Alaska Weather

When I saw this Alaska weather pie chart I had a good belly laugh. Yes, winters are long, but 85% of the year?!?! Not quite, but it can seem that way!

Kreeft on Suffering and Love

Perhaps we suffer so inordinately because God loves us so inordinately and is taming us.

Perhaps the reason why we are sharing in a suffering we do not understand is because we are the objects of a love we do not understand.

Perhaps we are becoming more real by sharing in the sufferings that are the sufferings of God, both on earth, as part of Christ's work of salvation, and in heaven, as part of the eternal life of the Trinity which is the ecstatic death to self that is the essence of both suffering and joy. (78)

Pascal on Eternity

"...a nothing of eternity, and an eternity of nothing..."

Ran across this from Pascal -- had never seen it before. So true and cuts to the heart of Jesus' command to not worry and Paul's "do not set affections" on this world and James' "life is a vapor". How could it be that we have things so backwards? The Fall did more than we can imagine. As Peter Kreeft has it, "We read the Times when we need to read the eternities." Pascal says it so well:

"Our imagination so powerfully magnifies time, by continual reflections upon it,
and so diminishes eternity for want of reflection,
that we make a nothing of eternity, and an eternity of nothing;
 
and so vigorous and deeply rooted is this propensity, that the utmost efforts of our reason cannot extirpate it."

Kreeft on the Problem of Evil: "shiny reason is not the answer"

"Shiny reason founders; only opaque paradox stays afloat."

As Kreeft lays out the plan of the book he says he will first work through ten easy answers to the problem of evil -- answers which turn out to be inadequate. See how artfully he explains this rationale:

Each of these ten answers is a nice, clean shortcut around the mystery. Who wants to steer into the fog bank when there are roads running through the clean air? 

The Bible looks like a fog bank. Its story centers on mystery. Christianity is not one of the neat, clean little roads. It is like Noah's ark, a big, sloppy, cumbersome old boat manned by a family of eccentrics and full of all kinds of animals who have to be tamed, fed, cleaned, and mopped up after (remember, Noah had no deodorants!).

The ten easy answers are like sharp, trim, snappy craft with outboard motors skipping over the surface of the great deep and leaving the drippy old ark behind as hopelessly inefficient and outmoded. Their only problem is that they don't reach port. They sink. Shiny reason founders; only opaque paradox stays afloat. (page 28)

How do we meaningfully ask adult males to be men?

Over a year ago I closed a post by asking, "How do we 'meaningfully ask adult males to be men' and help them to do so?" and then said I would try to answer the question in my next post.  I since deleted that question because I thought I'd never get to answering it!  The subject is both difficult and simple, daunting and inviting.  It faces every culture and every person everywhere, and so we cannot take the easy pass.  So here goes my best effort to answer the question.

How do we meaningfully ask adult males to be men?

There is no end run on life which is another way of saying there is no end run on character.  The only way to ask adult males to be men is to be men ourselves.  This requires first of all something which should not need to be said:  it requires we believe there is such a thing as manhood, as masculinity.

The very need to define this is without doubt universal and old as time, but we cannot pass without mentioning that feminism has been no friend in this arena.  I mean clearly and plainly this: insofar as feminism and other sex/gender ideologies have made masculinity wholly subjective -- to that extent it has not been good.  That seems axiomatic to me, though I would of course listen to rejoinders and admit freely that it is -- as are all things in our current life-of-mind -- all but impossible to prove. (Which indicates it is premise level knowledge -- you either accept it or you do not.)

So, assuming there are universal and identifiable aspects to masculinity, if I were to give a minimalist answer to the above question it would look like this:

1. Men should always be honest, hard-working, provide for their own, and do their best.
2. Men should be sexually responsible.  This means saving sex for one woman, and that after marriage; and then keeping it within marriage with that one woman until death.  Singleness is a sound option, to be seriously considered as preferable for some men.  But it is not honorable unless chaste.
3. Honor really matters. Honor means to do what is right, reward rightness in others, look down upon un-rightness in others.
4. Men should use their gifts to the best of their ability to serve their loved ones and communities.
5. Men should cultivate and promote a willingness to protect their homes, communities and fatherland -- with force as necessary -- with the goal of protecting the more vulnerable and assuring that maximal life is preserved and prolonged.

That's my best effort and I hope it helps someone somewhere, just as I was helped by my own Dad, Uncles, Grandfathers, brothers, and other male examples.  Which underscores the main point: the best way to help boys become men is to be faithful to those we father by loving their mother and staying home; and by living faithfully otherwise as an example to sons not our own. For after all, when we adopt a modicum of C. S. Lewis' moderate realism about masculinity, we know that it is an innate characteristic in all men, to be cultivated, enriched, and strengthened.  This, as they say, quite literally "makes the world go 'round."

These simple truths, lived out though in weak vessels, give solid foundation to any community and nation.

Blogging Daily, Unknown Merit

Blogging daily fetching thoughts

from passing notions fraught

with ephemeral concerns.

Bloggers publish more than print

and so in this immediacy lent

the words are more unworthy.

Media forms of past at least

tended to a better feast

for hungry mind and soul.

Of course it's not immediate

this one often indigent -

can tend to empty words.

And poems that are not at all

though definitions hear the call

define some 'poets' who are not.

Blogging daily may have merit

Gives ambitious author carrot -

but that is meager feast.

Do Words Make Real?

Do Words Make Real?

Do words make real?

Letters, concepts shaping,

sounds and shapes reflecting

light that shines on cave's stone wall?

Words give thought --

form reception, perception;

toy with what we see,

determine what we say,

define and form.

Do words make real?

Would saying so be real?

What of music -- surely

this is real. Emotive.

Speech of soul elicits;

drawing, leading,

calling tears and laughter --

dancing, otherworldy.

The Muse and those who tease,

embedding ring in soul,

pull us where they go.

But is it real because we feel,

because we yearn, because we know?​

Sartre, Camus

and brothers told us yes -

and no, for answers cannot

be their own undoing, 

words saying words not real.

Muse - wordless -

leads in world with million

points of bearing, candles

tossed about the seas:

now raging, now calm,

now lit, now gone.

What is real?

“I. Is that enough?”

Why ask? The heart knows

eternal without knowing.

To question this must speak

with empty voice;

“no” requires “yes”,

meaning nothing when “I” is gone.

Irony is weak for this,

hopeless to explain:

eye curses light,

fish defies sea,

woman denies man or man, woman.

It's very real we see

when ask

why skeptic mind alone

is given shrine, driving

masses thinking, blinking, bowing.

“The only real knows there is not,” we say,

smug but dead. We implode

in word, truth, reality. Too late.

Mortality does not lie.

The end of educated ignorance,

knowing what but never why.

A call of faith breaks through,

the soul of grasping words,

the secret home of Muse:

faith, fraught with

unfriendly friends, ideas

foreign to her person.

The true heart hears her voice,

wisdom's call: “There is,

and knowing knows it so.

Question as you will;

question the questioner.

I will be here still, rejected

lover whom to lose is

to be no more.”