Our National Destiny

I cannot imagine anyone who is not glad the election of 2012 is over.  Well maybe the advertising people who earned millions of dollars or the critics who delighted in finding targets at which to sling their darts of outrageous fortune or derision or invective.  

  

I am sorry that Mitt Romney lost.  He is a good man, a man of character who could have brought a very different tone and a restoration of foundational political principles to the leadership of our country and perhaps could have brought Washington together.   

Though I have little confidence that it will happen, I hope President Barack Obama, having competed against such a good man and won by such a narrow popular vote margin, will be able bring our political leaders and the body politic together this time around.   It can only be done by leadership and all of us having a better understanding of history and by the earned grace of God.

I am afraid, though, that the America, the United States of America that those of us born before about 1960 knew, the America that had/has been the magnet for so many immigrants, will no longer be recognizable unless we truly become ‘one nation under God.’

A house divided cannot stand. 

 I came upon a revealing statement Mr. Romney made, that was not broadcast on CNN or other vilifying sources: 

            “Over the years, I have watched a good number of people live out their lives in the shallows.  In the shallows, life is all about yourself.  Your job, your money, your house, your rights, your needs, your opinions, your ideas, your comfort.  In the deeper waters, life is about others: family, friends, faith, community, country, caring, commitment.  In the deeper waters, there are challenging ideas, opposing opinions, and uncomfortable battles. [A man I know] told me that his life ambition was to be listed in Forbes among the four hundred wealthiest people in the world.  His ambition, his preoccupation with self, overshadowed his marriage and his loyalties to his friends—so he lost them all.  He became wealthy in the way he hoped.  But he swims in the shallowest of waters, because he swims alone.” (from his commencement address at Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts, May 23, 2004)

We need to clean up our inward act, become united, and then reach outward with strength of each other and Almighty God to help us reach our worthy personal and national goals. 

A New Start

After a hiatus of several months I have determined that I will once again share my thoughts, observations, hopes, and frustrations with all who might value the worldview of a Christian early- Babyboomer white male who loves his wife, family, Church and country and despairs of where our culture and nation seems to be headed. 

My agenda is forthright: I would hope to influence my family, friends, and inquisitive strangers with my views.  Like nearly everybody, I think my opinions have value and wish others saw things as I do.  I especially think they have value because I have arrived at that age where I have seen and experienced much; I have had enough education to have critical-thinking skills that temper my utterances so I am not just shooting from the lip; I have been and continue to be a student of history;  I greatly value the wisdom of great men and women of the past (and that of my wives, present and past) and wish to re-present some of their views; and I believe I am worthy of spiritual guidance but am humble enough to acknowledge that I am not a prophet. 

My special mission, as I sense it, is to be a voice of warning—maybe even a small latter-day voice of “one crying in the wilderness” as the world approaches  ever closer to the brink of self-destruction.  I hope to encourage the preparation that will be needed to detect and weather the signs-of-the times.

If you are a new reader or one who is unfamiliar with my writings of the past several years I would encourage you to review the titles in the archives of my work on the right side of your screen.  I can testify to you that a number of them were, I believe, truly inspired for I know how the thoughts came to me.  If you can overlook my sometimes clumsy presentation I think you can find something of value.  

I thank you for your readership and would welcome your comments.

Authorized Married Love

In August of 2010 I wrote a weblog entry titled ‘On Love Songs and Love.’  My first paragraph today is an extension of my views on the latter part of that earlier posting. Subsequent paragraphs today expand the notion of ‘love’ into God-ordained marriage. I wrote then:

Love is an attitude, an orientation of character that has as its focus the pleasing and well-being of another. It is a giving for another, a giving of one’s self, not a ‘trying to get’ from another ( yet in the giving process one does, in fact, get as well). It is achieving a ‘oneness’ with another person and a losing of the separateness of and focus on one’s self. It is a ‘standing for’ someone, not a ‘falling for’ them; you stand in love, you don’t fall in love. Love is a synergy; it is complementary by definition.  It involves care, responsibility and unfailing commitment, respect and appreciation. Lovers are “each in love with the other for the sake of perfecting their mutual work.” (Rumi)

A purportedly Christian nation should remember that God said, in the beginning, that “It is not good that the man [or woman] should be alone.” He established, from the beginning, that marriage between a man and a woman should be the solution for that unnatural state of being alone.  The marriage, by God, of the man Adam and the woman He brought to Adam to be “an help meet [appropriate or ‘to conform to’] for him” set the pattern of all that should legitimately follow. 

Homosexual ‘marriage’? Gay ‘rights’?

What has illegitimately followed with some sad and lonely souls (only about 1-2% of the population in the United States is homosexual according to the latest analysis, notwithstanding the stridency of the proponents which is out of all proportion to their actual numbers—see The Atlantic, June 29, 2012) is the coming together of two persons of the same sex.  To excerpt a line from an old song, these lonely people are “looking for love in all the wrong places.” 

 What makes it so wrong, in addition to the fact that God called this distortion of human intimacy an “abomination,” is that it is so unnatural.  It cannot lead to God’s fundamental commandment to “multiply and replenish the earth.” Common sense tells you that two keys do not make a lockset—and two locks do not make a key.  Metaphorically it takes a key and a lock (a lockset) to perpetuate and lend stability and give a future to the human race.  Two men can be close friends, and two women can be likewise but to call it a marriage is to rewrite the dictionary, the moral code, and the decree  of Almighty God. 

Love and passion and commitment and recognition of natural gender roles establish marriage and, if honored and given wings to grow,  gives purpose to the earth-life experience of all humans and permanence to human society.  Supreme Court Chief Justice Burger some years ago said, in the last throes of our pre-social revolution age, “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is a fundamental right is to cast aside a millennia of moral teaching.” This and like acts are wrong and they are not ‘rights.’

Human sexuality as an expression of love, not simply as an ‘activity,’ finds its highest human expression in the holy matrimony of a man and a woman where their vows and behavior toward each other are not simply a legal contract but a covenant.    It is a procession of the soul from within outward; it enlarges and encompasses and invites children and never constricts or demands or demeans.  It puts on the yoke and aspires to vast and universal aims. Married love is a private and tender relation of one to another, which is the furtherance and enchantment of human life.  It does not inherently introduce disease (physical—consider AIDS; or emotional—consider profound gender confusion in children) into the relationship.  The purification of the hearts of the lovers from year to year and the invitation of children by their approved and natural sexual intimacy are components of a morally authorized marriage.  This level of love is the process which leads to the deification of persons—the two who have married, and the natural extension of their union—an eternal family.  

Homosexual ‘marriage’ should not be honored with this noble title; it is an institutional desecration and a counterfeit of the highest magnitude.  ‘Gay rights’ is a demand for respect and a demand for validation that is inherently disrespectful of God and his highest creation and invalid as a protected inalienable right. ‘Marriage’ of a man to a man or a woman to a woman is simply an attempt to try to dignify their deviancy or legitimize the illegitimate and it should not be given the status or protection or promotion by government or by law.  This type of behavior does not build or stabilize society therefore does not merit governmental involvement under the law.  

    

I do not believe in criminalizing a private consensual deviancy between adults or subjecting these individuals to ridicule, but I am disgusted by it and do not want it taught in our schools as 'normal' or supported by our tax-dollars.  If the couple’s deviancy were private and not paraded about and flung into the face of the larger normal society as a challenge and a demand for privileges that are protected by law as a basic stabilizing societal influence, as in a genuine marriage, I would think most Americans would let it pass in the name of ‘tolerance.’  I would.  But redefining this fundamental, historical, and God-given institution of marriage to accommodate a minority’s deviance is unacceptable to me and may be the final insult that brings down God’s wrath upon what has become an unholy nation by its acceptance.

Fractured

(I posted this last year and in checking found that nobody read it. Maybe nobody wanted to.  In case it was just a bad week for all of us I resubmit it for your consideration.)

In doing research for my doctoral dissertation (Character Education and the Development of Moral and Spiritual Values … Brigham Young University… [1984]) I read a 1978 address given at Harvard University by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn titled “A World Split Apart.” His address, and a book he wrote a few years before, “The Gulag Archipelago,” had a profound influence upon me. Now, thirty-three years later we are still a world split apart, we are still imprisoned—only in different ways. We are not split apart by communist or fascist totalitarianism, but we are split apart by other ideologies, by political loyalties, by religious beliefs, by unkept marriage vows and forgotten family hopes. We are imprisoned by selfishness.

When we have a broken limb we splint it, we cast it and protect it, we rest it; we don’t just automatically cut it off. Most of the time it will heal just fine. In the meantime, we do things for the person who is doing the work of trying to heal. We serve them, and when we do we come to love the object of our service.

In seeking for freedom, for expression of individual pleasures, for wealth, for ‘entitlements,’ we have lost our sense of unity, of ties that hold us together as ‘one nation, [or family] under God,’ indeed we have lost our connectedness as a human family. In fighting for our ‘position,’ or our distorted ‘identity’ we lose sight of the larger picture and our place in it.

We need to seek things that encourage our cohesiveness as families and as a nation and as a world community of people who have the same fears and aspirations, the same needs and hopes as we have. We are more similar than we are different. We all bleed when cut. We all can rest when the noise ceases and the cold is kept out, when we are fed, and we have some place to lay our head.

One thing that holds us together is our history—family history and national history. We need to learn it better. We cannot expect an individual or a family or a nation which has lost its memory to keep its vision. There may be rough brush strokes in what we paint of our families, there may be blemishes in our national history, but we are much more than the flaws—we are more good than bad. We must remember the good things and emphasize these things and hold out hope. And we must do this for others.

Things can get better; fractures can mend. Remember, “Faith, hope, [and] charity [all are needed]…but the greatest of these is charity.”

Of Maps and Viewpoints

A few years ago as my wife and I were returning on a flight from the Eastern seaboard I had a window seat and studied a slice of America from 30,000 feet. It was a clear day and I had several hours of fascinating observation and reflection. The look of the land seemed much different than the sterile maps I often pore over.

 Many different kinds of maps can accurately represent any given area, each, though, in its own limited way. There are maps that show elevations; others, highways; still others, geological formations. Plant types, population characteristics, and political boundaries can likewise be represented on maps and yet I could not see them on the geo-physical picture of ‘reality’ I was ‘seeing’. No map (or photograph, for that matter) can show everything about the area it represents, any more than what I could see outside my airplane window would reveal it to me from my perspective.

 In order to be intelligible or definitive, a map must drastically simplify things; it must leave out all but what it means to represent. Consider a few examples: Eskimos, I have read, are able to discriminate nine kinds of snow. Characteristics of snow are important to them. To me, snow is snow. Koreans or Chinese, or most other ethnic peoples of the world make sense of spoken sounds that are meaningless to me but are very understandable to them. Meteorologists can see a storm coming when certain kinds of clouds are far away on the horizon or even beyond the horizon, but most people can see only the clouds. What Eskimos, Koreans and Chinese, and meteorologists thus clearly perceive as significant is, in a sense, invisible to others.

 A cartographer in making a map wants to accomplish a certain purpose with his map: he includes in it everything that will promote or define this purpose and exclude everything that’s irrelevant to his purposes.

As our airliner flew over the vastness of America I felt I was seeing a synthesis between a land, which scriptures from my Church call “choice above all other lands,” (mountains and plains, forests, rivers and lakes and natural resources) and what man had made of it (farms, roads, cities, smoke—economic and recreational opportunities).

 For a person with one preconception of potential (a land of freedom and security, “choice above all other lands”—a scriptural definition) I looked at it one way; and for another passenger flying on this same airplane with a different preconception of potential it could be regarded quite differently (one giant pool of resources to exploit for gain). But instead of being two dichotomous ‘pictures’ of reality viewed through different portholes, or an antagonism or tension between two potentials, could not what was being observed better be considered simply two different ‘viewpoints’ based on different values?

 A similar statement can be made about any person’s system of knowledge or world view. It is like a map in that it is selective; that is, only certain things are represented on it while others are left out—by design or by ignorance. It represents and reveals those things that are familiar to the person’s background, interests, desires and goals.

 Some of the inclusions on a person’s individual ‘map’ or outlook are those typical of his family and society as he grows up under the influence of parents, teachers, and peers, as he learns their language, history and customs. Thus he tends to adopt their ways of seeing the world as his own. He becomes ethnocentric. But in addition to this social factor, education also plays an important part in the development of the person’s ‘map’ of reality. So powerful is this individual factor that two people having different desires and attitudes and education can grow up in the same environment and yet have strikingly different ‘maps’ based on the breadth of their understanding and thus arrive at different destinations. So, maps are important.

What makes the difference, then, between peoples’ governing or driving outlook on life—or their ultimate destination? It is, in large part, what they have been exposed to, what they focus on, and what they value—and the accuracy and completeness of their set of maps.

 It makes sense to me to try to accumulate many types of maps to help us sensibly negotiate life’s landscape. A single distorted, incomplete, or inaccurate map will not do.

Sport is . . .

In my part-time work at a resort golf course I take my lunch in the employees’ dining room. The television is always on and the channel chosen, by someone, is almost invariably on a sporting contest—golf, basketball, soccer, football, etc., and most of the diners are also watching the athletes. As I do my work on the golf course I watch the efforts of typically 150-180 golfers per day. I also see, off the course, the exertions of surfers riding the waves. I see bicyclers by the dozens, kite flyers, Frisbee throwers and skate boarders.

I, myself, have engaged, taught, coached, and spectated in innumerable hours of time on the field, court, course, mat, stream and trail.

So, what is going on with all of us thus engaged?

Here is something I found in my college notes that may give some philosophical insight to all this sweat, cheering, cheating, pain, exuberance, ‘thrill of victory and agony of defeat.’

“It is competition; composure; memory; anticipation. It is play for many and work for a few. It is what no one has to do and almost everyone wants to do. It represents, on the one hand, challenges willingly accepted—and, on the other, gambits willingly declined. Its colors are as bright as a cardinal’s feathers; as soft as mid-night on a mountain trail. It is as loud as Yankee Stadium at the climax of a World Series—and as quiet as snow. It is the jingoism of inebriated onlookers and the jaundiced reports of journalists. It is exercise and rest. It is man exuberant and man content. It is the dreams of youth still alive within us. It is an awakening that brings a family together –on a boat or beach, skiing weekend or camping trip It is as tangible as a baseball bat and as intangible as a frosty morning at the top of the mountain before the downhill run; as exciting as a photo-finish in a stadium with thousands of onlookers, and as serene as waiting on a board on a still sea for the next big wave.”

It’s point? Notwithstanding the reality that sport is ‘the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles,’ sport is the faithful (without Faith) image of the struggle of humanity toward perfection –spirit and body together striving to accomplish the age-old aspiration of mankind—Citius, Altius, Fortius,‘faster, higher, stronger.’ Or, for most of us, as Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, has said, “The most important thing is not to win, but to take part.”

Still, 'Let's win one for the Gipper!"

Let the games begin.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

In the mid-19th Century an American woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote a book that may have been as influential as any written in the next 100 years. Abraham Lincoln was reputed to have said, “So this is the little lady who started this great [Civil] war.” It was, in fact, after the Bible the best-selling book of the 19th Century.

I have read this book and can see why it should be on every American’s must-read list even now. One’s education is incomplete without it.

One of the things I appreciated about the book—and was criticized, of course, as being naïve by our sophisticated skeptics—was the clear demarcation, the black and white contrast, so to speak, between the philosophies and attitudes of morally driven versus secularly or selfishly driven people. In the case of the overarching theme of the book, it was the abolitionists verses the sympathizers of slave-holding. But it was also a depiction, vis-à-vis of two entirely different approaches to life and living and the values associated with the circumstances people find themselves in, or, for those who have a choice, choose to embrace. In the process of creating characters, stereotypes were created, but an honest evaluation of Mrs. Stowe’s purpose shows that they were done for good reason, precisely not to create prejudice or deeper discrimination.

The interaction and contrast between two minor characters of the novel clearly shows an example of polarities that exist between people, why they arose, and the consequences of diametrically different world views. Marie St. Clare, the pampered wife of a slave owner, and Miss Ophelia, the slave owner’s new-England bred cousin give voice to two markedly different attitudes. Hear their interchange:

Slave owner’s wife Marie: “You don’t know what a provoking, stupid, careless, unreasonable, childish, ungrateful set of wretches they are.”

New England cousin Ophelia: “Don’t you believe that the Lord made them of one blood with us?”

Marie: “No, indeed not I! A pretty story, truly! They are a degraded race.”

Ophelia: “Don’t you think they’ve got immortal souls?”

Marie: “ O, well, that, of course—nobody doubts that. But as to putting them on any sort of equality with us, you know, as if we could be compared, why, it’s impossible! “[Take my servant Mammy, she] has a kind of obstinacy about her, in spots, that everybody don’s see as I do.”

Ophelia: “Has she children?”

Marie: “Yes, she has two.”

Ophelia: “I suppose she feels the separation from them?” [She was sold and taken away from her husband and children.]

Marie: “Well, of course, I couldn’t bring them. They were little dirty things—I couldn’t have them about; and, besides, they took up too much of her time; but I believe that Mammy has always kept up a sort of sulkiness about this.” “Mammy couldn’t have the feelings that I should…as if Mammy could love her little dirty babies as I love Eva! You’ll find, when you come to manage, that there’s no getting along without severity,--they are so bad, so deceitful, so lazy.”

Ophelia: “I think you slaveholders have an awful responsibility upon you. I wouldn’t have it for a thousand worlds. You ought to educate your slaves, and treat them like reasonable creatures—like immortal creatures that you’ve got to stand before the bar of God with.”

Marie: “As I said before, they are a degraded race, and always will be, and there isn’t any help for them; you can’t make anything of them if you try.” “There’s no way with servants but to put them down, and keep them down.” “You must make ‘em know their place!”

Well. Though this book is not de Tocqueville, it is a critique of American society that every American must come to grips with.

As with many things, if one strips away the gray subtleties and self-justifications and excuses and rationalizations, there is black and white, good and bad, right and wrong and we all, at the core know it.