Philosophy
Freedom Squandered
No other nation, in the history of civilization, has endured so long without the benefit of kings or authoritarians. The United States has achieved a long-running democracy, in which the principles of liberty and civic responsibility drive us to our collective forward progress as a nation. What are we doing with this freedom?
To be frank, we’re blowing it. Our forefathers did the hard work cobbling together a nation of immigrants, standing up to the British Empire, resolving a civil war, winning two global wars, and setting a course to prosperity. For Americans alive today, we’ve received the gift of a stable, peaceful democracy without having to fight for it.
This is a grave danger, and it has all the hallmarks of historical collapses of civilizations. We become complacent and more concerned about perfection than about preserving domestic tranquility. We club our political and intellectual opponents, assuming the worst in each other and ignoring facts.
It’s a matter of physics that an object at rest tends to stay at rest. We are tending towards that sense of self-satisfaction that will be our undoing. It’s like we read in the Gospel, how the man rids himself of a demon, but doesn’t fill that space with anything good or new. So, when the demon comes back with his friends, he finds a space to inhabit.
Freedom is not free, and even now, there are Americans standing guard around the world, separated from their friends and family, maintaining our peace and security. This is a flawed, but great nation, an experiment worth defending. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Let’s stop using our freedom to attack each other, and instead use it to build a better nation.
Diligence
On Friday night, at 8:30pm to be exact, a very motivated local landscaping supply business owner dropped off a pallet of sod in my driveway. Several beds around our house sat empty since we removed over a dozen shrubs at the end of March. With this delivery, we were ready to end this project.
With any big project, it’s easy to get worn out. Running a marathon requires more than just energy and stamina. When you get to mile 20, 23, or 24, you need something much deeper to push you to the finish line. You require the internal motivation to keep going, and the diligence to finish what you started.
The spiritual life is the biggest project any of us ever undertake. Enduring a lifetime of trial, triumph, defeat, and temptation requires that we, as St. Paul said, run the race. We have to put in the effort, do the work, and not let despair set in.
Quitting half-way through, or taking a break, is like leaving those empty beds of dirt. We did the hard work in March to clear out the beds, dig out the shrubs, and clear them to dirt. By the time the sod man was hired and made his delivery, the weeds had grown up again, so we had to clean the bed out for a second time.
Why keep fighting battles that have already been won? Focus, fight, win, and never give up an inch of ground.
Turn on Your Brain
The culture of rage is here, a general acceptance of rule breaking in the furtherance of political ends. Rage is primal, reaching into the area of your brain that runs your internal “fight or flight” response. It shuts down logic and instead pursues action, no matter how unhinged.
A sad consequence of this indulgence of rage is that it rewards the party that can convince the highest number of people to turn off their brains. Alexander de Tocqueville marveled at the educated electorate that he met in America, and how everyone engaged in the democratic process. He’d be shocked to see that it only took 200 years to convert that America into a mob.
Humans are naturally trusting, and so it can be easy to accept reasonable sounding arguments, even if they’re fallacious. Many will ask you to excuse the intentionally killing of a child, but only in “rare” cases of rape, incest, or the health of the mother. A critical review of this request presents some questions.
Why is the only response to the violence of rape, the violence of killing a child? In what medical circumstance is it medically necessary to kill the child, rather than end the pregnancy early by delivering the child and admitting them to the neonatal intensive care unit?
Under the weight of logic, the argument collapses. We know inherently that killing is always wrong, with the sole exception of in self-defense.
Rage, and the beneficiaries of rage, benefit when you turn your brain off. Keep yours on.
The Paradox of Time
There’s a quirk in human psychology when it comes to time. We have lists of things that we’d like to do, but never enough time to do them. Yet, when our schedules open up, we’re more likely to drift to watching TV or wasting time, rather than investing it in quality activities from our list.
The path of least resistance is too easy to take. I enjoy a lazy river as much as the next guy. The mistake is believing that important things like work and chores get in the way of recreation.
A healthy amount of work is part of a well-balanced life. Work gives us productive activity and dignity. We use our skills to improve the lives of others, and generate compensation that supports our family. Engaging in quality work allows us to mirror the lives of Jesus and his father Joseph, who we know based on historical records, worked very, very hard.
At the end of the day, I’m often tired. It’s hard to summon the energy to clean the kitchen or take care of the little tasks around the house that need to be done. Some days, I whiff and check out for the evening. But on the nights that I take 15 minutes to get the kitchen clean, or the 10 minutes to pick up the books and toys around the house, the following day always goes better.
I’ve always planned to have a date night with Alison once a week. An evening where there’s nothing on the schedule except spending time with her. When I was solely an at-home dad, it rarely happened. We’d spend small chunks of time several times a week in the same room, and that was it. Now that my availability is cut down, Sunday night is a much bigger priority for a date night for me. Coincidently, we’re having date night much more regularly.
There’s a balance to managing the many responsibilities that we have in life. In the face of them, we can’t surrender to idleness or overwork. Like our spiritual life, making this balance requires daily effort and some amount of failure. Try harder next week.
Victory
Easter is here and the tomb is empty. The timing of Easter this year was prescient. In my listening to the “Bible in a Year” podcast, I lined up exactly with the events of Holy Week. The same went for my daughter’s Bible curriculum. For her school work, we read a story and the next day she narrates the story and draws a picture. In her telling, Jesus was hiding behind a tree, waiting for Mary Magdalene to show up. The image she drew of Jesus lying in wait was amusing.
Now that we’re into the Easter season and our Lenten practices are over, it’s time for an annual reminder about the point of what we just did. Lent, Holy Week, and Easter are only the beginning. They’re the keys that unlock the true freedom of Christian life. They’re the exercises and disciplines that draw us into our call to constant conversion.
Fasting from sweets, your snooze button, or meat on Fridays is the first step. It’s the introduction to the discipline of fasting. Fasting isn’t giving something up, it’s raising our awareness. Many vices aren’t driven by a desire to do evil, but a reaction to some negative event in your life. Drinking to excess may be covering up deep emotional wounds. Impatience behind the wheel may be about allowing too many pressures to build up in your life. When we give something up, we have an opportunity to be curious about what’s really going on in our lives.
Our successes and failures this Lent are another part of our journey. The Christian Life is anything but boring, and answering Jesus’ call to pick up our cross and follow him is the work of each day. But when we’ve completed our trek to the top of the hill, the place of the skull, what waits for us is not public humiliation and complete destruction. What waits for those who answer the call is the ultimate victory.
The Human Person
It’s a great paradox that in the Information Age, when every book every written and every fact known to man is available on your phone, that our connection to the truth is at great risk. The future that GK Chesterton presciently wrote about over 100 years ago is coming true; we are drawing swords to defend the basic and observable truths in the natural world.
Under the banner of progress, the new Imperialists seek not to seize lands and property, but to colonize minds. Submit and convert to their way of thinking, or submit to a public social execution. These emboldened voices challenge the very ideas that underpinned human civilization for over 3,000 years. As they pull blocks out of the bottom of the jenga tower, human civilization begins to wobble.
In their view, the family is outdated and human sexuality is nothing more than consensual recreation. Masculinity and femininity are not differences to be embraced, but simultaneously anything you want and nothing at all. These new pseudo-ideas posses the logic of a toddler, but we see them roll over institutions with little resistance. The Supreme Court has found in the Constitution, written by deeply religious men in the late 1700s, an unlimited right to kill at child until birth and that marriage is whatever two people say it is.
It can be hard to watch these threats emerge when we instinctively know that they’re wrong. But how do we defend these first principles when we’ve never had to articulate them? Our explanation that the sky is blue is just that; it’s an observable fact across all reaches of the globes by all people. We must find ways to explain this simple truth to people who refuse to look up.
Intellectual exploration is a wonderful thing, and human curiosity continues to expand the reaches of our understanding. Intellectual colonization is a pernicious threat, as evil as any other form of colonization. It seeks to subjugate and enslave its victims, all to gain raw power and control.
The human person, and our understanding of its dignity and importance, is the lens through which we live our lives. It informs how we behave and how we treat others. A solid understanding gives us the ability to recognize the commonalities that we share with everyone that we meet, and to empathize with their pain and sufferings.
A lack of respect towards the human persons results in the depredations that we’ve witnessed throughout history. It’s a conflict that continues today, whether in front of the camera in the villages of Ukraine, or far from the public view in other places.
Applied Bioethics Magazine takes on the bioethical issues of our time. The first issue is out now. In it, we explore and define the human person. It puts into words the truths about the human person that you instinctively know and it only takes about half an hour to read. Once finished, you’ll have a philosophical and theological understanding of the human person.
Confusion and stress can cloud our thinking, but we can’t let it diminish the central truth of our world. The human person is worthy of dignity and respect at every time and in every place. This is a fight worth fighting.
Desensitized
Evil’s greatest objective is to desensitize us to its reality. If we fail to perceive evil for the threat that it is, to our lives and our society, then it can more easily dominate us.
We have a political class in Washington that universally denies the basic dignity of children in the womb. So evil their beliefs, that they don’t even believe that these children have a basic right to life. That is evil. The Chinese Communist Party has interned over a million Uyghurs in concentration camps for well over a year, and the strongest response to this evil from the world community is not sending diplomats to fancy parties at the Olympics. For two weeks, the deranged machinations of a single man has inflicted pain, suffering, and misery on the people of Ukraine.
In days like these, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. We are looking evil in the eye, that reality that we tried so hard to deny. We pray for peace, but still see suffering. Despair is a terrible thing.
This is another wake-up call for us. It’s a reminder that the fight for our salvation is a daily struggle, and that we are witnesses to the light in the face of great darkness. This is the essential truth that C.S. Lewis so beautifully conveyed in the _Chronicles of Narnia_. In the face of evil, good always triumphs.
Keto Recycle
Over the past three years, I’ve experimented with the keto diet. It’s fashionable right now, a fact that’s helped me stay consistent. My grocery store stocks a variety of keto-friendly options, which is fantastic.
Alison and I first switched over because we were looking to do something different. I wanted an eating plan that would make menu planning easier. With fewer food options, we could benefit from focus. I learned that a strict keto diet is the single lifestyle factor that consistently delivers me more migraine-free days.
There are stages that the body goes through when on the keto diet. The first two weeks are like a brick wall, as all sugar stores burn up and the body transitions into ketosis, where fat is the body’s energy source. Sometimes this transition is known as the keto-flu, and it isn’t fun.
The deeper into the diet I get, the less I eat. I’m less hungry and fill up easier. My tastes change, and the richness of food comes through. Black or dark roasted coffee becomes a true delight.
At some point, when I’m deep into keto, I get tempted to quit. It may be a tray of Christmas cookies or just the smell of Chick-fil-A waffle fries. Whatever the temptation, I’m always amazed at how effective it is at getting me to break keto. I can see my enhanced energy levels and the easily beatable migraines. I know how hard I’ve worked and the pain I’ll go through to start over again, but I break anyway.
Why do I keep quitting?
It’s the same reason I sin, and it’s the same reason I don’t stick to my prayer routine. The grass always looks greener on the other side, but it never is.
I no longer look at keto as a diet but as a cycle. Like my life, I’m always in motion. I’m drifting further into the diet or further out of it. The goal is to spend more time in keto for more extended periods in each cycle.
The goal of holiness isn’t perfection. The goal is to live as perfectly as possible, contending with and overcoming your faults through grace.
When I break keto, I always gain a few pounds, but I never get back to the very beginning. The same is true for the spiritual life. Sin sets us back; it doesn’t reset the clock. Hard work reaps benefits, so keep doing the hard work.
Noticing Progress
It’s hard to notice progress in our personal growth. We’re so intimately familiar with ourselves that small changes are imperceptible. Even the markers that we mentally track can be deceiving.
In our relationships, we tend to have conflicts around the same themes. Those areas where there are disagreements between spouses seldom change. However, in time, the friction can fade away with work and love, as you both learn to accept each other for who you are.
In the spiritual life, the same is true. Think back on your last three Confessions. The themes, if not the specific sins, were likely the same. Maybe it’s been that way for years. It’s not that you’re not making progress; it’s that those are the areas in which you are weakest. That’s where your version of concupiscence, our natural inclination to sin, plays out. Your holiness is the work of a lifetime; acceptance and a refusal to quit is enough progress.
This blog is nearing nine years of work. I started to look back at my first posts last week, and I had to blush. The writing was rough, choppy, and lacked subtlety. There were fragments, grammatical errors, and a lack of polish. I can distinguish between the quality and style of those first posts and those that I publish today.
In between the first post and this one, #858, was slow, steady imperceptible progress.
We tend not to give ourselves credit for the tiny steps forward we take each day. Yet, taking a moment to step back and pan out reveals the actual trajectory of our progress. That’s something worth appreciating.
Pivot
We’re in a season of disruption. Three major holidays in a row, travel plans, end of year tasks, and more all add up to significant calendar changes. Our routines upended, we’re left scrambling to find the peace of the season while still covering our bases.
I read that the main characteristic of the 21st century is flexibility. Life in a rapid, 24 hour-cycle requires frequent adaptation. This isn’t just about the pandemic, but really the massive changes that have occurred since 2008, and even back to 2001.
To be successful, we must pivot. This is true in all aspects of our lives, including our spiritual lives. Daily prayer is the essential medicine to encourage virtue and help us to avoid sin. If it becomes so mundane that we resist or skip it, we put ourselves at risk. We have to pivot to a new prayer routine or expression of faith.
Structure is good, but rigidity is fatal. We have to be willing and able to pivot. We have to look forward and see disruption coming, and ensure that we’re living our best lives.