Jokes that are laden with mirth are always, at the bottom, very serious things. They are serious with the seriousness that is love.
Think of God creating the world. He creates it out of love, in a single burst of brilliant self-gift. It bursts out from Him like a shout of joy, like a yell almost; exuberant, prodigal, mirthful, blinding love. It cannot be contained. It forms everything from nothing, life from non-life, better life from lower life and in a final exultant high note, God creates man, a being who can share that love and give it and receive it.
Everything in creation is still pregnant with that love, bursting forth with it, bubbling over with it, alive with it. It meets you in every breath, around every corner, under every rock. It is the impulse of delight, which freely pours itself out as if there were no end, for there is no end. It comes from God. It is too strong to be contained in grim, serious faces. God begs us to play with Him, but in order to do that we have to become like little children. We have to stop taking ourselves seriously but we do that by taking everyone else seriously, and above all by taking God seriously. But not seriously in fear, or duty, but out of love. We delight so much in the others that we forget about ourselves. Completely absorbed in this mirth, we joke. There is no other way to express the depth of our love than to see and delight, and invite others to join in our delight, even in the oddness, the quirkiness, the singularity of the other. Even in the defects. True mirth loves the beloved, defects and all, and makes light of it.
“But, what about evil!” The gloomy ones protest. Indeed, what about it? In this fallen world evil, ugliness and misery exist all around us. They are intensely unnatural and gloominess is a natural response to that reality. But mirth is a response to it as well, a supernatural response. It moves beyond the recognition of the battle to the acknowledgment of victory, and rejoices, even through its tears. Humility laughs.
Mirth, then, is the voice of love saying things too wonderful to be said straight out. It is strong fare, and can be digested only by strong stomachs. Stomachs too used to the soft mush of self-empowering and self-complimenting drivel may not be able to take the truth about themselves, may not be able to take a joke. They lose by this. They are so full of themselves that they cannot receive love in one of its most joyous forms.
Mirth is not the same as humor. Humor can only be shared by a thinking being, for humor is the recognition of incongruity. There need be nothing intellectual about mirth. An infant can experience it, when she claps her hands and coos at the antics of her parents. The mentally handicapped can experience it, laughing to see bright colors with perfect unconcern for what others around them think. Even animals can sometimes share in it. Dogs certainly seem to. No great intelligence is needed, only love. Mirth can be shared from the higher to the lower. It can be a bond between people of the greatest possible disparity, between the genius and the idiot, the educated and the ignorant, the adult and the child, those in the prime of life and those senile with age, the saint and the sinner.
For God shares His mirth with us. What greater disparity could there be?
In response to this writing challenge on lkjslain's site, I wrote this poem. I had no idea where I was going with it, I just started it and kept writing down what came to me. Then I liked it so much that I recorded myself reading it:
Enjoy!
The Smile
I walked alone at night, through streets of gray,
Content to be alone, chasing tales
Hidden, obscure, in corners of crooked paths.
Secrets of those who passed that way before.
The walls and stones see all, and plain as day
Reveal the stories to me, their long lost friend.
For years I wandered thus, full well content
To slip unnoticed around the edge of life
Untouched by the swirling blizzard of human flakes,
I watched, and listened; marveled and passed on.
Then one day a new tale came to me,
Borne on a breeze of ice from the blackest heart
Of the shadowy ways of the City of Dreadful Night
The darkness at the center of that tangled wild.
Somewhere in the labyrinth a woman walks,
Or so the black breeze whispered in my ear,
Pale and tall, fragile and great of heart,
Mighty in soul, shrouded in hood of black,
Walking the city, weeping for her child,
And then, with tears used up, she still walks on
Through dark, dry, hopeless aching night.
I loved her then. It is not too strong a word.
Her grief scored deep my heart, my spirit shrank
At the deadening weight of pain that crushed her soul.
I shrank away in fear, but could not run
For awesome fascination at her strength,
For even yet, (the breezes sighed) she hopes.
The candle is all but snuffed, and yet one spark
One pitiful, stubborn, glorious, relentless spark,
Will not be quenched. She will not fade away.
She loves. There it is. Even still she dares to love.
Just a tale, passed on the fickle wind, and yet,
The weight of its fantasy shocked my sleeping soul
All my actions, pale, transparent and flimsy
Vanished in the shadow of such a love,
Such pain. I slowly turned my trembling steps
Into the night. The darksome labyrinth
Loomed before me, moaned and sucked me in
Into the whirl of pain, despair and hate
Harpies like a pack of howling wolves
Tore at my ears and shivered my resolve,
But yet it held. By ever so little, it held.
I sought her. Through narrow, devious ways I searched
Peeked through cracks in walls and peered through bars
In cellar windows. I kept an eye for her,
And the other looking back, always aware
Of the way out. For I purposed when she was found
That I would take her hand, and gently lead the way
Back, through treacherous paths and hateful looks
And clutching, clawing keepers, to freer air
To a place where light and music, silence and peace
Can still exist, and stories all end well.
Once in those early days I saw a glimpse
Of her face across a crowded, sullen street.
She stepped through a sickly yellow pool of light
From the streetlamp, but she never even paused.
When I crossed and looked again, she was long gone.
I redoubled my efforts, and vowed oneday to bring
A smile to those fair, set, determined lips.
Then one day I saw a fallen child,
With broken wings and tangled dirty hair
Caught in a pit, thrown in an abandoned crypt.
Worn out dreams lay wasted ‘round her feet,
Scornfully plucked in the bud, never to bloom.
Dirty hands tossed cold hard cash her way
To make her dance, or sing, or play to please her crowd.
So ugly, she was. Not the Lady’s child.
That child was long since dead, I know, but still
Once that child had suffered, as now this girl
Suffers. “It won’t take long,” I thought.
“I’ll show her out, and then return to the search.”
I did. I returned to her late at night and broke the lock
And guided her through the well-known maze of streets
To the tangle’s edge, and set her free. She ran
And never once looked back. I turned back in.
I went back to my quest, but once again,
I came upon a child, and once more paused
My dogged search long enough to get him out.
Another glimpse of her, but when I arrived,
Not her, instead two more of these pitiable urchins.
By now the keepers had learned I knew the way.
This time I had to fight to make it through
To the edge, and then frantic I rushed back in.
These distractions had to stop, or I would never find
The Lady; but now whichever way I turned
Were pitiful faces, children, women, the old
The lame, the sick, the hungry and the weak.
I walked with them. One or two at a time I got them out.
I couldn’t turn them away. They told their tales
And I listened, and wept and fought to clear the way.
Every time was harder than the last,
These middle years were years of many scars.
The Keepers scarred my body, the children my heart
And both bled freely, but each time I went back.
And now I am old and tired, and winding down.
My back is bent, my beard is gray and wild
And my hands are crooked, gnarled and lined with scars.
My heart looks much the same, or so I’d guess,
Inscribed as it is with so many tales of pain.
I have not seen the Lady these many years,
Perhaps she lives no more, perhaps never did.
I might have made her up, a silly dream
That will not go away, but holds more firm
Than the rocks I hide behind. Pitiless is hope!
Weariness covers my soul like a hood of black.
I am dying. That’s how it is. I’m glad to go.
Even though there are still so many more,
But I am full of other people’s pains.
I’ve drained to the dregs that goblet of human sorrow.
From the first to the last the stories stay with me,
Of kept and keeper alike, and scars of both.
And now I’m done. Right now, this trip, my last.
I know this one is my last, because I fell,
Just like that, my face hits the city street.
I cannot rise to my feet, my breath is short,
My chest sinks like an anvil on my heart,
As it finally breaks.
I have never seen her smile.
But what is this? The falling darkness breaks
The sky goes gray, then teal, then blue, then gold
And light falls on my head with searing heat
And all the weight of gold, poured liquid hot.
Intolerable for one brief hellish breath, far worse
Than life itself, and then a gasp of air;
Only not air. Or rather, this is at last is air.
Before this moment I’ve never tasted air.
I’ve never yet known light before this day.
The brightest day of life was shades of gray,
And air before a vacuum next to this.
This air could make a meal, this light a bath,
A shower, an ocean of curling waves of gold
Washing over and through my broken frame
‘Til Every scar shines out with borrowed light
A gift, a jewel, a royal diadem.
I draw this joy up from the very grass
And a laugh rings from my chest, the very first
I ever truly laughed. Mirth pours out,
Sounding a mad, triumphant organ fugue,
Answered in kind, in brave bright jubilee
In the Lady’s eyes; for there, at last, she stands.
Beautiful as the glowing moon, radiant with light
Over, around, with and by and through
The Light is pleased to shine, and even thus
Lovingly tempered still it is too much.
She smiles.
Too much!
I could almost die again.
She stands amid a joyful throng, a Queen
A Mother. Her children, whose stories now are mine
Keeper and kept alike, now whole and free.
Thus I lived and all my life was this.
Was bliss, for I have made my Lady smile.
Yesterday I went to Mass before going to work. It was only a weekday Mass, even if it was the feast of the Presentation, so the church was mostly empty. One of the things about this parish that I don’t particularly care for is that at the sign of peace, everyone leaves their pew and walks all over the church to shake hands with everyone. It’s not wrong, as far as I can tell, but it rather distracts from the real focus of the Mass. After all, at this point in the liturgy, the Host is consecrated and Jesus is sacramentally present on the altar. That is the focal point of the entire universe! It’s not really the time for a social event.
However, as I said, I don’t think it is wrong, and I certainly don’t think those who do it mean any disrespect by it so I did what I usually do. I shook hands with and asked God’s peace upon those in my immediate vicinity, and any others who wandered over from other parts of the church, and then turned back to the altar to get back to the Mass. Upon turning back, however, I saw someone moving towards me from the front of the church. She was a largish lady, in her fifties I would guess, with a look of intense focus on her round face. She had me in her sights, so I prepared to shake hands with her as well, but as she bore down on me (she had to cover enough ground that I had time to size her up) her arms stretched out wide. My thoughts were not coherent, but they could be translated, “That looks like… but no it couldn’t be… but it really… no…”
Then she said loud enough to be heard through the building, continuing to advance at a high rate of speed, “Can I get a hug?”
She was close enough to be breaking the comfort zone, you know that little personal bubble area in front of you where someone is just too close for conversational purposes? As she broke it I retreated half a step back into my pew, and held out my hand, mumbling something stunned and lame under my breath. I didn’t register her reaction, except that she shook and walked back to the front of the church. In retrospect, I suppose it might have embarrassed her a bit to be so obviously rejected. She’s fortunate I didn’t have time to collect my thoughts or I would have just said “No” in the driest, most end-of-story tone I could muster. No doubt many would consider my reaction rude enough as it was. I wish I knew how she viewed it, since at the moment she represented a mindset almost entirely alien to me and I would like to understand it better.
Since I couldn’t figure out her reaction, I spent part of my drive into post this morning trying to analyze mine. I was surprised, not only by her action, but by the fierceness and strength of my reaction. It took a while for me to bring my thoughts back into the realm of charity. You see, I hate being hugged upon by strangers. I don’t even like having my space invaded (with some exceptions), and my initial reaction is always defensive, but when someone I don’t know tries to hug me (it happens very rarely) my first instinct is to shove them back, create some space, and just say “Whoah, hold on. Back off, I don’t know you.”
She obviously had no such reservations, and I had to question my reaction. After all, she just wanted a hug, right? Aren’t we supposed to love one another? Well, that wasn’t a very loving thing to do, now was it? Isn’t that what the sign of peace is all about, showing the love of Jesus? Doesn’t Saint Paul tell us to greet each other with a holy kiss?
I suppose she must have decided I just didn’t like hugs or something, and it was this supposition that gave me an insight into why my reaction is always so strong. You see the fact is I actually don’t hate hugs. I love them in fact. I hug the heck (literally) out of people I know well, family and really close friends. In going through the list I realized that there are people that I love well enough to take a bullet for, but I would never hug. Most of my patients have been like that. Even that lady in the church, I certainly wouldn’t say I didn’t want to have some charity for her. But a hug is still unthinkable, even repulsive. It isn’t the person that repulses me, but the act of hugging someone I don’t know.
And right there is the crux of the matter. There are some people who say that a hug or a kiss is a statement of love, and therefore to be expected between Christians united in the Love of Jesus. After all, you don’t have to know the person to know that Jesus loves them. Very true, and yet that doesn’t call forth the hugging instinct in me. To me, hugging is not so much the language of love, as a language of intimacy, to one degree or another. Love may be possible without knowing the person. Intimacy is not. Charity is guaranteed, or should be, simply on the basis of the shared love of God. One of the results of charity is that it should encourage us to seek to know the people that God loves so much, but it does not change the fact that we are human. We don’t know people right away. It takes time and patience to get to know a person, and this “knowledge” is not simply awareness of facts about that person. It is a matter of trust, a mutual exchange of part of the soul of each. It is a mystery how one person can “know” another at all, but one thing I do know: intimacy exists only in relationship. There must be giving and receiving, gift and regift over and over again. The longer this has been going on the deeper that intimacy becomes. If it hasn’t happened at all, there is no intimacy. You don’t know that person.
This is what “knowing someone” means to me. So I realized that it isn’t because I hate hugs that I recoiled so profoundly from that lady’s well-meaning gesture. It is because I love the act of hugging rather jealously. I want it to have some meaning, not just be a flippant thing we throw around to whomever happens to be within arm’s reach. It seems dishonest. It is lying with your body, pretending that something is there which isn’t there at all. Like a man who vows undying love on the first date, it means nothing.
I guess this is just one symptom of my overall critique of our culture’s approach to social interaction. We tend to be so very friendly and open and “frank” and we tell people just exactly what is going on in our minds. Our heartbreaks are emblazoned on the shifting sands of our facebook walls, there to be pawed over by the crowds for the few hours or minutes or seconds it takes to work its way to the bottom of the feed. Our every thought, emotion, action, and relationship must be dragged out into the cyber streets and vivisected. And what of those thoughts so casually thrown around on twitter? Did that thought even have time to grow up before I stuck it out there? What happens when you put the hops in the still, and then pour out the juice before it has time to ferment, let alone age? Can we even think for more than 140 characters at one time anymore?
I applaud the willingness we have to lay our cards out. The ability to be vulnerable is a prerequisite for relationship, but I wonder. Do we really gain anything by it? Have we increased the breadth of our attachments, but sacrificed the depths? If you try to be intimate with everyone, you end up losing the ability to be truly intimate with anyone. That seems to me something too precious to give up.
One Real Hug is worth about five and a half bazillion fake ones.
There has been a huge hue and cry in the Catholic blogosphere recently in reference to the White House’s recent statement that there will be no broadening of the conscience clause in the Health Care reform bill. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and many other religious organizations in America have been lobbying for this broadening since the bill was passed, and this month, three days before the National March for life in Washington, the White House stated that “This group (Faith based institutions) will ultimately have to offer female employees cost-free contraception, just like others across the country.”
This was not at all what those faith based institutions were hoping for. In a somewhat insulting nod to these organizations, the White House is allowing them an additional year to comply. This is not an acknowledgement of the conscience issue, but to allow more time for administrative changes that will need to be made. “We know that a lot of these organizations may be large organizations, there are approval processes that require the approval of boards,” an administration official told reporters on a call this afternoon. “The transitional period responds to those concerns.”
Unfortunately, these were never actually concerns. This is not a question of “an approval process” as if the implication were that “boards” just need enough time to argue about it before finally bowing to the mandate of Washington.
The uproar has been considerable, though not as widespread as the response to the SOPA bill. Catholic bloggers and bishops, not-for-profit organizations and media personalities have been firing back. I cannot say anything that they have not already said.
I am interested, though, in the Administration’s point of view. What is the end game here? It was a bold strategy, not only the decision to ignore the principles of the largest religious body on the planet, but to drop the ultimatum three days before the largest gathering of Catholics in one place in America. Coincidence? I’ll just say, competent strategists don’t allow coincidences like that. If the timing was not taken into account it was sheer incompetence. If it was, then what on earth was the strategy?
You see, only an idiot goes into battle without knowing his enemy. While there are varying levels of competence in Washington, I’m not ready to believe that the architects of this bill are idiots. They went into battle, and they had to know how the Catholics were going to react. This isn’t an administrative policy we are talking about here, this is a matter of moral principle. The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception is a matter of history, and She has been before now the single voice in the world condemning the contraceptive culture. We made it through the 60’s without changing that for crying out loud. There is no excuse for ignorance about the Church’s position on this topic. Therefore, there is no possibility of compromise. We literally cannot give in to this law. It would be like forcing Jewish businesses to sell Kosher Bacon.
So I have no choice but to believe that at the very least the Administration knew that there was going to be an uproar. Perhaps they underestimated how rapid and loud it would be, but they took it into account in the decision making process. What part did it play?
I can think of two possible strategies that account for this blatant aggression. The first, and I think the most likely, is ideological. Perhaps the President and his advisors really believe that contraception and abortion are so obviously mainstream healthcare, that anyone who does not provide them shouldn’t be in healthcare anyway. An analogy would be someone who did not believe in prescribing antibiotics and refused to do so on moral grounds. Such a person has a right to believe that, but no hospital in America would hire them. They would not be allowed to practice as a physician, and rightly so. I think it is possible that Obama and his cronies are so in love with the idea of contraception that they have deluded themselves into thinking that contraceptives are on the same level as antibiotics and other routine, life-saving interventions. The rhetoric of “reproductive rights” might well have tricked its authors.
If this is the case then the move to engage in open warfare, as it were, was seen as a calculated risk. They think they are right to force people to take care of their employee’s health and welfare (their view), and they are counting on popular support and even more popular apathy to wear down religious resistance over time. In this scenario they expect to hunker down, weather the storm and keep up an endless stream of propaganda. It will blow over eventually and they will get their way.
The second scenario is more sinister, and I think less likely. In this scenario the motives are not ideological but pragmatic. They don’t give a damn about reproductive rights or contraception or any of that. What they do want is power. The Catholic Church, by Her nature, is always a possible threat to the power of the State, because She claims divine authority to resist laws it deems unjust. In this view the goal is to hamper the freedoms of this institution, consolidating power for the State. What you need for that is to do two things, simultaneously: First, you need to isolate and weaken the institution’s base of support among the population. Second, you need to create the opportunity to take action against that institution in such a way that it will be perceived as legitimate. To accomplish these you need an issue which will be at the same time odious to the institution in question and widely popular among the rest of the population.
So in this scenario this particular issue is not the issue. Instead it is simply a weapon. The goal is to draw intense, outspoken, and hopefully hot-headed or even inflammatory response from the Church, which can then be construed as backward, selfish and intolerant. The Church is forcing her beliefs on employees who do not even share the same beliefs! The hope then is that when the inevitable confrontation occurs, whether the Catholic institutions try to continue operating in defiance of the law, or close their doors, any government action can be presented as preventing the Church from imposing Her ideas on other people. No one will come to our aid in any effective way.
I don’t think this is the scenario, because it means that the Administration thinks the Church is weak enough that they can get away with it. You don’t deliberately provoke an all-out power struggle until you are certain you have the tactical advantage. I don’t think we are at that stage yet. In fact, if anything can bring out a little fight in us, this is it. But in the short term, motives matter very little. In either scenario the crux of the matter remains the same. The side that sways the people will win, and if Obama has proved adept at anything, it is influencing the people. People will point to his crashing polls, but the mystery is not that they have crashed so far, but that they have not bottomed out. The man can spin a yarn, and people listen. This is the most dangerous quality he possesses and we must not underestimate it.
In any revolution or counter-revolution, the propaganda war is the real war. The human terrain is the only terrain that matters.
“The major concrete achievement of the women's movement of the 1970's was the Dutch treat.” -Nora Ephron.
This quote always makes me laugh a bit. Of all the things in the world to be hailed as a great achievement, seriously? But my initial amusement is something of a discredit to the woman who said it, because it does her the discourtesy of not listening to her. It interprets her words through my set of ideas and assumptions, which is the surest way to avoid ever hearing what a person is saying. Obviously to her it was no laughing matter (at least I don’t think it was. I can find no reference to her as a humorist.) She meant something by it.
It turns out, when you take the time to listen, that she saw it as a symbolic victory. In her mind, up until then, men have viewed women as helpless, fragile creatures who simply couldn’t manage to provide food for themselves if the big, strong, manly men didn’t give it to them. Worse still, the big, strong, manly men were intent on keeping it that way because, deep down inside, they were all afraid of these fragile little women. They couldn’t feel manly without someone to dominate, so to protect their own egos they had arbitrarily forced women into a position of subservience.
To her, the groundswell of support from countless women around the country saying “No thanks, I can pay for my own meal,” was a vindication. It was like Gandhi, refusing to walk in the gutter, insisting that there was room on the sidewalk for all people regardless of color. Every Hindu who followed his example and calmly and quietly walked on the sidewalk, even for a few steps, was a blow at the institution of oppression. In the same way, I think Nora Ephron saw every woman’s purchase of her own dinner as a small, but significant demonstration against the patriarchal establishment.
Whether she was right or wrong, is another thing entirely, and not the point of this blog. I will say briefly that while I cannot agree with her, I cannot completely disagree with her either.
Instead of worrying about that, for the moment, let’s fast forward thirty-odd years to the 2000’s and early ‘teens. Now we have the cultural phenomenon of blogging, and in that blogging world, the delicious irony of posts and comment threads like this one, in which the women are the ones reminiscing longingly over the days when men were men and could pay for the date. In still another stroke of genius, men are now the ones who are calling for “equality”. If they want equal rights as men, let those women share some responsibility. They are adults, let them pay for their own dang meal.
Lo! I fear we have created a monster!
Actually, no. We have created nothing. We have simply put an old problem in new clothes, and even the new clothes aren’t really new. They are just the old clothes, turned inside out.
Why were a few vocal, and admittedly often eloquent women, able to launch a movement that, with very little organization and almost no direct conflict, was able completely to change the face of a society in a few short decades? As a professional student of revolutionary tactics in general, I can tell you it was a pretty bit of work. They had a base of support. Their message hit home, and resonated with women. For one reason or another, deep down inside, thousands of women heard this message of liberation and it meshed with a fear in their hearts. They felt like their rights were not being met. They were being used.
Can we argue against it? Possibly, although every individual’s story is always different. That really is beside the point. The point is that they felt used and denied rights which should be theirs. There was a reason they felt that way. There always is!
And now that the tables have turned, and men choose not to pay because generations of women have told us, “No, thank-you, I have a job and I can afford it,” the cry is different. Women lament that men don’t think them worth the time or money it would take to treat them to a nice, thoughtful date. They feel used. I doubt any would argue that their rights are being violated. That is now the man’s cry. Why does the man always have to pay for everything? Why is it now our job to be gentlemen while women have apparent carte-blanche to pick and choose which of the traditionally lady-like gestures they will or will not use? Why do laws on anything and everything from divorce, to civil disputes, to domestic quarrels favor women?
The few men who can put this succinctly find an audience. There are murmurs of assent, that instant leaping of recognition, aggrieved to aggrieved. Men feel like their rights are being violated.
Like I said, old problem, new look, same clothes just turned inside out. The root of both issues was, and is, the fear of being used. We are inveterate cynics, we human beings. Always on the watch lest someone pull the wool over our eyes. Someone is out to deal us out of the game, cut us from the line where all the good bargains are. It isn’t that we are necessarily greedy. We don’t want to take anything that’s anyone else’s but I will not be gypped of what is rightfully mine. If you don’t look out four your rights, someone else is going take you for everything you have.
Mutual suspicion is as old as fig leaves.
So what is the solution? Simple. Let go of the fear. Give someone the benefit of the doubt, for a change (which is not the same thing as pretending there is a doubt when there isn’t). Speak honestly and sincerely, expect others to do the same. It’s okay to be surprised and hurt when someone lies to you. You should be surprised. It’s a surprising thing. It is utterly unnatural and unreasonable and you ought to rebel against it with every fiber of your being. But don’t believe that lie. You see, if you take one woman who lies to you, or ten, or fifty, or a hundred, and then extrapolate that all women are therefore liars, you have bought the lie, hook line and sinker. You really have been hoodwinked.
That is not the Truth! The truth is that people lie, from time to time. (Some people tell the truth from time to time.) But there are people who believe in the truth. There are people who believe in honor, integrity, and generosity. There are people who will guard your rights far more zealously than you ever could. Seek them out, take the years it takes to get to know them. Because when you can let your rights go, confident that they will be taken care of, it frees you to live something better. Rights exist and are important because they protect us from ourselves, but they are the lowest common denominator. In a relationship, if you have to worry about your rights, you are already behind the power curve. Relationship exists so that we can forget about our rights, and move deeper into the realm of self-gift.
This is what a man says by paying for a date, even a first date. He’s saying, “I don’t need to stand on my rights. I can give of myself, and I hope you can do the same. I don’t know, but I’m giving you the chance. You deserve it.”
Thursday morning I went for a run. It was still dark out, but my plan was to do 50 minutes total along the sidewalk. Now that the snow has melted I’ve discovered that the sidewalk runs straight north almost to the Puget Sound. It’s mostly downhill on the way out, and then, of course, uphill on the way back. I ended up running only about 48 minutes because of it. I turned around at 24 minutes, expecting it to take me longer to get back since I would be running uphill most of the way. Instead, to my delighted surprise, I actually ran almost exactly the same speed on the way back making it in at 48 minutes. Close enough. I let myself off the extra two minutes for good behavior. Someday I’ll have to drive the route to see how far it was.
However, this blog concerns something that happened in the first ten minutes of the run. As I said, it was still dark out, and although the sidewalk is pretty good, there was one place where one of the segments had heaved up out of the ground, probably from a tree root, and it was sticking up about three inches higher than its neighbor. My left toe caught that lip in the dark and down I went, knees, heal of the hand, forearm and shoulders, a very awkward looking shoulder roll back to my feet and I kept moving. I was cranking under my breath, but I was still going. The heels of my hands were the most painful parts at the time, but I could tell my knees had been pretty banged up. At any rate, it was too dark to examine them, and I didn’t want to slow down so I pushed on and forgot all about it until I got back to my apartment. Unlocking my door, standing on the well-lit landing, I finally looked down at my legs and saw this:
It turns out I did take some skin off.
Of course it’s always a mistake to judge the severity of a wound by the amount of blood (and that isn’t even a lot of blood). If there is a lot of sweat, it dilutes the blood and makes it flow further and faster than it otherwise would, so even a little bit of blood can cover a lot of area. I washed these and the other abrasions off pretty thoroughly when I showered, and then ignored them.
But I realized, it’s all Obama’s fault.
Well, not Obama exactly, but it is the government’s fault, and he is the head of the government so we’ll blame him. Does Washington (D.C.) not care about its people? They should know that sidewalks with cracks in them are hazardous. They should know that running is hazardous. People get injured like that in countless numbers every year. Why isn’t Congress doing something to mitigate that? Like mandating knee and elbow pads for runners, or providing everyone with free head lamps, or outlawing running during hours of darkness?
I mean, if this administration can’t protect me from the consequences of my own choices, what good is it?
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, my patient is currently discerning a vocation to the priesthood, and I fear he is tipping the wrong way. What do I do? Sincerely, Fearful in Seattle.”
My Dear Fearful,
No need for pseudonyms here, I have enough friends in the offices of the Lowerarchy to find out your number if I want to. That you are a miserable blunderer, in very great danger of the usual punishments for incompetence and carelessness, I already know. Even the fact that you use the phrase “discerning a vocation” shows you have gathered most of your information about this from your patient. I suppose you never took my lectures on Vocational Uncertainty? Or perhaps you were one of those disgusting, arrogant insects who always simpered and smirked in the back, thinking you knew better than I. Now where are you? In imminent danger of letting a soul slip into a very dangerous and poisonous position, and of course, of being appropriately re-educated.
Never fear, though, all is not lost. The very tone of your question tells me that what you really need is a new point of view on the matter of “vocations” (so called). You need the principle of “vocational uncertainty,” a humble contribution of yours truly to the vast science on the subject. Put simply, it states that we do not know whether or not any particular human has or does not have a vocation, or if he does what it might be. We know there have been cases of Him calling individual humans. The singularly unfortunate and otherwise inexplicable case of our dear old boy Saul is one such example. But by and large we simply have no evidence to suggest that The Enemy “calls” the average human. If you take what He says at face value then it follows that He does, but we know better than to listen to anything He says, don’t we? Another important point is that the humans don’t know either. The patient doesn’t know. If he did he wouldn’t be “discerning” he would be struggling to accept or running away. The patient’s priest doesn’t know, his parents don’t know, no matter what kind of “advice” they give him.
On the whole it doesn’t matter to us at all. Of course if we could find out for certain what The Enemy’s game was, we would certainly try to discourage that vocation, but we can’t so it makes no sense worrying about it. Maybe your patient is being called, maybe he isn’t. You will be the last to know.
Now that I have shown that you really know nothing, it’s obvious from your question that you regard his becoming a priest as the most undesirable outcome. Such a shallow view of things is sure to get you re-educated sooner or later. Never let the facts dominate your view of reality. Let what you want be the way you see things and with practice you can get others to see it that way also.
In reality, neither outcome is good or bad for us. Let me impress upon you the spiritual maxim you should have learned as a lowly parasite: humans are raw material. Their thoughts, their feelings, their choices, their very bodies and souls, all of these are nothing more than raw material. We can get a priest to damn himself just as easily as anyone else, and they are tastier when they get here. Really, the disturbing thing is not that he is leaning towards becoming a priest, but that he is leaning in any direction at all. Do we want him to be a priest? Do we want him to be a lay person? To us, it truly doesn’t matter. We want him to be nothing. If I could I would make sure that every one of those obscene half-breed vermin lived their entire lives as nothing, doing nothing, desiring nothing, choosing nothing. I would see all of them waste every talent, opportunity and dream fleeing endless fears, living a bland, soulless existence and finding out when all is said and done, that nothing meaningful was said, nothing worthwhile was done, and all their choices were made by us, as we shall continue to make their choices for all eternity. I would like to see all of them torn with vocational scruples, bouncing back and forth in endless, self-defeating uncertainty between what they truly want, and what their dear Aunt Tilly has so helpfully half-convinced them The Enemy wants them to do.
If he could be made to engage in a spectacular act of willful defiance that would be one thing, but since we don’t know what we are making him defy, and since the more spectacular it is, the riskier it is to us, we just want to delay. Never let him see that no choice is really a choice, but we are the ones making it. Dawdle. Muddle. Confuse. Obfuscate. Guilt, fear, hope, desire, all of these are in our favor so long as none of them lead to what we fear most; i.e. a free, whole hearted, open commitment. The Enemy wants the patient to do one of two things: either to embrace every natural desire of his heart, all those deep longings for “goodness” and “truth” and “beauty” (pardon my French, but this is no job for the squeamish!) that The Enemy has placed there. If he does this, following those images with thankfulness and the knowledge that they are images, he is really choosing The Enemy behind those images, and that suits The Enemy just fine. Or, on the other hand, he could reject all of those images and choose to search for The Enemy Himself, face to face as it were (I know, the idea fills us with disgust, but some of these humans have tried it and they are unbelievably damaging to us.) I say again, the Enemy wants the human to do one of these two things. Which one, we don’t know. It doesn’t matter. We want him to do neither. Whether he is a priest or a publican is of no concern to us, so long as he is not happy or holy as either. Whether it matters to The Enemy, we can’t say for sure, but I suspect it is not His ultimate concern.
In summary, the road he takes in the end is of less interest to us than the choice, or rather the lack of choice. Keep him stalling as long as possible. When he does make it, see that he does not make it fully or freely, if you can. A choice made through fear is far better for us in the long run than a choice made from honest desire. And finally, once he does make his choice, (or drifts into it, if you do your job right,) you can use it to maintain that same spiritual stranglehold on him. Keep nagging at him with guilt, regrets, what-ifs and doubts. Encourage him to hang around with pious friends (our kind of pious, not real piety) who will say things like, “You know, I always thought you should have been a priest.” Or “Hey, at least you never have to deal with a nagging wife or whiny kids.” The ignorance of that statement is a veritable feast.
This should be enough to get you started. If you can’t manage to make it work even with this excellent advice, well, we shall just replace you with someone who can.
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