Set Apart Humanity

 I have watched a number of movies lately that seemed to have a theme in common. The two that come to mind had a definite "teen sci-fi" flare to them: "Divergent," and "The Giver." While I hesitate to lump the two into the same category (and will no doubt be mentally excoriated for doing so by any who have seen both) they have a lot of similarities. Both are based on novels marketed primarily for teens, both involve dystopian futures in which an apparently benevolent government or cultural schema controls all aspects of life. However, this controlling, impersonal authority (personalized in the character of an older, neatly dressed woman in both cases) is revealed to have sinister designs, and the cultural schema is shown to have dark secrets. It must be resisted by the protagonist who is singled out in a coming of age ceremony. The protagonist has talents and abilities which set him or her apart from everyone else, and he or she must make the choice whether to use those talents to serve the power or to challenge it for the sake of true freedom. The choice to pursue freedom for themselves leads to the choice to sacrifice in order to provide freedom for everyone else in their society as well.

In fact, the main difference is the writing and the depth of the themes explored by the nature of the differences. These differences are significant; I would not consider "Divergent" worth a second watch, although I plan on reading the book. "The Giver" I would watch again, and I plan on re-reading the book several times, probably out loud to my children when they are old enough.

But the theme they held in common is what you might call the "set apart" theme. It is different from the lone hero theme, which is common to much great literature. For instance, Frodo Baggins is a consummate lone hero, but he is not a "set apart" hero. He becomes a lone hero by the end of the trilogy, but he does not start out that way. He starts out as a perfectly normal hobbit, just like every other hobbit. He is thrust into abnormal circumstances by external factors, and the experience of carrying the One Ring to Mordor sets him apart. When he departs from the Grey Havens, alone, he does so because he has sacrificed his ordinariness so that others might keep it.

The "set apart" hero is a little different. The set apart hero begins the story different from everyone else. Either he is born that way, or something (e.g. a mutated spider bite) makes him that way. The story is about him exploring that difference, coming to terms with it, and deciding what to do with it. 

In "The Giver," Jonas is different because he can see and feel things that everyone else has forgotten how to see and feel. He sees color, feels emotion, and looks beyond the surface of things. In "Divergent," Tris is different because she has the ability to embrace the traits of more than one of the dominant social classes. They are born with these traits without knowing that they have them, but in the coming of age ceremony they discover them, and it is this discovery which prompts the growth arc.

What struck me about the "set apart" theme was how deeply it seems to resonate with people. I know one man (in his mid-thirties) who insists that "Divergent" could have been written about him. He doesn't fit into everyone else' categories, his brain works differently, he sees possibilities that no one else sees, etc. The "set apart" hero taps into a very powerful longing that everyone has to be different, to be unique, special, mysterious.

Perhaps this is why the ordinary hero tends to be better literature, in my opinion. It is more realistic. Ordinary people without special powers or special talents how have to rise to extraordinary challenges make better stories. We want to root for them, the people who have to struggle, fight for it, earn their specialness. We root even more for those who have no choice but to fight for what they love, and so specialness is thrust upon them when they would like nothing more than to remain ordinary.

But the "set apart" hero has a place too. It calls to the place in us that wants to be different, unique, special, because we are different, unique, special. At the very center of every human being there is an intransigence, something that is utterly incommunicable. The reason that these stories resonate so deeply, especially among the nerds, weirdos and outcasts, is that they are most used to not being understood. Everyone, however, knows what it is like to be misunderstood. Everyone goes through times when they feel that no one "gets" them. Everyone feels, occasionally, an uncrossable gulf yawning between them and even their closest friends.

There is a reason for this. It is important. It means something. In truth, each human being is unique because each human being: "is 'alone': this is to say that through his own humanity, through what he is, he is at the same time set into a unique, exclusive, and unrepeatable relationship with God himself" (John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. 6:2). Each human person is, at his very core, utterly and irrevocably alone. That is why it is natural for everyone to feel at times like no one understands. No one gets you. Of course not. Only God can get you, because there is an aspect or facet of God that you, and you alone in all of time and space, were created to see and know and love. 

Gaze on that face of God, allow it to suffuse your being. Then share that being with the world, and you will find that you are unique and original, without having to look at yourself at all.

Patient Interactions

-->

My favorite part of medicine is interacting with patients. My second favorite part is fitting the puzzle together, piecing all of the various bits of data from history, exam, labs and the literature to form a coherent image. For some providers, I suppose, that is the most exciting part. Dr. House comes to mind as an example of that disease oriented provider. Others are all about the procedures. They just enjoy getting hands on the patients, physically manipulating the diseased part, and providing healing that way. I suppose that category would include most surgeons. I find, however, that most patient encounters do not require much puzzling. Most are actually quite straightforward. Hardly of my patient encounters require procedures, although they are fun when they happen. However, every patient encounter includes an encounter with another human being. Sometimes these encounters are memorable, sometimes not. Sometimes they are fun, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes there is good rapport, and sometimes it seems that you are speaking totally different languages. Regardless, the encounter is always an encounter with the ineffable other of a human being who is not myself.

Tacoma is known for having a very high percentage of Asian populations. In fact, South Tacoma Way, one of my favorite strips for Asian cuisine, is informally called “South Korea Way.” Street signs are even labeled in Korean. Being a Special Forces soldier, my training includes a foreign language, which, in my case, is Korean. I would not say that I am fluent. I can order food, exchange pleasantries, and maybe chat a little bit about C. S. Lewis’ book “The Four Loves,” (I memorized a good deal of vocabulary for that book when I was preparing for my Korean speaking and listening test). It is not, however, to allow me to hold a conversation with ease with a native Korean speaker.

Several of my patients over the last two weeks were older Korean ladies, wives of Korean war veterans. I usually enjoy chatting with them a little, enough to say “Hello, how are you doing, where does it hurt?” One patient, in particular, was a very sad looking Korean lady who complained of fatigue, tiredness, pain, and heartburn. We talked with her for quite some time trying to come up with a list of her complaints and prioritize them, but she was a very listless and haphazard historian and she complained of confusion. Finally I asked, in Korean, “Sunsengnim (term of respect), do you get confused talking in Korean?” Her eyes widened and she repeated my question back to me in more correct vocabulary. I asked about her Korean friends, and she shook her head sadly.

“I not trusting Hanguk (Korean) peoples, they not sharing feeling. They nod yes, yes, when talk but later they like this behind you back,” she made a blabbing gesture with her hand. I asked if she had any American friends and she said, “I no likey Miguk (Americans) either. They just talking talking saying whatever come in they head. I not like that.”

While the doctor typed his note we chatted about this and that, and she slowly became more and more at ease. It was more “konglish” than either Korean or English. I learned that she was very lonely, and almost always sad. Her house had been broken into (she lived alone) and she just felt nervous and unsafe. She gave me an impromptu lesson in Korean language, history and folklore, and explained why the Korean number 4 “sa” is considered unlucky. I very much doubt we were able to provide any lasting relief for her symptoms, as I strongly suspect most of them had a behavioral or social health basis. She was a sad, lonely old lady, and she needed a friend and a hug more than she needed pain medications, but her fears and isolation kept her from those, so pain medication was all she could understand. However, she seemed to be put at ease by my broken attempts to speak and listen to her in her own language, and there was even something like a half ghost of a smile on her face when we shook hands goodbye.

Was that a good interaction? A positive one? I would not classify it as such, objectively. We learned very little to point our way to a treatment plan, and I do not have much hope that her symptoms will ever be resolved strictly by medicine. However, the attempt to reach out to her was just a little less negative than it otherwise would have been, and I think therefore it was more than worth it.

Another Korean lady the same day came in for coughing and post nasal drip, but she refused to believe that she had allergies. She was very upset at not being able to see her regular doctor (who was on maternity leave) and she denied ever having taken allergy medicine that her doctor had prescribed her. “I throw that medicine away, because I not like takey the pills!” It was hard not to laugh. She was about four feet tall and about two inches in diameter and bound and determined that something was wrong with her, because she could not stop coughing or sneezing, but it was NOT allergies! Bless her heart!

No amount of cajoling in English or Korean could convince her that, yes, in fact she very likely did have allergies, and it was perfectly normal and treatable. We tried to get her to promise at least to try the allergy medicine. When she would not we tried to sneak it into her medicine list without telling her what it was for! We said, “Oh, that’s to make you sniffles stop,” which was true, but she would have none of it. “I not takey the pills.”

Finally when the visit was over she stood up and said, “Thisa better working. You not makey me better I go to Korean doctor!” I felt like saying, “Fine! Go to a Korean doctor! What sense does it make to come to a western doctor and then refuse to take western medicines?” She never got angry, she just laughed at us like we were too ridiculous for believing that she was so weak that things like allergies and pills could apply to her. She did, however, tell us most emphatically that kimchi was going to keep us young and healthy and that I was going to live longer than the doctor because I loved kimchi and he “only likey the pizza!” He had never said that he didn’t like kimchi, he simply had never tried it, but in her mind that lumped him in with all the other pizza eating Miguks!

I cannot get angry at patients like that. I love their eccentricity, and I respect their autonomy. God bless them, if they want to grow old and cantankerous and get their kicks out of making fun of western medicine, more power to them. I hope I have enough spark left in me when I am old to be grumpy and funny like that.

The patients I feel sorry for are like the 60 year old man who came in for a regular checkup. In the course of the interview he mentioned having a new feeling of shortness of breath whenever he walked up hill. This prompted a deeper interview, a physical exam, an EKG, and the end result was that he was going home with a bottle of nitro, a bottle of baby aspirin, and a follow up appointment for an exercise stress test. As the appointment progressed and the diagnosis took shape, I could see the growing possibility reflected in his face and posture. His shoulders sank, more and more, his face became more and more bewildered, distant, afraid. It was a relief when the doctor finally said the word: “Heart disease.”

“We need to make sure you don’t have heart disease.” Amazing how we all knew that was what we were talking about, but we were reluctant to say it.

“Are you doing okay?” I asked.

He looked up at me. “I guess. It’s just I have a lot going on at home. I have family troubles, and my dad is not doing too well, and now this.”

“A hell of a thing,” I said.

“A hell of a thing” He agreed. His dad’s brothers had died in their early sixties of heart attacks. His face fell even further when he found that he could not work out until after the stress test, because of the risk of having another incident. “I can’t go to the gym?” His build spoke for itself. Despite his slight beer gut, his shoulders and arms were thick and powerful. He had been lifting his entire life. Now he would have to give it up, perhaps for a very long time, perhaps forever. Not only that, but because Viagra reacts synergistically with nitroglycerin, and can cause a catastrophic drop in blood pressure, he could not take Viagra until after the stress test, when we would have a better plan.

He looked at the doctor. He looked at me. “No weight lifting? And now you tell me no sex? Doc, what’s the point?”

At times like this you feel guilty about the clock, ticking away, reminding us that his appointment was only supposed to last twenty minutes, and that is long since up. How do you kick him out the door so the next patient can come in and tell us all about his acne and how it is affecting his social life?

I might be getting old, or maybe my parents were just poor and backwards (poor they certainly were) but it never would have occurred to them to take us to the doctor for acne, especially not acne so mild as to be invisible under long, thick black hair. There were a dozen or so cystic comadones around the hairline on his forehead, and another dozen along his hairline in the back. This rates a trip to the doctor?

And yet, it is a big deal to him. It never was to me, (I could have cared less for popularity at that age) and that may make it difficult to relate. One hopes that he grows to be a little less concerned about such things as he gets older and gains perspective, but he is not older. He is a teenager. This is where he is, this is important, and in its own way it is as devastating to him as a tumor would be to me. Why should I allow my age and experience to deprive me of empathy for his lack of age and experience? Would not that be shallow mindedness without even the excuse of youth and ignorance? And how difficult is it to prescribe some erythromycin face wash and an exfoliant? We sympathize with many, many older patients who are just as silly, and with less excuse. Certainly in my life many, many older and wiser people have put up with my ignorance and silliness. Shall I refuse to do the same for him?

So I resisted the urge to write him a script for “soap and water” or “a nice cup of man the heck up!” and provided one for face wash instead. I wish him well at his next high school social function. He was a nice kid, after all.

In reviewing these patient encounters I find it very difficult to classify them as “positive” or “negative.” That is more or less to be expected. Any encounter with another human being is essentially an encounter with the unknown. We do not hear the other perfectly, we do not communicate perfectly. The best I think we may expect of ourselves is the continual effort to be present; beyond all filters, preconceptions, contexts and languages, present for the other to be the other. Is it possible? Probably not. It is a worthy effort, I think, for only thus is any real meeting possible between humans. So, in any encounter, there is always more that could have been achieved, or less that could have been said badly, or some aspect that could have been improved. It is never perfect. The mistake, I think, is to try to reduce it to a technique. Technique is a tool, body language, active listening, participatory conversation techniques, or what have you. The essence, however, is goodwill towards the other. It is goodwill that will overcome all barriers, and hopefully shine through our clumsy, inept attempts at using our various languages, to communicate with something essential in the other person. On that level, perhaps we may even hope that some kind of real healing might occur.

Holy Crap: A Post Chiefly About Poop

This morning, as is I my habit, I awoke and made my way to the chapel for morning prayer. On the way there I paused at the chowhall to mix myself a bottle of instant coffee. Yes, it is quite as disgusting as it sounds, but I had a reason for it. I usually do not stoop to such depths of degradation, however, today I was planning a run down to the river (not, alas, to pray and study about that good old way, but merely to turn around and come back. At least I did not stay to live down there in a van... but I digress.)

Now, the run route leads through a local village for a mile and a half, and then into the jungle for a about half a mile, but even in the jungle there are several little bamboo huts with people living in them. With this information, the discerning reader will readily see why it would behoove the early morning runner to take care of business (from a solid waste perspective) prior to embarking on this run. It has been my experience in most Asian countries that defecation tends to be an all or nothing proposition. I do not react as violently to the local food as most white people do (not racist, just saying) but still, when it is time IT IS TIME!

Accordingly it becomes necessary, when a run is planned, to attempt to coordinate the morning poop for sometime before the run. Just my luck to have it hit in the middle of the village, a mile and a half from a civilized toilet. Not that I would not use the local facilities. I have before. However, that would certainly be disruptive to the locals' routine, and I try to avoid being disruptive.

Well, about two minutes into my chapel time, the criminally dreadful instant coffee accomplished the end for which it was consumed. There are, unfortunately, no bathroom facilities in that chapel, so I began my morning fitness routine with a record setting 400 meter clench-and-waddle, and finished morning prayer and the office of readings in my room. As I was making for the only refuge available to me at the fastest pace I could safely maintain, this clever little couplet introduced itself into my brain and danced around and around in high glee at my predicament:

"Even your morning poop can be poetic
If you start your day with a diarrhetic!" 

The Office of Readings today consisted of Ecclesiastes (yeah!) 5:9-6:8 which is cleverly summed up in the one line, "The Vanity of Riches!" The first responsorial is:

"Keep falsehood and lying far from me, O Lord
  --Give me neither poverty nor riches, provide me only with the food I need
I have put my trust in you, O Lord; my destiny is in your hands.
  --Give me neither poverty nor riches, provide me only with the food I need." 
(Proverbs 30:8, Psalm 31:15)

My brain immediately inserted that quote from Hello Dolly: "Money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It ain't worth a thing unless it's spread around, encouraging young things to grow."

My brain then asserted that human manure was definitely not appropriate for that function. Of course Victor Hugo, in his book Les Miserables, in the chapter in which Jon Valjean escapes through the sewers, digresses for a good chapter or two on the benefits of human manure as a fertilizer for crops and laments the financial waste that was the sewers of Paris. I particularly remember him vehemently

asserting that gold is lost to the agriculture of France "with every cough of our cloaca." Victor Hugo, however, was not aware of the serious health risks of using night soil as a fertilizer, (i.e. Chinese liver flukes, cholera, and any number of other fecal contaminants, which are a constant concern when buying produce in many rural Asian countries. But I digress.

So according to both Solomon and Dolly Levi, riches are basically crap and hording them makes about as much sense as hording big steaming piles of $#!+. Of course, I have hoarded big steaming piles of manure before. My family could never have been accused of hoarding money. Indeed, my father's pay check was purely theoretical money. It was always budgeted, allocated and spent before it even hit the bank. Poop we did collect, though. I remember the twice annual manure spreading that we used to do on the farm, in which we would load 4-8 months (depending on whether it was spring or fall) worth of manure from the manure barn onto spreaders and take them out and spread them all over the fields. I never minded the smell. It was a strong smell, but not a bad one. It smelled of fecundity, richness, and all the potential for life and green growing things, that was secreted (and excreted) by its myriad marvelous microbes with their curious chemical conversions. Have the humility to find humorous the humble, rich black humus deposited under a pile of manure after a year of the action of such benevolent bugs. (Humus is not the same as hummus, but I suppose if you were to feed your livestock on hummus for a year, then hummus could become humus. And then if you grew garbanzo beans in the humus, mashed them up into a paste, and flavored them with basil and sun dried tomatoes you might make some very excellent hummus from the humus.)


Money is more or less the same. It can be hoarded for a time, to be spread later, but spread it must be or else it becomes a terrible waste, and it stinks.

As I think back, I inherently grasped this principle when I was a child. I felt like poop ought to be spread, and some of my siblings even invented the art form known as the "fecal mural." Alas, as with most avant garde artistes, our visionary methods were ridiculed, discouraged, and even actively suppressed by the staid, stuffy establishment.

I have never minded poop. I have even written before, in my book for guys, about the necessity of changing diapers for a full growth in humanity. There is something about taking care of such an aspect of human nature that really encourages a beautiful, cheerful humility without which there is no true humanity.

As my morning prayer came to a close and I prepared for my run, I couldn't help but reflect with some ruefulness, almost apologetically to God, on the slight oddity of my meditations for the day. On the other hand, I felt like God replied, these meditations are no odder than His own original move, which was to stick a spiritual (and therefore meditative) soul into a physical (and therefore defecative) body. As surprising as these thoughts might be to me, they are not to Him. If anything, He is amused by my amusement. I suppose that's a good thing.

Totality

"I am the Lord's poor servant; to Him alone, the living God, I have offered all in sacrifice; I have

St. Lucy, after her eyes got gouged out during her martyrdom.

nothing else to give; I offer Him myself." Antiphon for the Canticle of Zechariah from the Divine Office for the feast of St. Lucy.

This morning during my Holy Hour the antiphon above really stuck in my mind. It is fitting for Saint Lucy, since she is both virgin and martyr. She truly did give everything to God, both during her life and at the end of her life. By including this antiphon in Morning Prayer, the Church obviously means me to pray it, but the truth is I cannot honestly apply it to myself. In truth, I doubt anyone ever could strictly apply it to themselves, except for Jesus and the Blessed Mother. No one else can claim truly to have given everything to God. Even the greatest saints have held something back at one time or another. All are conscious of their sinfulness.

If this is true even of the greatest saints, how much more so of myself? I cannot even give him a full hour totally. Even thinking about this during my Holy Hour I noted the trend I have to be extremely distracted for about the first 50 minutes. It is generally only the last ten minutes or so that I really feel like I engage in on any affective level. The first 45-50 minutes are just me trying not to be distracted as I work through the Liturgy of the Hours. I cannot even claim ever to have given Him an undivided hour. Can I really claim to have "offered all in sacrifice?"

In thinking about this another similar experience came to mind. I have been doing a lot of kickboxing lately, working the heavy bag a couple of hours every week. I am right handed but I box left handed because I got into that habit when I first started out. My left hand would not learn to jab very well, so I just jabbed with my right and used my left for power punches. I also liked having that surprise power shot with the right, and I liked messing with right handed sparring partners who aren't used to fighting a southpaw.

In my sessions on the heavy bag I have been having trouble getting my left cross up to scratch. It doesn't have the speed or power that I want at first, it is slow and stiff. It takes about four or five rounds on the bag to get it snapping the way I want it to, and only then does the real practice begin.

I sometimes wonder if my distracted prayer isn't a bit like that. I only really get into the last bit because it takes me the first 45 minutes just to get warmed up. With the boxing the cause is fairly straightforward. A punch flies properly when it is loose. It starts from the feet, legs and hips and translates out from there to the end of the fist, but in order to do that the power must be generated in the large muscles of the lower body and transferred smoothly through the muscles and joints of the lower body. It isn't hard to teach those muscles all to fire. That takes about five minutes to learn. What takes much longer, years and years in fact, is teaching the other muscles not to fire. When I throw that punch, my body wants to tense up and push harder, thinking that will make my strike more powerful; but that simply does not work. Instead, muscles end up fighting each other, competing instead of cooperating. Instead of transferring smoothly back and forth between different groups at different points in the movement, all groups want to be controlling all parts of the punch. I have the strength. I can deadlift 400Lbs quite easily and do multiple sets with it. That is more than enough power to hit as hard as I want, if only I would stop getting in my own way.

This, ironically, is why small, lean fighters often hit with more force than large, muscular ones. They have less muscle to get tangled up with itself, and it is easier to train them to work in cooperation. This is the secret behind Bruce Lee's incredible"one-inch" punch that was reported to be able to knock a sumo-wrestler off his feet (note the guy in the picture is not a sumo-wrestler.)

To apply this to my prayer life, what the antiphon is talking about is a similar kind of totality, where every single part of me, body, mind, emotions, will are all engaged in just one thing. As with boxing, I am beginning to think that perhaps it is less a matter of training myself to do and more a matter of learning not to interfere. The simple decision of the will is there. I get up in the morning. I go to the chapel. I kneel down. I make the decision to pray, which is a response to the call of God to pray. That call is the power. That generates all the power needed to crash through any barrier or overcome any enemy, if only I wouldn't get in the way. But my mind refuses to be still. It wants to think, because when you are a mind that is all you know how to do. My body wants to move, because that is what a body does. My emotions want to feel things, because that is their only experience of life. My will wants to choose things, without knowing that all that is required is not to un-choose.

The truth is that the prayer is not any of these things. All of these things may enter into the prayer at any point, for a specific purpose and then they must be prepared to give their all in that moment, but they are not the prayer. The prayer is that single, downward rushing desire of God to come to me and dwell in me and make His home with me.

The rest is just me learning not to get in the way.

Getting Old

When I am deployed I always have time to work out. Whereas in the states I always have more important things to do, and physical fitness is relegated to whenever I can make the time, on deployment there are long periods of time where there is literally nothing to do except work out. Then of course there are the deployments where there is no time at all, but that is a different story.

So thursday morning I did a solid sprint workout, trying to get my run time back down to the sub 6:30 mile range. I was feeling pretty good, but I had deadlifted the night before. Not necessarily the wisest thing ever, to jump straight into two-a-days and to sprint the morning after a deadlift routine. Sure enough, I pulled a muscle.

Not a large muscle, like a hamstring or a quad or anything like that. No, I pulled a very small, almost inconsequential muscle in my lower abdomen, right in the flex of my hip. It doesn't hurt very bad except when I do one very specific movement, which is try to bring my left leg from behind me underneath my body to in front of me. Given that I am a biped who gets around by walking, however, I do this with an astonishing degree of regularity, i.e. every step. As long as I am just walking it is fine, because I don't let my leg go that far behind me, but even a single step of running hurts like the proverbial Dickens.

So there you have it, just one tiny little pulled muscle. No big deal, right? When I was 19 I would have taken a weekend off, come at it hard on monday and been fine. Now, at a few months shy of 29, I am having to be wise, unfortunately. I have to cut back not just the intensity of my workouts, but even the style. It is only a small muscle, a small injury, but you use that muscle for virtually every exercise that involves tensing up your core (which is pretty much every exercise worth doing). More importantly, a weakening of that muscle leads to an increased risk of hernia, which I do not need right now.

So there I was tonight, in the gym, spending an hour working just biceps, triceps and forearms. I have not done an arm workout in years. I despise isolation exercises, ones that only use a single joint, or pair of joints. I eschew the body building notion that every muscle needs to be trained independently and sculpted to the max. That is vanity and a waste of time. I don't have time for that. When I go to work out I am focused on one thing, and one thing only, and that is increasing my work capacity. Sometimes that means I practice martial arts, sometimes I practice moving my own body, sometimes I practice moving other heavy things, but I despise workouts that are focused on cosmetics. My goal is function, healthy body mechanics, and the ability to do useful things.

Unfortunately, all of those heavy, multi joint lifts or dynamic body movements or martial arts techniques involve the core, which means they stress that particular muscle, which means they retard healing, so there I was, curling.

Then, to make matters worse a buddy that I sometimes lift with came in. He is a big guy. Huge. He proceeds to start a leg series, squatting and leg pressing. I really wanted to get rid of the curl bar and the cables and all that girly stuff and throw a bar across my back, but I refrained. I did not jump into the squat workout.

It seems I have invested my pride in the kind of workout I do. Every bit as foolish as the "beach muscle" lifters that I presume to despise, I have taken pride in not being a "beach muscle" lifter. So when beach muscle lifts are all I can safely do, it irks me. It stings my pride. Therefore, it is probably good for me. I need the humility of realizing that even functional fitness is not my goal, and therefore needs to be surrendered. God had other plans, and therefore I must cease my grumbling, my superiority complexing and my feeling sorry for myself. It is an opportunity to remind myself that I am mortal, strength is fleeting, and I will grow weak and die someday. This is my first acute sports injury, at 28 years old. I am doing really well so far, but it is all down hill from here, and I need to be detached from my physical abilities, because God is going to take all of them away eventually, once they have served their purpose. Let them go. He is the only strength that matters.



His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse,
    nor his delight in the legs of the warrior;
the Lord delights in those who fear him,
    who put their hope in his unfailing love. Psalm 147:10-11

The Good Life

Sit for a bit and rest between sets and I

Will share with you what you already hear

In the creaking, cracking, groaning of my knees

At full flexion, the bottom of the squat or swing

Of the ugly metal ball. With every rep they sigh

And cry

The price

Of life, lived to the full. Loud and clear

Like hawkers in the flea markets, peddling their fleas

My swings sell the idea of strength, but sing

Also of the cost, in the creaking that you hear

So clear.

I fear

I am mere mortal. I feel the changing breeze

In my hips and knees and ankles, at twenty-seven.

If even this life I cannot stand to fill;

And spend my life like water, how much harder still

The greater life poured out on me in Heaven.

I buy this fleeting strength with future pain,

But gain

A strength that will not wane.

I will not hide my capital in the earth,

But burn it out for every bit I am worth

And hope to see it returned to me again

A hundred fold, shaken, tamped full measure

Running over with resurrected treasure. 


The Glory of God is Man Fully Alive! Alleluia!

Come Examine

Daytime prayer from the Divine Office for today had a phrase in one of the psalm prayers that caught my attention: "Come, examine your Church and wash her clean of sin." When I read that phrase it hit me like a ton of bricks, effecting an instant paradigm change.

You see, when I read the first part my first reaction was one of fear. I recoiled. I don't want to be examined. For some reason I have always had a fear of anyone looking at me too closely, especially people I care about; most especially God. I am afraid of what they will see. There is a lot about me that I don't like. I expect others to dislike it as much as I do. I expect rejection, or condemnation. Especially from God, I feel like if someone else sees how unworthy I am, I will stand condemned.

The more I read and talk to other people, the more convinced I am that this is not an unusual feeling. In fact, I have come to believe that everyone in the world feels this deep seated sense of unworthiness. As in my case, growing up as I did with incredibly supportive parents who take immeasurable pride in every good thing I have ever done and never hesitate to tell me so, you would think if anyone would be free of it, I ought to be but that is not the case, because that is not the source. It is not a product of upbringing or childhood neglect or an insufficient education. All of these can compound or mitigate it, but the thing itself is much deeper. It is, quite simply, Original Sin.

It takes so many shapes, this existential shame. Every human being experiences it, because every human being, deep down at his core, is in fact unworthy. No one can be worthy of what we were created for. It is sheer gift, unearned and unasked for. In the beginning, in Eden, this unworthiness was not a source of shame, but of joy. Adam and Eve delighted to receive the gifts they had not earned, and joyfully accepted being eternally in His debt. That is our nature. We were created to be cheerful beggars.

Perhaps it was rejection of that joy, and seeking to be self sufficient, equal with God, that was the core of their sin. Certainly the first thing that they did after sinning was to hide. First they hid from each other by making clothes, and then they hid from God. Why? Their hiding was the root of our fear of being examined. We desperately want to be seen intimately and loved totally, and we desperately fear being seen intimately and found unworthy, rejected, or treated as an object. And because each human being is born with that deep seated awareness of unworthiness, we assume on some level that anyone who does really see us will see our unworthiness.

It takes many forms. The husband who can't understand why, no matter how many times he tells his wife that she is beautiful, that she is precious to him, she brushes him off or doesn't seem to believe him, but she gets upset with him if he never says it. This is because she deeply needs to be told that she is worthy but only one voice is strong enough to tell her permanently, and that is God's voice. That is why she needs to hear it from her husband, but his voice alone will never fully convince her. However, if his love is true love, meaning that God is teaching him how to love, then his voice will become more and more convincing, because more and more it will be God's voice speaking through his. The same is true for the husband who never believes he is good enough, or makes enough money, or whatever. He needs to trust that when his wife speaks to him out of true love, it is a way in which God speaks to him.

But when I read the second half of that phrase, "And wash her clean of sin," something shifted in my head and my eyes opened. I was willing to allow God to examine me, endure it as a necessity, but the prayer of the Church invites me to look forward to His examination and welcome it with joy and even eagerness. Why? Because the purpose of that examination is precisely to heal me of my sin. God wants to heal that deep, fundamental skew that makes me so afraid. The purpose of the examination makes all the difference, and His purpose is not to condemn. It has never been to condemn. It is to heal.

It is as if we said to the doctor, "No! Don't look at me! I am sick!" "Well of course you are sick, you dunce! And if I do not look at you, you will stay that way." In her daily prayer the Church is inviting me to trust in God's desire and ability to make me clean, and to be so eager for that cleansing that I accept, and invite, and welcome with open arms that vulnerabilityof being seen in all my naked unworthiness.

I wonder if that isn't what life is all about. Certain parts of it do seem to be in preparation for that vulnerability. Opening up and allowing friends to see into your heart a little bit; the nakedness of husband and wife, (physical and emotional); most especially the sacrament of Confession; heck, even the decrepitude of old age, and allowing someone else to wipe your but for you, if accepted graciously and joyfully, even that is a preparation for meeting God.

There is much to be learned from just that one phrase, but mostly I guess it can be summed up by saying, "Be not afraid."

He loves us.

Ephesians 5:22 and Swing Dancing

I am returning in this post to the man/woman leadership/submission debate. I spoke about it a good deal in both of my books, and some of my blogs from years ago (mostly on my old blog which is long since deactivated.) I haven’t re-visited that dynamic in a while. There are a lot of topics like that which I used to speak and write about constantly in my early twenties, that I simply don’t put much emphasis on anymore, e.g. modesty, Theology of the Body, the Way of the Warrior, to name a few. The reason I don’t get into them much these days is not because I think they are no longer important, but because I spent years thinking them through from every angle I could find, and came to a pretty good working understanding of them. Now I live based on that understanding, and when I come up with something new I revise it, but most of my thinking is devoted to other things.

The reason I am returning to this topic for one post is because I ran across a comment on another blog to the effect that one of the problems faced by Catholic men in seeking out wives was the need to find “faithful and submissive” women. I found it a touch irritating, but mostly amusing. It’s the sort of thing you would expect from someone who simply did not understand the whole leadership dynamic. It reminded me of grumpy old men at a swing dance, and a particular story involving a very dear friend of mine:

I enjoy swing dancing from time to time. I am not particularly good at it, mostly because it isn’t something people do very often these days, and so I haven’t had much practice, but it is fun when I do get the chance. Last September I was on leave back on the East Coast and I did go swing dancing with a group of friends. One of those friends is a lovely young lady who works at a school for special needs children. She is black, bubbly, sassy, and very often dressed in purple, and never afraid to speak her mind. During the evening she was dancing with one of the regulars, a slightly older gentleman, who apparently was quite skillful and knew a lot of moves, but apparently was not used to dancing with someone with a personality because, not thirty seconds into the dance, he told her, “Look, I can tell you are a feisty one, but if you want to swing dance you need to learn to follow.”

To which my friend shot back, “Well, maybe you should learn to lead with some authority!” Okay, so sometimes she gets more than a little sassy.

Every woman I have ever danced with (not a great number, I could probably count them without taking more than one shoe off) has been a different dancer. This particular friend had a very physical, almost athletic style of dancing. I never had a problem getting her to follow my lead, but it had to be a very firm lead. She didn’t like that finger-tips only grip, she liked a firm, solid grip, so that she could spin out and away as fast and as hard as she liked, confident that I would not lose her hand and let her go flying across the room (I don’t know what that move is called. I call it the “Yo-yo.”) When she spun back in she liked to know that I was going to catch her, not just get out of the way. She would dip or jump without fear, as long as she could feel that I had a solid hold and wasn’t going to drop her on her head.

Other dancers, some of my cousins, for instance, would have been scared away by such “roughness.” One cousin in particular prefers to have just the lightest grip possible, just thumb and forefinger on her palm. She doesn’t like being dragged through the moves, or being tossed around the ballroom. The slightest movement of my hand was enough to signal to her what we were doing, and then she would flow through it. I still had to lead with decision, because changing your mind in the middle of a move is just awkward for everyone involved, but there was no place for the firmness that my other friend enjoyed.

Dancing at my brother’s wedding recently I came across another problem I had never seen before. I learned to dance in South Carolina and Virginia, and my brother (not the getting-married one, a different one) and his friends had learned to dance in the Northeast. Different styles of swing, different moves, and slightly different leads, not to mention vastly different experience levels, meant that often it was like speaking a different language.

In all of these different situations I had the same job. If you are going to swing dance, as a guy, you have to learn how to lead. You can fudge it for a bit, and most girls are not going to storm off in a huff, but if you want to have more than one dance per girl, you have to learn to lead. This is not simply a matter of learning the steps and the moves. You can get through most songs with a handful of moves and some confidence. You don’t even need real confidence. Fake confidence will do the trick as often as not, as long as the girl has a sense of humor. What you absolutely must learn is leadership. Moves do not make leadership. The older, extremely experienced dancer who told my friend she needed to learn how to follow knew some moves. His red paisley spats probably knew more moves than I ever will, but that did not enable him. It actually hindered him from enjoying a dance with a great lady. He knew how things were supposed to go, and was not prepared to listen to her. She was doing it wrong, and he felt he had to educate her. She declined to be educated by him and that was that.

What he could have done had he perhaps known less about dancing and more about dancing with people, was listen to her. Feel her out. Get to know her style, figure out how she liked to be led, what she was comfortable with, and adapt himself to her preferences. Perhaps be willing to accept a dance that was not as artistic as he was used to, a little imperfection of style, or even a lot of imperfection and roughness, in the interests of sharing a dance with her. I guarantee if he had stepped up his game and tried to match her preferences, he would have found her making equal efforts to adapt to him. Perhaps it would have been worse dancing, but it would have been better leadership.

Sure, that one dance isn’t going to be as smooth and artsy as it could be if it were someone whose style perfectly matched his, or if he had danced with her regularly for a year or two and they had gotten used to each other. Searching out that “perfect” human relationship too often devolves into a single-minded, ruthless pursuit of one person’s private idea of what perfection ought to be, which is always flawed. Perfection is impossible in this life, and even harmony is achieved slowly and patiently, by listening far more than by speaking. That is real leadership.

Thai Women Part VIII

Part eight in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid. Parts one, two, three, four, five, six and seven are here.

So let’s take this back to the Thai women who inspired this whole series of reflections. Any Americans who thought they were going to sleep with some hot Thai police ladies simply because they flirted heavily through two weeks of class with them were disappointed (I hope) because they still didn’t have that emotional context. Those girls might have been giggly and girly, and they might have been sending all the signals. Some might even have been head over heels in whatever-you-want-to-call-it (I would be loath to use the word “love” for something that grows over a two week seminar). But regardless of any infatuation, there was something else at work. To put it into context I thought about what it would be like for a group of women in America to get a two week class from a bunch of foreign men (insert nationality of choice here) with great builds, exotic looks, and exciting accents, ready to flirt at the drop of a handkerchief. Don’t tell me there wouldn’t be a flutter of giggling, flirting, gossiping and a few scattered sighs. But I very much doubt the majority of these women would sleep with their foreign instructors, and I’m quite certain they would be the first to condemn any of their colleagues who did.

The women were not simply speaking another language (I am speaking of the language of their actions, not the Thai language.) They were speaking the same language with different meanings. When they shrieked and sighed over our white skin and muscles, they were speaking the same language as the guys when they commented approvingly on the women’s faces and shapes. But with the guys the thought process went something like: “Wow, she’s a hot, exotic looking Thai chick. Let’s have sex.” There requires no mental or emotional gymnastics, no process of consideration, just A à B. It makes sense to us. (Yes, despite my moral and mental and even emotional repugnance to that philosophy, I still speak it fluently. I follow it with no trouble at all.)

With the women the thought process was very different. “Wow, he’s a hot, exotic looking American guy,” yields a whole plethora of possible responses ranging from, “Wow, fluttery feelings!” to “I should get a picture with him and put it on facebook. My girlfriends would totally freak!” to “I bet I could get him to come over here just by batting my eyes.” Mixed in with all of that is the realization that, “Yeah, he’s cute, but I’m going back to my unit in two weeks and he is going back to America.”

Same language (laughing, giggling, flirting, showing off the body just a little) but with a totally different meaning. Some of the guys could at least observe that the meanings were different, and some simply continued to interpret everything based on their own assumptions.

The male model is a lot less work for sure. The female model requires, or at least assumes, that there will be time, and a lot of it. A lifetime in fact, is nearly always the hope, at least subconsciously. Trust is an intrinsic component of it, not just trust in the man that he won’t beat her or leave her, but trust that he will love her, trust in herself that she can love him, and trust in the relationship that it will be worth fighting for. Trust does not happen overnight. It takes time, and once established it isn’t permanent. It may take years of patience really to win a woman’s heart and then it can be lost in one act of betrayal. It has to be actively sought after and maintained for the duration of the relationship. This reality is so foreign to the male thought process that most men, I suspect, never learn it.

I believe it is worth it, though. Those who never learn it will never know what they missed by not learning to listen.

Thai Women, Part VII

Part seven in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid. Parts one, two, three, four, five and six are here.

I’ve been working on a new theory of the psychology of women. Don’t exit the page, please. Have a good laugh, and then read the rest of the post.

What the adolescent male of any age cannot understand is the need of the feminine mind for context. He understands it in the tactical sense, if he is smart, meaning that he observes the signs and patterns and can come up with strategies to manipulate or bypass those patterns. Essentially he views the particularly feminine part of female sexuality as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than as a complement and balance to his own sexuality.

Context is the word I am using right now to describe the complex psychological and emotional reality that I observe surrounding the behavior of women, sexually. To put it in the simplest terms, in order for a man to get a woman to agree to have sex with him he must create a context in which it makes sense to her, not simply intellectually, but emotionally and even subconsciously. Men don’t really need this. In the male brain, sexually attractive female (whatever he has been conditioned to believe that is) = all the context I need. Women are not naturally like that. This is not to say that they cannot become like that. In fact, a good number of men spend a lot of time and effort ensuring that women do become like that.

I believe this need for context springs from a natural sense of self-worth. To observe it, however, you usually have to go back a long ways, right to the beginning of womanhood, and even before. A little girl instinctively believes in her own worth. All little girls know that they are princesses. No one has to tell them this for them to act like it. It doesn’t matter whether she is a girly-girl or a tomboy, she believes instinctively in her own inherent value. Unfortunately this belief is a fragile thing. It can be affirmed, or it can be exaggerated and blown out of proportion, or it can be destroyed. Usually, however, a good portion of it remains into the teen years in all but the worst cases. With puberty it becomes entangled with overt sexual urges, especially in middle and high-schools in our society in which it is almost impossible for a girl to escape being judged primarily as a sexual object.

This inherent sense of worth, in its most natural state, tells the young woman that she is not an object to be used for someone else’s pleasure. She, of course, has her own urges and desires, but mixed with the purely physical desire (which I have no qualifications to judge) is that intuitive grasp of her own worth and the instinctive fear of being used, or of using someone else. Like it or not, for women self-image and sexuality are inescapably linked. In order for her to want to give herself physically there has to be a surrounding emotional context in which the man’s treatment of her squares with her own view of her own worth.

Now, that is a very important point. It explains how context works, both for the true use, and for those who abuse it by using it as a tactical advantage in a sex-war. A man can bring about this parity between his treatment and her self-image in one of two general ways:

1)    Either by affirming her worth and making her feel secure in the knowledge that he will guard her worth more fiercely and lovingly than she ever could.

2)    Or by degrading and tearing down her sense of her own worth until she feels that she deserves whatever kind of treatment he wants to dish out.

It is important to understand that either of these ways can achieve the end result of getting a woman in bed with you. All the man is doing is putting her self-image and his actions on the same level. It is also important to understand that #1 is not automatically virtuous. A man can lie in order to seem like he loves her and respects her, and then betray her. Or he might actually believe it, and then “fall out of love” with her later on. Either way his honesty is compromised, and the end result is likely to be a terrible blow to her self-esteem, but as regards method he still went by the affirmation route. In fact, I would say that is by far the most effective route, even for a total liar and scoundrel, simply because it bears some superficial, temporary resemblance to the real thing.