather after that. Christmas is obviously a day off, as is Boxing Day, December 26, although most Americans don't refer to Boxing Day by that name.

This year Christmas came on a Sunday, which was nice as it made December 23 the day of the lunch and effectively an extra day off.  We took, of course, Boxing Day off.

Sometime in there, I began to wonder why I hadn't taken the whole week off.  With just three days off, beyond Sundays, and having worked most of the 52 Saturdays of the year, I should have.  I had the things done, pretty much, that I needed to get done.

What was I thinking?

If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us.  Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings. 

Well, I'm actually at the point, in spite of myself, that I'm so acclimated to going to the work that I feel guilty if I take time off.  And frankly, the Internet hasn't helped much.  On the afternoon of the 23d, I received a text message asking me if I was working that afternoon.  I wasn't, and they were gracious about it, but this is how things tend to be. It's hard to actually escape the office.

On Boxing Day I went goose and duck hunting.  Conditiond were great.

I should have had my limit of geese and ducks, but I shot like crap.  It'll be part of an upcoming post, maybe, but my hunting season has been messed up due to surgery.

I was going to go with my son, but events conspired against it, so it was just me and the dog.  

Earlier this year, my wife had us buy a bigger smoker. We had not had one until fairly recently, when we won one at a Duck's Unlimited banquet.  That one is a little traveling one, sort of a tailgating smoker, and can work from a car's battery system.  You can plug it in, and we've enjoyed it, but due to its size, we decided to get a bigger one and did.  It's been great.

This was my first occasion actually using it, something necessitated by the fact that our oven is more or less out due to some sort of weird oven thing that happened to it which will not get addressed until sometime this week.  Besides, I'd been wanting to try smoked waterfowl.

It turned out great.  I should have taken a picture of the finished bird, but I didn't.  Maybe one of the top two roasted geese I've ever had.

Anyhow, I should have taken this whole week off, but didn't.  I may take some time later this week, however.  

It's been a really long year.

Synchronicity, was Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XXXVI. The Lying edition

We just posted this, this morning:

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist XXXVI. The Lying edition: For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales!  Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons...

As it happens, the Tribune's article is on the same topic, singling out the current, appointed, State Superintendent of Education Brian Schroeder and legislature running for Secretary of State Chuck Gray specifically. Schroeder is referenced for his claims about a Federal requirement preventing students from being denied lunch services due to gender issues, which he has claimed is about something else related to that topic, and Gray for making "election integrity", or words to that effect, the centerpiece of his campaign even though there have only been four instances of voter fraud in the state over the past 22 years.

Lex Anteinternet: An answered prayer?

Keeping at, that is what's described here:

Lex Anteinternet: An answered prayer?: God does not come to free us from our ever present daily problems, but to free us from the real problem, which is the lack of love. This is ...

And today I get this in my Twitter feed:

Fr. Joseph Krupp

@Joeinblack

#talkedtotheboss He said when we find ourselves in a spot where we want Him to change our circumstances, we need to be open to the possibility that He’ll change us instead.

I'll admit, this is becoming disconcerting.

Still keeping at it, however.

Synchronicity

Just about  three or four days ago my son and I were joking about Julian Assange.

More specifically, we were finding it amusing that he was probably a really annoying house guest for the Ecuadorian Embassy in the UK.

Turns out he really was. Basically, he was a spoiled child and a titanic a*****e.

A couple of additional observations.

He was wanted in Sweden for a charge of rape, but the accusations against him in the US would only subject him to five years in the pen, assuming he got the full sentence.  The charge in Sweden has expired due to some oddball interview deadline that Swedish law has, but after spending seven years in the Equadorian Embassy, which is not large, he's exposed to five in the US.

You have to wonder about the wisdom of his decision there.

Secondly, Pamela Anderson. . . you know, the girl from Bay Watch (which I've never seen) and the early years of Home Improvement, is Assange's girl friend.

Anderson is a pathetic case in her own right.  She went to being cute, with minimal talents, to being plastic and in my view creepy. Assange is also creepy.

Well one more item of weirdness to be featured in the papers, in the Age of Weirdness.

More bad news for Coal

A report in the Tribune earlier this week indicated that employment in coal dropped again in 2018.  Maybe that reflects a new normal level of employment, but at any rate its not good news for those who were banking on a return of coal for various reasons.  Among those this is not good news for is the State, which has been funding education on the coal severance tax for a very long time.  Mine employment, of course, isn't directly tied to that tax, but the tax reflects production as does employment in the mines.

Also, the same week I ran an item about a bill in the legislature to require coal companies to try to sell coal fired power plants before closing them, a unit at just such a plant in Kemmerer in fact shut down.  This would reduce the plants capacity by a third, at least in the context of it being a three unit plant.

When I ran the item on the bill I had to admit I didn't know how many coal burning power plants the state had and I wasn't aware of this one.  I am now, of course, but only because of that news. The reason given for the shut down was that the plant was doing it as it couldn't comply with environmental regulations and it wasn't worth the cost to upgrade the unit.  While that's undoubtedly true, that ties back in with long term trends we've been noting on coal having reached a point where it now no longer has a big cost advantage over other power generating means.  Of course, it could be noted that regulation is what caused this to come about, but be that as it may, that regulation is there and is, at least presently, part of the cost of doing business.

Oddly enough, at the same time, a proposal for a solar electrical generation facility near Kemmerer has been made.  There's no connection between the two, but it has a weird element of synchronicity to it.

Sidebar Synchronicity

Netley Abbey, founded in 1239, disestablished in 1536.

I have, like most blogs, a series of sidebars off to the right that link here and there to things and places I find of general interest.

Just because I link to them doesn't mean that I agree with them 100% of the time by any means.  Indeed, if you find yourself agreeing with 100% of most websites you like, well. . . . you maybe want to rethink your approach to things a bit.

Anyhow, every now and then you can catch glimpses of synchronicity.  It's always interesting when that happens.

One of the sites I link into is dedicated the English writer and philosopher Hillaire Belloc.  The current entry from that site provides the following

CULTURES spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it—we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines—the very structure of our society is dissolving.

Just below it is my link to the National  Archives Tumblr blog where we learned, yesterday, that this is LGBT History Month.  In the Tribune I read an editorial in regards to the current Administration and those in the "LGBTQ" "community".  I don't know if National Archives is shunning the "Q" or just got confused on the expanding list of letters of the alphabet in this imagined category, but its entry provided:

In honor of LGBT History Month, we would like to share with you a federal court case from 1955 that led to a landmark Supreme Court case regarding the right of free speech, in which the Court held that speech in favor of homosexuals is not inherently obscene.

These entries are oddly synchronous.

Tintern Abbey, Wales. This abbey passed from the Church into private hands in 1540 and the lead was immediately stripped from the roof.

Recently I listed to a BBC History Podcast in which the speaker was speaking on the Reformation.  The speaker noted that he was not religious at all, quite the contrary, which in some weird way, as an English historian, may have allowed him to overcome the baggage that English historians usually carry on the Reformation.  Having said that, a couple of English historians recently have come out with works that take a refreshing view on this topic.  This fellow, to my huge surprise, pretty much condemned Martin Luther and then went on to condemn King Henry VIII, quite a departure from the usually propaganda of the Reformation view that English historians usually have (this is not, I'll note, a post on The Reformation or most certainly not on Martin Luther).  One of the points this fellow disturbingly raised is that he was of the opinion that huge historical change, and disastrous change, can happen overnight.

 Valle Crucis Abbey, Wales.  It was closed by King Henry VII in 1537 and leased to a private owner.  It's now protected by the Welsh government

I think he's right.

And I think we're living in a time that recalls that. 

One of the great myths if history, or at least one of the great American erroneous beliefs about history, is that all history is progressive.  We're always advancing towards some shining city on a hill. But as English history teaches us that is far from true (and we won't even dare to comment on what Russian history might teach us).  At best we might be able to say that history is progressive over a very long time, but not necessarily during any one person's lifetime or even over a period of centuries in many cases.  So, if a person is comforted by the thought that history must be advancing, they should be discomforted by the fact that it might not be advancing for you.  No, not by any means.   And true disasters and radical changes can and do happen nearly overnight.

Let's take the example of the English Reformation, and no I don't mean to pick on Protestants in general and those in the Anglican Communion in particular.  Rather, I think the history of what occurred, particularly to average people and their culture, is extremely important and we can take our lead from the English historian noted above who, I might add, was a self declared atheist.  As an earlier English historian who has written a book on the English Reformation has recently noted, up until Henry VIII's break with Rome, England was radically Catholic and defined its existence as a Catholic state with a Catholic monarch.  When Henry could not obtain an annulment (not a divorce, Henry never obtained a divorce from anyone, contrary to the common opposite assertion)  he determined that he, not the Pope, was the head of the Church in England, a view that the Anglican Communion today would regard as fairly absurd (and interestingly at least a few High Anglicans maintain today that, no, the Pope is the head of the Catholic Church of which they view themselves to be part of).  So Henry acted to create what was then probably a schism but soon developed into more.  Henry never attacked the Mass, but he destroyed the monasteries and soon after his death England was thrown into a state of religious strife that lasted basically until 1660 when the English Restoration occurred. During that century plus period the English lived in a state constantly on the edge of revolution with its social culture completely destroyed and a sort of terror frequently in place that would rival, to some degree, that of the more famous French model that would come a century after that.  Catholic Priests were murdered.  Peasants rose up in rebellion.  Anglicans were suppressed by Calvinists.  Anglicans suppressed Calvinists and Catholics.  It was horrific.

Glastonbury Abbey, England.

For the average person in the 1530s, life in England became a sort of nightmare and this would continue on for decades.  The overall result was that when England finally emerged from the era of endless strife much of its preexisting "Englishness" had vanished and would never return. When Episcopal parishes today look about and wonder why they are generally hurting in the United States (where a huge percentage of the population has English roots) and in England, part, but not all, of that answer lies with King Henry VIII's bedroom driving decisions of the 1530s.  Indeed, a large portion of that lies there.

Again, this isn't a history of the Reformation in England, but the point is that Henry VIII destroyed the English culture in significant ways in just a few years.  Prior to the 1530s there were Englishmen who held dissenting religious views to be sure, but after Henry VIII nobody could be secure in their views for long.  Men and women in the pews went, by law, to their old churches week after week and attended services not knowing if they were Catholics or something else, served by a Priest who couldn't be sure if he was in schism or not, and an overarching terror existing for anyone who dared dissent, which many in fact did.  Things to some degree would grow even worse when the same people were told that they were not to attend a Mass at all and that Christmas (along with sports) were being abolished in the name of religion, something that must have been distressing in the extreme.  Largely powerless, although at least one major rebellion was attempted, most just went along with it no doubt feeling a constant feeling of distress.

 

Lincluden Abbey, Scotland.  Still a ruin today.

We're undergoing something like that now, but not with religion, but rather human biology, although like the Anglicans to the Catholics, and then the Puritans to everyone, fundamental religious beliefs, along with fundamental scientific truths and also philosophical beliefs are being shunned so that the dissenters, recently the majority and maybe still the majority, play along.

We know more about biology than at any time in our prior history, and yet we are at war as a culture, or at least cultural leaders are, with our actual human nature, a nature which is fallen and far from perfect for anyone which gives rise to problems in everyone. We're a mammal, as we ought to know, with a high level of sexual dimorphism.  That is, the two genders, and there are only two, are radically different in human beings.  Humans, as a species, are extremely complicated and part of that extreme complication is due to our extremely high level of evolution. That evolution, in turn, has created a situation in which the two genders in human beings show more disparity between themselves than nearly (or perhaps) any other mammal.  So great is the disparity that if human samples were viewed in a vacuum with no other knowledge about them a typical scientists would doing a Linnean classification would risk defining them as two separate species.  Even our closest relatives in the primate family of animals are nowhere near as dimorphous as we are.  And that uniqueness is not only merely in our appearance but it goes right into our core.  The psychology of male and female humans is simply different and is different across cultures.  Positive and negative human behavior, from a social point of view, repeats in predictable form across cultures and religions with perfect predictability by gender everywhere and throughout time.

We're now pretending that's otherwise, and like the agents of the King in the 1530s, we have actually reached the point where official and semi official organs of government and society require the populous, which held no such beliefs just a few years ago, and in which many doubt them now, to comply.  The media insist that Bruce Jenner is a woman, and that his name is now Caitlan, even if only skillful surgery and drugs can create and maintain that appearance.  The courts have determined that every American must agree that marriage can be contracted between members of the same sex, which has never been the case in our own history or the history of any other people until suddenly it arrived upon us via Justice Kennedy and his fellow travelers in an area of the law, marriage, that traditionally the Court rarely entered.  As a result of that radical departure from the universal past and historical global norm, a baker from Colorado finds himself at the Supreme Court this term for running afoul of a Colorado commission that seeks to require him, against his will, to bake cakes for same sex wedding ceremonies.  An American organization that's dedicated to promoting traditional views on marriage found itself without the ability to process credit card donations as its processor,  a Wells Fargo entity (not exactly otherwise on the morally clean list recently) bumped them when another group defined them as a "hate group" for taking that view. The Boy Scouts have decided that girls can be "boy" scouts too.  The military has determined that an occupation limited pretty much to men since men first picked up a rock and killed a member of another tribe, and which is clearly part of their psychological makeup, must be opened to women even if the NFL basically isn't.  The same military has decided that maybe those who are confused about their gender and who seek to change it can somehow also serve in an occupation in which you fight other cultures who have no such confusion and who won't be sympathetic to the confused or their unique medical needs. 

This will all have a bad end.  It's not possible to take views contrary to nature over the long term. But it is perfectly possible to disrupt, and even destroy, a culture in the short term.

Iona Abbey, Scotland.  This site has been partially rebuilt in recent years by the Church of Scotland.