Civilians is Silly

The other day I got to help my younger brother move furniture. He and his fiancee' are preparing to merge apartments as their wedding approaches, and moving several pickup truck loads of furniture was the next step. It was great to help out with that, because, both of us being busy adults, we had not gotten time to hang out in a few weeks. I was in Georgia, studying for my National Registry Paramedic exam (which I passed, thanks be to God) and he was, is, and still will be for some time, preparing for a wedding.

It is great to have a brother. Friends are great, a wife is awesome, but no one is ever going to understand you like a brother. We can talk about things with that, "You know what I'm saying?" "Yeah, I'm right there with you," "People just don't get it," "No, they don't," kind of agreement. We have different opinions and interests, but we get similar things because we start from the same principles.

Civilians, for instance. Both of us share a similar attitude toward civilians and city folks. We grew up on a farm and were, if not exactly dirt poor, at least soil rich. We liked to build things, break things, learn things, discuss things, argue about things, think about things, and question things. Every thing had a million functions, only a handful of which were included in the instructions. "Ready made" was not in our vocabulary.

Then both of us joined the military and spent years being shuffled like a bad card trick from one side of the globe to the other on various missions. We had no control, we had to be ready to pick up and go at a moments notice and so we learned to discern what was needed and what could be deleted or returned or simply done without. If it doesn't fit in a C-bag or rucksack, it obviously is not required or can be acquired, jury-rigged or hot-wired on-sight, overnight, in flight, on the go.

We have a casual disdain of plans, because they never work. When you make a plan, you have only succeeded in describing one of the million possible ways in which it definitely will not go down. More often than not you have blinded yourself to the one or two ways in which it probably will go down. Best to keep it loose, and just make it up as you go. Screw it, we'll do it live.

One of the biggest discoveries we have both made, which we sometimes commiserate about, is that civilians freak out over the silliest things. Whether it is running late for work, or the color or layout of party decorations, or whether or not they might get a black eye from sparring with friends, or how hard it is to walk up a mountain at 2 mph for a couple of hours, they freak out about it. I once saw a patient in the hospital who was a veteran. He was working in retail as a manager, and when one of his subordinates started freaking out about some boxes that got knocked off the shelf, he told him, "Shut the f--- up and quit crying. No one's got their arms or legs blown off by a suicide bomber have they? No one is dead. No one is getting shot at. So what's the big deal?" This resulted in a complaint, a trip to his superior's office and subsequent trips to a psychiatrist's office. He was unable to wrap his head around the concept that you can't talk to people like that in the civilian work force.

I get where he is coming from. Sometimes I get frustrated and just want to shake people and say, "Wake up! Are you seriously complaining because the server made you wait five minutes before he took your order? Are you starving to death? Are you that important? Do you realize that right now, in a hundred countries around the world (including this one) there are millions of people who are not eating at all? Broaden your horizons and stop being so small and pathetic." People who complain about office politics especially unnerve me, because A: I just want to tell them they haven't gotten shot, lost a patient, or blown themselves up so quit crying; and B: I am going to have to make it in that civilian workplace eventually.

I can talk about this with my brother. He gets it. I can talk about this with my wife. She gets me. Most people start to nod and nervously back away, so I learn to let it go. You see, while our background gives us advantages, it also comes with some drawbacks. Neither of us is good at relaxing. Or rather, what is relaxing to us is incredibly strenuous to others. We want to be engaged, mind, body, heart and soul. The glory of God is man fully alive, and we don't want to be even the least bit dead until we are all the way dead. So a relaxing Sunday afternoon might involve hiking up a mountain, or discussing astrophysics, human genomics, and the moral ramifications of both. As a matter of fact, if we are hiking up a mountain, we are probably discussing some heavy topic at the same time. So we are great at relaxing in our own way, but we have been living at such a high level of intensity for such a long time, that our idea of relaxing is skewed, and neither of us does well with boredom. He goes to school full time and works nights full time. I feel like a day that doesn't start at 4:30 AM and run non-stop until 10:30 PM is wasted. 

We sometimes have a hard time being patient with people who aren't patient with the vicissitudes of life. As my brother says, "We had no control over our lives for so long, we learned to just go with the flow and not stress out about it." (He split that infinitive, not I. I merely left it in, in the interests of historical accuracy.) It isn't life's ups and downs that frustrate us. It is the people who get frustrated at life's ups and downs.

All in all, we are well on our way to being either incredibly active and useful citizens or grumpy old men.

Whichever we end up becoming, we will probably be whole hearted about it. As my brother likes to say, "I never half-ass anything. I always whole-ass it." (Which I believe is a Ron Swanson quote.)

Or, as I would put it, "The generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart." Oliver Wendel Holmes, 1884 Memorial Day Speech.

Conversation

“If you don’t mind my saying,” my Friend said to me, “I have noticed something about these little visits you make. You know you have been coming to visit for quite a while, and I always enjoy our time together immensely, more than you can possibly imagine. But I must say, I notice a strange thing about how you converse. Do you mind if I share it?”

“Not at all,” I said, surprised and pleased. “Please do.”

“Well, I notice that you come to visit and you always have such things to talk about, really very deep things, although most of them you do not understand in the slightest. You seem utterly determined to keep the conversation on those topics. Why is that?”

“I am afraid I don’t understand,” I admitted, slightly puzzled and, truth be told, just the tiniest bit offended, though I reminded myself that my Friend’s bluntness was just exactly what I needed most. “What exactly do you mean?”

“Well, you will be going along, chattering away about metaphysical hogwash and yadah yadah, and you will start to go off on a tangent. Maybe you will start to talk about the leaky faucet and how you have been meaning to get to that, or that bill that is going to be overdue in a week; but then, right as you are about to get going, you stop, you apologize, and you go back to your high-falutin’ talk.”

“I suppose I do,” I said, somewhat stiffly.

“Why? Why do you always cut the tangents short? And why the apology?”

“Well,” I answered, “For more or less the same reason I don’t answer my cell phone here. I don’t want to be distracted from the conversation. It is out of courtesy to you.”

My Friend laughed. “Oh, but Bless your Soul, did you really think this was a conversation? Goodness, a conversation implies two-way communication, and thus far you have done most of the talking. But let me explain it this way. Suppose you were in the middle of one of your ‘conversations’ with me and one of the children came in and asked for a drink of water? Or your wife asked you to grill some hamburgers. What would you do? Would you say, ‘Oh, sorry, go away, don’t bother Daddy now, he is talking to his Friend? Sorry, babe, I am in the middle of a VERY IMPORTANT CONVERSATION!’ Or would you get up and do as they asked?”

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I hope I would get up and do what they asked.”

“You would,” he agreed kindly. “Rest assured you would do it, and I know you would. Why?”

“Because you would always want me to fulfill the duties of my state in life before any other consideration.”

“Very correct,” my Friend said with a hint of irony. “Do you think that I am not within the children? Within your wife? Within each and every person, down to the very least of these who has a claim upon your service? Do you think you could serve them without serving me?”

“No,” I answered. “I know that in serving them I serve you.”

“And do you not know that when I come to you disguised as a child it is no less me than when I come to you disguised as bread and wine?”

“I know this.”

“Then apply that same logic to your tangential thoughts,” He said. “Do you think any thought arises in your mind that I have not allowed? Do you think any thought, even the least stray imagining of yours, is uninteresting to me? Who gave you this list of approved topics of conversation that you follow so scrupulously?”

I knew not what to say, so I said nothing.

“Perhaps instead of biting off those tangents and shoving them back into a corner somewhere (where they will either go bad or go to seed, but never go away), maybe you should take up one or two of them? I already know what is worrying you, far better than you do. Let me see it (by which I mean, ‘let me show it to you’) and share it with you, and we can deal with it together. Who knows, perhaps this conversation thing might become an actual conversation after all.”

Princess Fairy Tale Shoutout

Hey all,

My cousins over at trucksandteacups have begun writing a fairy tale, starring their three kids, and especially starring my god-daughter Mimi (as Princess Mimi the Cute.) If you've got a minute and need a dose of cuteness and daring-do in your life, go on over and check out the first installment.

These Things Endure



Blessing has a way of being passed on, like ripples in a pond. We call it many things: karma, luck, positive thinking, God's favor, as if God was up there bribing us with blessings to do what he wants us to do.

 

Say rather that God has created the universe out of love, patterned after love, and built upon love. Anything done out of love takes part in the nature of the universe because it imitates the God who created the universe. One who builds his life on the foundation of love and truth, establishes a house built upon rock. Upon that foundation blessings will be laid for many generations to come, even to the ending of time, because God sees that it is strong enough to hold them.

 

But this is no guarantee that bad things won't also happen, no matter how well you build. There will still be heartache, pain, sadness, loss, and death. Sometimes we ask why bad things can happen to good people. This is a silly thing to ask. One may as well ask why storms hit both the weak houses and the strong houses. The storms are coming, whether you build your house on sand or on rock. Build on rock, not because it will keep your house out of the storm, but so that when the storm comes, your house will have a fighting chance.

 

This picture was taken on November 11, 2011, shortly after I graduated the US Army Special Forces Qualification Course and received my green beret. It was the last time I ever saw my grandfather. I put almost 3 years of sweat and blood into earning that silly green hat. G'Pa put 74 years of his life into building a legacy of Faith, Family, Pizza and Beer. The green hat means nothing, if at the end of my life I do not leave behind me a legacy of love, like the one which this old, bald, toothless hero left behind him.

Ted Pelicano, May 27, 1937 - November 26, 2011

"But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Joshua 24:15

The Good Life

I wrote this as an antidote to yesterday's poem. This one is based on my grandpa's life and philosophy. It makes a great deal more sense than the other one.

The Good Life

 



He gave me a nod,

“The Good Life?

It’s pretty clear.

The life that meets a:

Faithful God,

A loving wife,

An excellent beer,

And great pizza.”

 

 

 

Ask Thugfang: Questions

His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness, Master Thugfang, is a demon of great infamy among academic circles. He is a frequent columnist for “Tempter’s Times”, an assistant editor for “Wickedness Weekly” and current chair of Tempter’s Training College’s Department of Defense Against the White Arts, after the sudden disappearance of the most recent head under mysterious circumstances. Now, His Right Dishonourable Loathsomeness takes your questions. Having problems with a particularly troublesome patient? Meddlesome enemy agents stymieing you at every turn? Don’t wait, write immediately to “Ask Thugfang” C/O “Underworld Magazine."

Dear Master Thugfang, I have just been assigned to young patient, the youngest of a very large Catholic family. The previous custodians of all of the patients have just been reassigned, presumably to much warmer jobs, because the Subvisor felt that their progress was inadequate. Naturally I am anxious to avoid a similar fate. Simply put, all of these human siblings are on the receiving end of a focused, detailed, incessant catechesis by their parents day in and day out. This whole house practically reeks of the White Arts. Some of the big ones are practiced on a daily basis. My patient is too young to begin learning such things at the moment, but the older siblings are not promising. They all accept the Catholic teachings without question. How do I keep my patient from ending up like that?

Sincerely, Ready to Get to Work.

My Dear Ready,

Ooh! That tingle of fear that shivers your existential core! Don’t you just love it? No better motivator for an up-and-coming young tempter like yourself than the knowledge of a predecessor’s fate. You should think about it regularly to make sure that this present salutary terror does not pass away. Fear and hunger, my young friend. They are the source of our strength, the mainspring of all our success. Embrace them both with open arms.

Now, as to this problem of yours, it does sound a bit grim, doesn’t it? All those lily-white souls just trembling on the brink of life, just on the cusp of the great struggle; will they hang on to what they were given, or will we be able to cajole, trick or intimidate them into letting go. I am positively licking my lips just at the thought of so much innocence, practically mine for the taking! But your patient is not there yet. You are trying to prevent the damage from being done, which is very wise of you. As much fun as it is to snatch a soul right from the very jaws of life, it is always better not to let that life get its teeth well sunk in in the first place.

Unbeknownst to you, you mentioned the answer to your own dilemma in your letter. I wonder you didn’t see it? But that is why I am the Master and you are just a lowly tempter. Never fear. You may yet learn.

So the older siblings accept the Faith “without question” do they? That is very interesting. Very interesting indeed. You see, the natural response of a human being, especially a young one, to something as stupendous as the Enemy’s Church is to ask questions. A human who really meets that Church usually spends his entire life asking questions, learning and growing ever further and further from us. Every new truth (faugh!) learned only wets their appetite for more. I don’t understand how the little rats can consume so much of the stuff. I personally find it nauseating and overrated. But that is what happens when a human really encounters “Truth.” They start wanting more and more of it. A human who is not asking questions is still open to us. All we need to do is stall them, keep them from really encountering this “Truth” until over time the sound of His voice dies away and is buried under layers and layers of business.

Now then, what you need to do is scurry round that homey little nest of theirs and sniff out the reason why these wholesome young lads and lasses are not questioning. Ten to one you’ll find it’s because the parents are not questioning, and there you will find the chink in the armor. You have practiced squeezing through smaller cracks in school, I hope. Now is your chance to slip through a real crack under fire (you didn’t think the enemy agents were going to let you have it all your way, did you?)

Young humans are born with question marks in their brains. Every word out of their filthy, slimy little mouths, once they learn to use them for anything other than stuffing their bodies with matter, is “Why.” Curiosity, my Dear Ready, is a truly nauseating trait in either man or angel. I hope you never indulge in it. Almost the most important use for an older human in charge of a young human is to stifle that curiosity. This can be done by parents, teachers, peers, priests, nearly anyone, but it is most effective if it is done by parents. Parents can get started so much earlier than anyone else, and they have so many more options. Take a good long look at how these adult humans respond to the questions of their younger offspring. In the natural order of things the adult humans would positively delight to be asked questions. They would listen honestly with attention and humor and answer clearly and straightforwardly, or admit it if they didn’t know the answer. In the order of what the Enemy calls “Grace” the results can be truly horrifying. Adults can actually use the questions of an ignorant, stupid child as opportunities to grow and learn themselves. Some of the more clear-headed humans go on to great lengths about simplicity and “fresh perspective” and such rot.  The curiosity of a child has been known to reawaken real curiosity in adults of even very advanced age, and curiosity is only one step removed from humility. Without upsetting your young head with further obscene details, suffice it to say that we categorically do not want this reaction to the child’s curiosity.

Fortunately hardly any humans are that natural all the time, and most humans are never that natural. We have many ways of twisting this dangerous dynamic to our ends.

The oldest and easiest standby is simple impatience. The human child is a creature of infinite repetition. It does not get tired of asking questions, but the adult is not so energetic. Adults get tired of answering questions. This is our opening. You need to keep the adult busy. It doesn’t matter what it is working on, so long as it feels pressured to finish that task, and snubs the young one’s question. As one rather insightful human put it, “Can’t you see that the paint on the walls is more important than the joy in your heart?”

Or, if the adult tends in the opposite direction, you can make it a slave to its offspring’s questions. Not as common or as useful, but I have seen it work.

But I think your particular situation is going to call for something a little more subtle. You say the parents actively catechize, which means they are answering questions at the very least when the children are younger. It means that they are trying to stuff those little heads with truth, so any intimation that the children are interested will no doubt fill their hearts with parental happiness. The parents have too much committed, and you are not going to be able to stop that process, but can you twist it?

Given that the older offspring are simply accepting everything the parent’s say without question, I am guessing one of two things is going on: either they have never been exposed to anything that could challenge their parents’ teachings, or they have learned that their parents do not want them to challenge it. If they have never been exposed to a challenge you have a decision to make. Do you want to bring in a little outside influence, or do you want to keep them sheltered.

Do not underestimate the effectiveness of the start they have been given. Culture shock and infatuation with the world may draw college kids away from the practice of their faith for a time, but in my mind it is rather a dangerous game. Some few of those who go hog wild never come back to the faith, but most of them do, and when they do it is a much more mature and balanced faith. Having sinned greatly they are more likely to be patient and understanding with the sins of others. The infamous dictum “There but for the grace of You-Know-Who,” has a powerful reality for them. The enemy is such a vilely unfair opportunist. Instead of blasting them for their first willful insult to His dignity, He patiently allows them to come back and then uses even their worst sins as opportunities to bind them to Him more powerfully than ever.

So the world that the parents fear is, in my opinion at least, not the most effective means of stealing the souls of the children. The parents fear it because it is visibly and measurably evil but we, as pure spirits, are not fooled by all the flim-flam.

If you can, I suggest you continue the isolationist trend. The faith that the children have been given thus far is very unlikely to be the real thing. Not that it is totally false, or that it won’t become the real thing, but they have not invested themselves totally in it, because they are teenagers. We want to delay that investment. In one sense it doesn’t matter how many of the externals of the faith they follow, so long as they follow them by mere habit. Going to Mass because their parents require it is perfectly acceptable to the Enemy when the human is eight years old. When the human is twenty-eight years old and still following the rules out of shear apathy or human respect, well, that, my dear demons, is a blighted human soul.

Now, even if the children do see or hear things that cause them to question, we can largely neutralize this if we keep the parents subtly under our control. Very few parents ever actively and deliberately punish their children for asking questions, but even the best parents can be made to discourage such questions. There are two ways a human can ask a question. One is to ask quite honestly for information. The second is to ask in a rhetorical fashion. For example, “Dad, Bobby said there is no such thing as heaven. Is that true?” is a legitimate request for information. The mind is open, and a wise human will take the opportunity to fill it with truth. “Why can’t I go to that movie with my friends? Who gave you the right to run my life?” is not a request for information it is a challenge. The child’s mind is closed. A wise parent may still answer this, or may choose to respond some other way, but we want parents to treat this as an affront to their dignity and blast the children into oblivion. In a sense we want them to do to the children exactly what the enemy hasn’t done to them.

The next step is to get the parent to treat every question as the challenging kind of question, and then voila! Our work is done. Whether it is a harsh response: “Young Lady, you will not see those friends any more, and I want you to forget what they said and never repeat it again.” Or a seemingly kind and loving response, “Don’t worry your head about it, dear, they were just being silly and they don’t know any better because they weren’t raised like you are.” The end result is that the child’s question is not answered and he learns that that sort of question is not welcome. Very soon he will either stop asking them altogether in an effort to please his parents, or he will rebel against his parents and ask all the questions he wants, but he will be biased against anything that sounds like what his parents would say, and will ask them of the world. At that point you will have to coordinate with our networking department. We have ways of ensuring that the answers he gets are our answers.

This is not foolproof, of course. The enemy did say that any who seek will find eventually, so on the whole I prefer the little vermin do not ask questions at all. Kill that instinct as quickly as you can and get the parents to do it for you. We have done a great deal of work with the current education system, and it also does an excellent job of stifling that unfortunate tendency. A human who does not seek will never find, and he is as good as ours.

Not that you can let up on the disgusting creatures, though. You never can tell with humans, and you wouldn’t want to let one slip away at the last minute. It would rather dull your prospects, I should think.

Cheers

Thugfang

Fear and Love in Homeschooling

In life there are only two paths: the Path of Love and the Path of Fear. They begin from the same place and travel very close to each other at first, but the farther a man travels along them, the more spearate they become. In the end they diverge so sharply and irrevocably that they lead to opposite sides of an unbridgeable chasm. On one side is life in all its fullness. On the other is death in all its emptiness.

I grew up in a homeschooling Catholic family and I know many homeschooling families, both Catholic and Non-Catholic. I know enough about it to know that no two families choose to homeschool for the same reasons, or in the same way. Some have religious reasons, some have primarily academic reasons. There was a time, when I was a teenager, and a little bit into my early twenties, when if you had asked me how I intended to educate any children I might ever happen to have, I would have said "Homeschool," hands down and given you a half dozen or so well-articulated reasons for that conviction. Since then, however, I have had the good fortune to meet and become very close friends with a number of families, young and old, who have homeschooled some of the time, or most of the time, or all the time. Some used curricula programs, some created their own curricula. Some went alone, some worked as co-ops with other families. Some homeschooled up until highschool, and then sent their kids to the public school or to private schools. I know of two groups of unusually ambitious families who pooled their resources and created their own Catholic schools, one in New York and one in Louisiana.

We can quote statistics about how well homeschoolers do on standardized testing, or invoke stereotypes about the sheltered, socially awkward homeschooler going hog wild on sex, drugs and rock'n'roll in college. No matter how many "outcomes" I have seen I can see very little in the way of a pattern. (Even the evaluation of outcomes must be undertaken very carefully, taking into account that every human being is different and makes his or her own choices.) I do, however, see a pattern in the foundations, so to speak. The motivation behind the choice to homeschool is really a choice between two opposite reasons. The choice is made either out of fear of evil, or out of love of the good.*

Too many homeschooling families that I have known chose homeschooling out of fear, fear of the experience they had in highschool being replayed in their children's lives (with good reason). The choice to homeschool was a reaction against that, a flight from the evils of the world. This attitude of fear is very powerful, but also very posionous. This attitude of fear becomes a prevalent undercurrent in the life of a family, and then in the life of a young person who grew up in that environment. The fear of making mistakes, of failing, of not being the "perfect Catholic" family, of somehow being corrupted by the evil world, all of these attitudes are based on fear. This is the fear that keeps Catholic young people from going to secular colleges for fear of being corrupted, from entering the military for fear of being dragged off to the strip club, from asking that girl to dance for fear of being led into sin or having everyone think you are going steady. It is the fear that keeps men from trying out the seminary, because they might fail. It is the fear that keeps men in the seminary after they have decided it isn't for them, because they don't want to be seen to fail. This fear prevents good Christian boys and girls from spending time together because they fear temptation more than they trust grace. This fear prevents good Christian young people from being friends with atheists, for fear that their faith will be stolen. Fear, fear, fear. We become so enamored of the homely ideals which really only exist in our minds that we run away from the real world, and consequently it goes to the devil. What do you expect when the salt of the earth is horded for our own private recipes, and the light of the world is put under a shade to make it a convenient night light for scared children?

The opposite motivation is love. Some people homeschool because they believe they have a gift to give their children which the world cannot give them. They want to share this gift of life with their children, in the hopes that their children will then go out and share that gift with the world. So they allow their children to ask questions, even challenging or disrespectful sounding questions. They allow their children opportunities to learn from anyone and everyone who has something good, true or beautiful to offer. Perhaps most importantly of all, they allow their children room to make mistakes. They do not try to shelter them from the responsibility to make their own choices, they do not prevent them from meeting people who think differently. They are available to answer questions and aware of the questions that their children are asking, but they are willing to be pushed aside, ignored or not listened to. They applaud the good, no matter how immature it might be, without ever condoning or encouraging that immaturity. These parents are humble enough to realize that they are not in control. They are simply tools in the hands of God, so they can make themselves available but not grasp at control when things don't go the way they planned.

This is the pattern throughout life. The slightest good attempted by the grace of God, even if it "fails" by our standards, is of more value than any amount of evil avoided. Remember the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-29), and tremble if you were given great gifts. Tremble, but rejoice, for you have been given the opportunity to do great good. Invest everything you have and everything you are in the mission that excites your heart and sets it on fire. Do not fear the naysayers, whether they wish you well or ill. Listen to their fears, and recognize them as fears. Take whatever truth they offer, and let their fears pass you by.

For we were not given a spirit of slavery to fear, but a Spirit of adoption by which we cry Abba! Father!

Fear not! He has conquered the world. He who is in us is stronger than he who is in the world.



* For the purpose of this blog I have artificially separated and contrasted the two motivations, but in real life they are never that simple. There are very, very few people in the world who are completely motivated by love and never by fear. There are some people who are motivated almost entirely by fear, but I hope not very many. There is a little bit of love in everyone, just a little spark of fearlessness. So don't expect to see real human beings entirely in one camp or another, and don't expect to see homeschooling families entirely in one camp or another either. The distinction is meant to enable us to see which direction we ought to be going. When we start using it as a set of boxes to stick our fellow Christians in, then I think it has become a trap and should be discarded.

How to Laugh at the People you Love

As a follow up to my last two posts here and here, I offer this set of rules I have come up with for laughing at people you love. Essentially this is what I have learned through trial and error (mostly error) about how to tease someone the right way. Essentially it comes down to two very simple and obvious principles which are simply and baldly ignored by most people most of the time:

1) Know yourself

2) Know the other person

That's it. That's all you have to do and, not only will it guarantee your learning how to use teasing correctly, but it will also solve 99% of your relationship* problems. And it's free! I am posting it right on the internet for absolutely 0.00 dollars down, and then only three easy payments of $free.99.
Of course, there is always the part where I actually have to do what I have thought of. That is the hard part, and, far from being free, it may well cost me everything I have. It remains to be seen whether the sacrifice is worth the pearl of great price.

How do you know yourself, in the context of friendly teasing? This is primarily a matter of internal awareness of what you are really saying. Loving teasing is shaped by primarily two factors internal factors. The first is the overall context of how your relationship with that person is. Loving teasing can exist only in the context of a loving relationship. How you really feel about this person is the single most important factor in determining whether your banter is loving or not, so if your relationship is shaky or twisted in some way, don't even try it. Heal the relationship first. Teasing is strong fair, only digestible by strong emotional stomachs. If there is an underlying tension in your relationship and you try to tease someone without acknowledging that tension and bringing it to light, it will come out in hidden form in your teasing.

The other factor in knowing yourself is an awareness of your emotional habits and patterns. Granted that your relationship with the other is healthy, we all still have long standing habits, learned from our earliest childhood on, that shape how we deal with conflicts and tension. Some people withdraw, some people hide, some people stick their head in the sand (not the same as hiding), some push, some go straight for the throat, some just try to force the other to submit. There is no one, not one person alive, who does not inherit some unhealthy pattern for dealing with conflict. Patterns very often can be traced from generation to generation within families. You do what your parents did or you react against it in the opposite direction. This is not doom and gloom. It is simply being aware of human beings (seen through the lens of my own behavior) as they really are, i.e. wounded with an existential wound.

These patterns are not the whole story, but they do come into play very strongly when there is conflict within a relationship. Even in a healthy relationship, human beings will not always agree with one another. This is not a bad thing, it is how we grow. The problem comes not from disagreement, but from how we handle that disagreement. If you have a habit of using sarcasm to attack, or light banter to hide, then these are tactics you should avoid. You must also practice being aware of what you are really feeling, the deeper meaning behind that joke. It doesn't have to be malicious to be poisonous. Simple irritation, impatience or annoyance is enough to cause an unbelievable amount of hurt. Even if the relationship is such that you really do love and trust each other, this does not make the hurt less. If anything it makes the hurt even greater because it is dealt out by someone who is trusted, and is therefore a betrayal of that trust.



However, knowing yourself is not yet enough. You must also know the other person, because whether or not they are hurt by what you say depends as much on how they take it as on how you meant it. People misunderstand each other all the time, and misunderstanding causes as much tension and pain as actual malice.

This starts out at the most basic level simply by paying attention to the other. Learning to read body language and conversational cues will go a long way to letting you know how your humor is coming across. Some people are natural at this. I am most definitely not so I have had to devote a lot of effort to this study, but it has been eminently worth it. It also has required a lot of paying attention to people who have a talent for making other people laugh, and imitating their style. (Yes, the whole process sounds rather laborious, but that's how I learned to socialize. The biggest step was learning not to take myself too seriously. It doesn't come naturally to me.)

The second step is learning to tease the way the other person wants to be teased. Which doesn't mean that someone is going to say, "Hey, would you poke fun at me about x, y or z? I really enjoy it when you do that." That would violate the essentially modest nature of teasing. (In fact, I almost feel like thinking this much into it violates that nature. I intend to forget the whole thing as soon as I have written it.) You have to pay attention to how they respond. If you have learned to pay attention to how much fun they are having, rather than how much fun you are having, it shouldn't be too hard to figure out what things are fair game for making any particular person laugh (your mom or dad for instance) and which are off limits.

The next step is to realize that people, especially women but also men, have moods. This means that even though you may have found a way to joke around that is acceptable most of the time, that doesn't mean that it is automatically acceptible if the person is in a bad mood. Even when you know a person really well you still have to be aware of their particular mood at any given moment.
Finally, it has to be mutual. It doesn't do for you to be one who is teasing all the time, but they can't say anything back. Of course if they know you as well as you know them, they should have plenty of material for jokes (if you haven't found something teaseworthy about someone, you don't know them yet.) You absolutely have to laugh at yourself.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes, learn from your mistakes. If you accidentally hurt someone apologize immediately, acknowledge how and why it happened, and take that into account next time.
Knowing another person, however, is problematic because on the deepest level a self is unknowable by another self, at least in this world. Even a husband and wife who have loved each other dearly for sixty years cannot be said to know each other totally. Not yet anyway. There remains a part of the will for which the individual alone is responsible. The key to another's heart is always in the hand of that person and there are places within that heart which can be known only by God. No human being is big enough to fill another's soul.

This may seem like an academic existential distinction but it is of immense practical value because it means that, no matter how well I know the other, I might be wrong. A joke meant in kindness might hit an unsuspected nerve. How damaging this is depends on the overall context of how that relationship stands day to day. It also provides the philosophical basis for a certain humility in our search for knowledge of the other. I can never know her totally (in this life. I leave off discussion of the next), and that, far from being a source of regret, should be a source of joy. It means that no matter how long this friendship lasts I will never run out of friend to know and love. It means that the source of this relationship is quite literally inexhaustible. This humility is essential to healthy relationships because nothing will kill a relationship faster than idolatry, the demand made on a human being to be all in all, to fill a place he or she can never fill.

The language of humility is laughter. It is infinitely far from being the self-deprecating, gloomy "I am a miserable worm of a being" talk of some overly religious types. Laughter alone acknowledges the truth of our limitations, and allows us to rest secure in the knowledge that our limitations, for all their illusions of grandeur, are not the whole story. Not even close.

I will glory in the Lord; let the afflicted hear and rejoice. Psalm 34:2 If you are afflicted you are eligible for the "hear and rejoice" club. And which of us is not afflicted?


*Throughout this post the term "relationship" should not be understood to be speaking exclusively, or even primarily, about romantic relationships. I am instead speaking of the entire gamut of human relationships. Wherever one human being comes into contact with another, there is a relationship of some sort in existence and these principles come into play within the context of that relationship and its nature.

Laugh With Me! Part 2

In Part One I talked about teasing people and how it can so often be abused to hurt people or used to cover up an underlying malice or jealousy the person is unwilling to deal with in a more honest way. However, I don't want you to think that teasing is inherently malicious.

For many people I know, teasing, or back and forth teasing (which we could call banter) is a very real expression of affection. Joking, practical or otherwise, can be done in a spirit of mutual fun which makes it a good time for everyone. For instance, when I tease my sister about her college degree and how she must be looking down on all of her brothers now because she is the only one of us with a degree, I am not for a moment suggesting that she actually is looking down on us. I know that, she knows that. What I am doing, however, is pointing out in a comical, indirect way, that she has accomplished something none of the rest of us have accomplished.

I can remind my brother of the time we did such and such and he face planted on the tile floor from the top bunk and broke his tooth. Or make fun of the overbite he used to have. It made him substitute the "f" sound for the "ch" sound. Great Grandma used to make him say the "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck" rhyme when he was little and thought it was hillarious. I can laugh at him for turning north out of the driveway instead of south because he was too busy dancing in the front seat of the car to pay attention. He can make fun of me for going off trail on a hike and taking a harder way down than he did. We can laugh at each other almost constantly, but there is nothing malicious about it at all.

Teasing someone can be done in a loving fashion. Some might say, "Well, why an indirect compliment? Why not just say it straight out?" Well, there are a lot of psychological reasons for that. Without going too deeply into the existential roots of this dilemma, love is a very shy thing, even among old, old friends. When you compliment someone you make yourself vulnerable, and when you accept a compliment you acknowledge vulnerability. Phrasing a compliment in a roundabout way provides it just a little bit of privacy. There is an inherent modesty in teasing someone lovingly, a modesty that allows you to see, admire and love, without being completely emotionally exposed. Human beings cannot stand to be emotionally naked very often. This is why we wear clothes in the first place. Banter and teasing, or flirtation as a friend of mine calls it (she uses the term regardless of the nature of the relationship, my definition is much narrower) allows us to be affectionate without being promiscuous.

There is also a certain mystery about a roundabout compliment, something that requires a little bit of work, a second thought, to understand. It isn't simply handed baldly from one person to the other, but exists in the interchange between them. This makes it a relational thing, since both have to cooperate in making it what it is.

But I think by far the most common reason for teasing people (for me at least) is simply to make them laugh.

People are such odd creatures. Every single one of them is unique, absolutely singular among all the people that have ever existed. We are have quirks and foibles and flaws, we make mistakes and we do silly things. Some of these things are very serious and hurt other people. Some merely hurt ourselves. Some don't really do much harm, but definitely make us look like idiots. The only proper response to a silly mistake that makes you look like an idiot is a laugh. I delight in people. I delight in their uniqueness, their incomprehensibility, the ability they have to surprise the heck out of you even after you've known them for years. I love the unpredictability of people, and the predictability of people. I laugh out of sheer delight that God should create such wonderfully clumsy creatures. I laugh at the divine foolishness of creating little sparks of spiritual light to shine through blobs of clay. I mourn the ugliness and hatefulness of ignorance and sin, but I also laugh at its idiocy, its banality. It is so pathetic, so useless, so obstinate and childish. I know that Christ has conquered sin, transcended death and redeemed even me! Why should I not laugh? Life is beautiful!

I laugh in the darkness and hardship of deployments or military training because I have hope. I laugh despite even my sins because I have hope. I laugh at my own sins (eventually) because they are opportunities for grace. There is some need in all of us for the laugh of the "cheerful beggar," who knows that he is unworthy and only laughs at it because it highlights God's generosity all the more.
I want people to laugh with me. When I poke fun at someone I am not condemning one of the traits that I despise, I am rejoicing in one of the quirks that makes them unique and inviting them to join in that rejoicing. I want you to join me in laughing at yourself, and I want to join you in laughing at me.

That kind of laughter can heal the world.

Little Brother

Dear Matthew,

You are going to Basic Training next week. You already read the book. In fact you read the book before it was the book. But these are some specific things I wish someone had told me before I went to basic training. They are in a very particular order, i.e. the order I happened to think of them in. If I had known then what I know now, I would never have had the courage to do what I did. But if I had not done what I did, I would not know now what I didn’t know then:

·         The Army is a toxic environment. It is toxic to faith, it is toxic to morals, it is toxic to good manners, it is toxic to free-thinking, it is toxic to humanity. However, this does not mean that people in the Army are the enemy. They are people, beloved of God. He died for them. Each one has his own story, his own history of wounds and health, brokenness and wholeness, happiness and sadness, wisdom and stupidity that made him what he is. Know the story, know the person, see him as he sees himself, and see him (as closely as you can) as God sees him. It will change the way you treat everyone in your life.

·         Some people have nothing to say worth saying. But no one is not worth listening to.

·         Push yourself to do your best at everything they put in front of you. Go the extra mile. But do not define yourself by how well you do.

·         Compete with your peers, because it will make you faster, stronger and better. But do not define success by how you measure up to them. You will be faster, stronger or smarter than many of them, but that does not make God love you one iota more than He loves them. Someone will always be faster, stronger or smarter than you, but that does not mean God loves them more.

·         The most valuable things cannot be earned. They are given for free, and the best you can do is try to be worthy of them.

·         Make friends with your peers. Do not do what I did and be a loner, and take pride in that loner attitude. You are more outgoing than I am so that should come naturally. But be prepared to part company without hesitation or possibility of appeal the first time someone says, “Hey, let’s go to the strip club.”

·         Friendliness is not the same as trust. Trust is earned and it is neither implicit nor all-encompassing in most cases. There are more men in the army than I can count that I would trust with my life, but less than a dozen I would trust not to try to lead me into sin on a night out on the town. And there have only been two friends in my entire career that I would trust with anything really important to me. Go out with the guys, but keep your own counsel on what really matters. Una Certa Sprezzatura.

·         Draw your lines, make them known, and never cross them. Don’t be afraid to alienate people who don’t like your faith and morals. If they are fair you will earn enough respect to get on with by being good at your job. If they are not fair, who cares what they think anyway? Unless they are your boss. In which case, well, some days are like that. Morals are more important than promotion.

·         Know your alcohol limit. Figure it out on your own, around people you trust. Take that number of drinks down by about 25-50%. That is your “going out with the guys limit.” Set that number in your head and NEVER allow them to talk you into going over it. Make the decision before you go out. Once the first drink crosses your lips, do not change that plan.

·         When your peer hangs a pinup girl on your wall locker, borrow his lighter and burn it in front of him, and say, “I will not be a part of treating women like objects.” If he does it again, punch him in the nuts.

·         When someone tries to get you to look at porn, ask them if they would kindly shoot you in the face instead. Trust me, you are better off dead. Nothing will kill your ability to love more effectively than porn. You were raised on love. Losing your ability to love will twist you up inside worse than you can possibly imagine and you will feel it. You are better off taking a bullet to the brain than getting hooked on that poison.

·         Do not go it alone. The first chance you get, you find a parish. Give yourself a few weeks to try out the different churches in your area, and then make your decision and stick with it. Register at that parish, get envelopes, volunteer to be a reader, an usher, sing in the choir (I’ll warn you right now, the choir probably sucks, bless their hearts), anything. Be involved. Commit to that parish.

·         Seek out Catholic young adults. If you can’t find a group, make one. Your peers in the army will be a toxic influence. You need a wholesome influence to counter it.

·         Don’t expect your Catholic friends to be perfect. Peoples is Peoples.

·         Don’t expect your Army peers to be demons. Peoples is Peoples.

·         God loves your Army peers as much as He loves your Catholic friends. But your Army peers might need you to translate that love more than your Catholic friends do

·         But then again, I’ve known some pretty wounded Catholics. You are related to more than a few.

·         If a person never knows the love of the brother he can see, how will he ever believe in the love of the God he cannot see?

·         Give your job your best, but do not give it your heart. To the Army you are not Matthew Kraeger. You are not a son, a brother, a friend, a boyfriend, a cousin or a nephew. You are not a person at all. You are an 11B10. Your identity and place are entirely representable as a sequence of numbers and letters, detailing your age, height, weight, physical fitness, rank, job, how well you shoot, etc. Your entire military existence boils down to a sheet of paper called an Enlisted Records Brief. You are fully interchangeable with all other 11B10’s. Give the job your best because it is what you swore to do, but do not give it your all because it is not who you are. My biggest regret is that I spent so much of myself for so long on a worthless job, instead of on relationships with people who could actually care about me. In a lot of ways I made a bad trade, but I never totally lost myself into it, and many people have been more patient with me than I deserved, so I came off all right in the end.

·         Being a soldier is a job. Being a warrior is a vocation. There is a difference. Never confuse the two.

·         Learn everything you can. Everyone has some wisdom no matter how stupid or irritable they might be. Listen to them with a completely open mind, take in everything they say, whether teaching you how to shoot, or how to bandage a wound, or how to march. Listen as if they were teaching the only possible way of doing things. Then, when you have wrung every last drop of knowledge out of them and sifted out the garbage (that takes a while, sometimes it is hard to tell what is garbage and what isn’t) file it away in your mind and remind yourself, “That is one way of doing things.”

·         You have the bad luck to be of significantly higher than average intelligence. This means that at least half of your leaders will not be as smart as you are. Do not for an instant think that this means that you know more than they do, or that you do not owe them respect and obedience.

·         The dumbest person in the Army knows more than you do about something.

·         Always question everything. Including me.

·         Expect an answer. Don’t just question to be smart.

·         Some people will not be able to answer you and they will mock you and tell you to shut up. This does not mean there is no answer, only that you need to find it for yourself because you have gone beyond your teacher’s depth. Remember that when you are the teacher and one of your students goes beyond your depth.

·         You are a human being, not a rock. You are going out with a faith much stronger, more mature and better informed than I had when I went out. You are older than I was. You have the benefit of more experience from your older brothers. But I promise you, you are not invulnerable. If you think there is any sin or folly out there that it is beyond you to commit, think again. Of course, vice will not seriously challenge you, not at first. Once you make your standards known pride itself will ensure that you never back down from them. What will kill you is complacency. Better men than you have become alcoholics, murderers, rapists, drug addicts or just plain lazy bastards and it can happen to you. They did not fail because they were weak. They failed because they were strong, and they trusted in that strength. Only God’s mercy stands between you and becoming everything you justly hate. Remember, because you start out with great gifts, your fall will be more terrible if you fail. If you stop growing in your faith, you will fail. It may take ten years to undo your natural gifts and habits of home. It may take fifty. If you stop growing, you will die.

·         If you keep growing in your faith, it doesn’t much matter what else you do. God will bring you through.

·         By “Faith” I mean relationship, not book knowledge or observance of rubrics. Those will kill you deader than anything else if you trust in them in the absence of a vital relationship with God.

·         But don’t skip the study or the rubrics either.

·         Maintain your prayer life. Without it you will fail.

·         Go to daily mass when you can. I don’t care whether you feel like it or not. It will save your soul.

·         Develop a No Less Than prayer life. It might be no more than a morning offering when you wake up and Hail Mary, Our Father and Gloria as you fall asleep. This is what you fall back on when you simply have no time for your regular prayers. Train yourself to wake up with a morning offering on your lips. It will serve you in good stead when your drill sergeant throws a trash can down the hall at 0400, and the next chance you get to think is 2200 lights out.

·         Guard time = rosary time.

·         Mopping the latrines = rosary time.

·         Standing in line at the chow hall = rosary time.

·         You are a human being, not a rock. You will be contaminated. You will wake up one morning and look at yourself and see a habit that you have picked up that you could have done without. It might be something silly. It might be something vulgar. It might even be something sinful. Do not freak out. Did you expect to be perfect? Set about cheerfully and hopefully undoing it. Cheerfully because God is already working at it. The very fact that you see it means that He showed it to you, which means it is time to start working. Hopefully because He wants to perfect you far more fervently and effectively than you ever could.

·         In the end, you will never save your soul. The best any of us ever learn to do is cooperate with God as He saves us. But the results can be quite spectacular. Read a biography of Mother Teresa if you need an example. Actually, read her biography whether you need an example or not.

·         4 years, 10 years, 20 years, a lifetime. The Army is temporary. Like anything else it is worse than useless as an end. But as a means it can be a road to the service of God in His people, and a path to Heaven. Just keep in mind what is truly important.

·         Remember who you are (easier said than done, as you’re still figuring that out.) You were a Catholic gentleman before you joined the Army, and God willing you will be a Catholic gentleman when you are out of the army.

·         Remember that you are loved. The Army can never love you, but there are plenty of people who do. They loved you before you were a soldier, and they will love you when you are a soldier no longer.

I will be praying for you. I love you, and I am proud of you.

Your Older Brother, who made 93.4% of the mistakes he has just warned you against, and saw the rest of them first hand…

Ryan

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Matthew 10:16