The Power of the Written Word

 In this age of social media and the convenience of electronic gadgetry being accessible to practically anyone on the planet, there is no shortage of information available on practically any topic known to man under the sun.  However, have we lost something in the process of this technological explosion?  I guess for those of us raised in the BD era (before digital), this is perhaps a more significant issue than it would be with the Millennials and the emerging Gen Zers.  After all, when those two generations came of age, most of the world was already wired for cyber-communication, and thus to them it is not a big issue in many cases because social media, smart phones, and other amenities are part of their own daily existence in a far greater way than it was for us who are Gen Xers and older.  This has created some debate and discussion in recent decades as to what degree are we as a society becoming so dependent upon technology.  That being said, I wanted to just discuss a few things today that got my attention. 

First, be advised I am by no means a Luddite or anything like that - I utilize technology myself as part of everyday life, and to be honest in some ways it has made things easier. The smartphone, for instance, has become a sort of all-purpose tool - you can pay bills, compose correspondence, shop, order food or a taxi, research the internet, and so many other things with it.  I myself have been the proud owner of an Android phone for many years, and it does help me to keep track of a lot of things better.  However, technology is just that - a tool.  This is why many of us who are older often are somewhat perplexed by how addicted people can get to something as simple as a cellphone.  When a tool becomes a master of one's life, there is a problem at that point, and it has caused a lot of the atomization we see in today's society.  While we all cherish a bit of solitude at times (I know I do), we are not mere islands unto ourselves - man was created by God to be a social being, and human interaction with others is integral to our own wellbeing.  And, you cannot have that interaction on social media or online chats - they serve a purpose, but they don't replace the need for human interaction that is integral to us as a species.  As a result of an over-reliance upon gadgetry, this present age is characterized by a lot of loneliness, depression, and other abnormalities we should not be experiencing.  There is no organic support structure anymore in many places because everyone is glued to a smartphone, tablet, or other electronic device.  It has gotten so critical now that people are resorting to weird trends - robot "girlfriends," professional cuddlers (I still don't understand that one!), and other crazy stuff. What happened to us??  As I have been thinking about this over the past few days, I began to reminisce about a few simple pleasures I once had and wanted to talk about those today. 

Beginning in my high school years, I started widening my interests to a variety of things - I was into Church history, I had started to get more involved in Armenian and Assyrian advocacy, and of course my music interest I have talked about many times before.  40 years ago, the primary ways to get information on anything like this was limited to two venues - you wrote letters or you called on a phone to get the information you wanted.  One of the major bones of contention my mother had with me in those years was the fact I would dial long-distance a lot to request specific things, and while many of those calls did come with a high return (I would get a package with a huge bunch of material in it within days of said call), they also racked up the phone charges.  What was even more complicated about that was in my high school days, my mom was a live-in caretaker for a nonagenarian lady in the small town in West Virginia where we lived, and thus the house phone was the source of many of my calls. Mom was understandably embarrassed when about $25 of extra calls showed up on the monthly phone bill, but I was also always good to utilize a part of my monthly allowance to cover that too, so as long as I paid for them, I could make calls. The other venue which was much more economical then was to simply write and request things I wanted, and it was not uncommon for me to mail out a stack of letters every couple of weeks.  The thing with those was that some would actually respond, and in a couple of weeks I would either get a letter from my intended contact or a parcel with the information I requested.  One skill I gained doing this was an appreciation for writing - I honed my writing skills well, and they bore fruit.  If you could write an articulate letter - even a hand-written one - it would often merit a response.  Of course, a cadre of capable teachers over the years helped and encouraged my writing skills, and I am indebted to them for their dedication. That being said, let me talk about mail delivery.

Beginning in my early teens, getting mail was considered a real simple pleasure in life.  Whether it was that package of Columbia House records or cassettes one could get back in the day for a penny, or a letter from a friend, a package from my dad, or a fruitful bounty of information from one of that stack of letters I sent out for stuff, it was exciting.  I used to do two things beginning in my early teens with the mail flow I received.  First, I would keep a list of who I was expecting responses from, and as something arrived, I would scratch it off the list.  Secondly, I would always mark on a calendar what I got and on the day I received it, a practice I still do today.  It was an efficient way to keep records of everything, and it also helped writing skills become more developed as well as learning how to keep personal records of my own activities. I do still have all those calendars today, extending back over 40 years, and they will play an integral role later as I start to document my own life story reflections. Between calendars, journal books, and even financial records, I have kept a very efficient and detailed history of my own life that may even serve the purpose of giving a more comprehensive picture to future generations who may be interested in knowing more about who I was. Any rate, getting back to the mail, I began from about the age of 14 to receive a ton of mail on a weekly basis, and that would intensify over the next several years. Anticipating mail delivery became a big thing for me, as I would religiously watch the mailbox to see what the local mail carrier was bringing, and then I would make sure to get to the mailbox as quickly as possible to collect it.  However, it also caused some friction with myself and delivery people, and I could be very impatient with the mail or other delivery carriers.  It was a source of amusement for my mother and others, but I took it very seriously.  In recent years, I have become less aggressive towards mail delivery, as for the most part service has been relatively good in recent years.  On occasion, however, I still have some issues and am not hesitant to make my concerns known. Especially in a small town which was largely isolated from the outside world, the mailbox was a daily highlight, and perhaps I wrote for and requested more information due to boredom.  However, I felt I did have genuine interest too, and those days of sending letters and receiving information back were exciting times.  

Learning to communicate by writing letters of interest and requests for material was actually a good skill to develop, and it is one that is lost today in the more abbreviated and less-articulate world of social media. I actually miss those days of writing for things that caught my fancy, mainly because almost everything can be easily downloaded online now and thus it sapped a lot of the mystery out of receiving information now.  And, I still get high volumes of mail, but that is due in part to a far more effective measure of exchange than just sending a letter - money! Most everything I receive today is ordered online from either Amazon or Ebay, as well as the occasional private vendor who is more specialized.  Money definitely gets you things faster that you want, as in the past many letters I would send would often be ignored - I am wagering that many ended up in burn piles or shredders of the recipients and were never taken seriously. But, pay a certain amount for something and you will not only receive it, but you will get it in record time.  However, in all honesty, I miss the old days of the effort to track down something, after which a letter of sincere interest to find out more about it was composed, sealed, and sent. But we definitely now live in a different world.  So, we adjust.  

Whether it is keeping calendars or personal journals, documenting daily life is a rich endeavor that more of us should engage in.  It is a journey of self-discovery, and it also helps sort out thoughts and feelings in such a way that it can birth a creative talent.  In his book The Assyrian and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1950), acclaimed Armenian-American writer William Saroyan devotes an entire chapter to the topic of "The Writer on the Writing," and in the chapter he has some very priceless gems of wisdom.  On page xxix of the text for instance, he says this:  "The man who does not need to know about himself is not apt to be a writer in the first place, hence we may presume that a writer has self-knowledge to begin with, that in all probability having self-knowledge impelled him to start writing, and that if he is to have self-knowledge at all, the more he has of it the better it will be for him and his work."  Immediately prior to this statement, Saroyan notes that the creation of a character is essential, and in doing so there are six attributes entailed in doing so:

1. Self-knowledge

2. Health

3. Intelligence

4. Imagination, Intuition, Collective Unconscious

5. Social Responsibility

6. Technical Skill

With that, I am also reminded of the words of another favorite writer, the late Robert Newton Peck, whom I also had the pleasure of speaking with and knowing later in life.  Rob Peck wrote a series of books based around the character of his childhood friend, a rambunctious and resourceful kid named Luther Wesley "Soup" Vinson.  I was first introduced to these books in fourth grade by my teacher then, and really enjoyed them ever since.  I have the whole collection of those in my own library now.  Rob notes the value of the written word by connecting it to personhood, as he affirms in the following quote:

 " Writing is not showing off with big words. Nor is teaching. The dearest rabbi who ever lived, a Nazarene carpenter, preached of little things in common terms . . . loaves and fishes, a camel passing through the eye of a needle, a mustard seed. Tangibles.  Stuff, not abstracts."  (from About Peck (blahnik.info), 2000)

What Peck is saying here is in line with Saroyan's idea - self-knowledge is tangible, relatable, and not pretentious.  A person who has to write a bunch of BS in pithy, Harvardesque language to self-promote is fake, simply put.  Knowing yourself, and being able to communicate who you are in a way that is tangible and has some sort of pulse to it will go further than anything.  So, learning to write is not simply just about proper grammar (although that is good too), but it is about knowing who one is.  So, taking from Peck and Saroyan, tangibility and self-knowledge will resonate with the reader. 

I want to address something else in regard to writing as an art and cultivated skill.  In this age of "wokism," a new type of iconoclasm has gripped society and it threatens the very essence of our civilization.  Many have already talked about the societal consequences of this junk, but there is a more personal level to it.  The concept of self-knowledge, for one thing, has become a mentality of self-hate, and an embrace of the quasi-gnostic sentiment that appearance is evil and only "feelings" matter.  This has had catastrophic consequences upon cultural and intellectual development overall, in that it suggests that somehow everything in the "past" was evil and now not only does the individual have to re-create themselves into something they are not, but they even have to manipulate language to force this on everyone else.  There are two ways this happens in modern society.  First, a radical re-invention of language itself, creating non-existent "pronouns" for non-existent genders.  That in itself is insane.  Second, there is a destructive tendency among radical extremists who embrace such stuff to enact a forced iconoclasm - these kooks burn books, tear down and deface statues, and even desecrate art and religious expression.  This is very, very evil and detrimental to our nation and indeed to our world.  And, it has resulted in what is called "cancel culture" - if it doesn't go along with the agenda of the day, it must be destroyed and purged from society in their minds.  We have seen the consequences of this before - look to the Nazis as well as their Voelkisch predecessors, and to Stalin, Mao, and other demonic despots who made themselves godlike in their regimes and possessed an evil lack of empathy that deprived them of a regard and respect for their fellow human beings.  As part of my dissertation I am completing for my doctoral program as well as research for an upcoming article here, I have been studying what is called the "horseshoe theory" of politics, and essentially what this entails is that what is often called the radical Right or radical Left are essentially two expressions of the same thing, and going to either extreme leads to the same destructive consequence. Therefore, a "woke" group like Antifa is in essence the same as the National Socialists in 1920s Germany, and many of them hold similar views (ironically, Antifa is a shortened form of "anti-fascist," but in reality Antifa is as fascist as the Nazis were, if not more so.  Since October 7 of last year when Hamas massacred over 1200 Israelis, Antifa now has the same antisemitism as the Nazis).  "Cancel culture" and "wokeness" are the greatest threats to individuality the world faces today, as these attitudes seek to suppress independent thought and free expression in favor of their own wacky dystopian nonsense.  "Wokeness" is the enemy of self-knowledge, in other words, because "wokeness" denies the self in favor of the agenda.  And, that is why it must be exposed, opposed, and deposed from Western civilization for good, and true cultural expression restored. 

In relation to this, the postmodernist who embraces "wokeness" is enslaved to a mentality of iconoclasm and a skewered idea of "change."  Change is integral, yes, and to a degree change does happen as a necessary part of the human experience, but true change never seeks to eliminate the past, nor can it.  Rather, proper change builds upon the foundation already there and never wants to destroy it. Anthony Esolen, in his book Nostalgia: Going Home in A Homeless World (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 2018) notes on page 92 what the consequence of the more radical, iconoclastic form of "change" will bring - it wars against reality, and it creates anger and destruction rather than true progress toward anything.  He is correct, because the modern definition of "progressive" is anything but actually about progress - it is destructive, and seeks to tribalize human beings into a caste system of "oppressed vs. oppressor," and in doing so it is inherently Marxist at its core and promotes hate, racism, and rebellion. This Marxist-derived "cancel culture" mentality, as Max Eastman notes in his seminal book Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 1955), seeks to make over all human society in its image (p. 123) and also to eliminate anything it perceives as a "threat" to its agenda - the very definition of totalitarianism.  This is why the purple-haired, black-clad mobs of insane kids rioting in cities over the past several years are anti-free speech - they are spoiled brats who were enabled by Marxist gobbledygook to try to impose their will on everyone else.  It is not merely enough for instance to let a "same-sex marriage" take place, but it must be affirmed and celebrated by everyone or else someone will have a "milkshake" lobbed at their heads.  So, what does this political commentary have to do with writing and self-knowledge?  Let me get to that now.

Self-knowledge entails being able to know, accept, and appreciate yourself in a way that also values the individuality of others.  If people see that you have a good sense of self-recollection, it inspires them. And besides, you are the person God created you to be - it is a cardinal offense against yourself to deny that.  Too many radicals though have this weird idea that they are the right expression of self, and while on one hand they think in antinomian Crowleyite terms about "do what thou wilt," in reality they are so rebellious and stubborn that they cannot fathom someone who doesn't think exactly like they do.  This has been true of extremists from time immemorial, be they radical Islamic jihadis, Nazi Sturmabteilung , or Stalinist mobs of all stripes.  And, they all started the same exact way - the Wandervogel in 19th-century Germany, the "hippies" in 1960s San Francisco, and now Antifa/BLM rioters in American cities. When you see movements like that spring up, beware - that radicalism underlies a groupthink which despises individual expression despite how they claim to emphasize it. Therefore, write down your own thoughts and cherish them, and keep them in a safe place.  Many of us older people learned rhetoric, literature, and proper grammar, and we should make that work for us.  What we preserve now may inspire others later - that is why Anne Frank's diary is a classic now, and it is also why Lech Walesa succeeded in eradicating totalitarianism in Poland.  There is power in the written word, and it can be both an effective weapon as well as a valuable tool.  Therefore, use it to your advantage.

I have rambled on and on here I know, but I feel it is important information we need in this day and time.  It is important on a personal level because many of us are getting older, and thus a preserved written history of ourselves is integral.  It is also important on a broader societal level because the preservation of legacy ensures the survival of a culture.  If we glean nothing else from that lesson, let it be preservation of legacy, and how it may impact someone generations in the future who may be seeking answers.  Thank you, and hope you all have a good weekend coming up. 

Eccentricity vs. Insanity

 The adjective "crazy" is thrown about routinely in a variety of contexts.  If someone, for instance, really loves something (food, music, etc.) or someone (their significant other), they are often said to "be crazy about" whatever the something or someone is - in a more negative context, it refers to an abnormal obsession with something as well. In another context, "crazy" is also synonymous with extreme, and can be used both in a good or bad context - similar to other normally negative adjectives such as "sick" or "bad."  As an integral part of American syntax and slang, we are used to these applications of certain words, and there is nothing wrong with it - sometimes, it may be the perfect word to address whatever the context is in all honesty.  However, there is a more proper context the adjective "crazy" is used in, and generally it is used to describe some sort of mental instability or insanity, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, etc. A person with those disorders is not the same as having a mental disability such as Down's Syndrome, as those disabilities are not normally associated with insanity because they are developmental disorders which are not the fault of the individual who has them.  In all fairness though, clinical insanity is often not the fault of the person diagnosed with it either, but unlike Down's Syndrome, clinical insanity is psychological rather than genetic or developmental.  A clinically insane person may actually be extremely intelligent and highly capable of normal functions, but at the same time there is something that isn't firing right in their mind and it causes issues - usually, proper therapy and even medical treatment can control it, so much like someone who is developmentally disabled, a clinically insane person can function in society with the right care.  It is also important that decline in cognitive ability with age that occurs in some individuals - such as Alzheimer's and dementia - is not the same as clinical insanity either. What constitutes clinical insanity needs to have proper diagnosis as well as basic knowledge of what constitutes it, and therefore it is judicious to exercise care at labeling someone "crazy" or insane in that context.  I may be sounding politically incorrect by using terminology such as "clinical insanity," but in all contexts there is not a proper word (maybe psychological disorder, but even that is broad in definition) which really codifies the description other than that.  However, at the same time, if that terminology is to be bandied about, it should be done so with equal discretion.  That leads me to a second term which often gets confused with insanity, and that is the term "eccentric."

Eccentricity is defined as having unconventional views or behaviors that often are not looked on as "normal" by others and seen as strange, and many of us have peculiarities unique to our personalities which could be described as eccentric.  I am a case in point, as I am a self-identifying eccentric, and I am not ashamed of that in any way.  As a matter of fact, eccentricity should be seen as a gift rather than an abnormality, and if properly respected and appreciated, eccentric individuals may actually enrich the lives of others.  An eccentric person does not have either developmental issues or clinical insanity, but due to much misunderstanding about said person, others may look at them as "crazy" or even worse.  It was often true that in earlier days many validly eccentric people were misdiagnosed with mental disorders and locked away in institutions.  This is particularly true with the rise of eugenics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when very racist individuals tried to essentially "church up" discrimination as they saw it as a way of purifying the "race."  In this case, actual individuals with eccentricities were lumped in with the clinically insane and the developmentally disabled, and it led particularly in Britain to the codification of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, which labeled "feeblemindedness" as a contagion that needed to be contained and segregated from the rest of society (Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics {New York: Oxford University Press, 2010}, 117-118).  The legislation of such measures in Britain also provided an impetus for the Nazi regime to enact the "Law for the Protection of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" in 1933, which mandated both compulsory sterilization and euthanasia for "inferior" individuals who had any type of disorder - swept up in that mess were a number of people who just had eccentric traits and not mental or psychological issues whatsoever.  The Nazis were not alone though in this, as in the rest of Europe and in the US, similar laws were in place that were just as egregious as those of the Nazis, and generated from the same sources - namely, the eugenics movement.  Any "undesirable" population was at the mercy of such heinous law, including in the US many Blacks, poor Appalachians, and immigrant families. Much of this nonsense could be traced back to Darwin, Galton, and Ernst Haeckel, all of whom actually espoused what was called a polygenic view of human origins - essentially, this idea said that different "races" of man were in reality different species, and therefore any identifiable abnormalities in a group could be attributed to intermarriage between people of different races, and thus racial integrity would be an objective of more radical voices - such as the Nazis - that would come later.  For their part, the Nazis assimilated this idea from the work of German Volkisch occultists such as Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, who in his 1902 screed Theozoology even went as far as to incorporate Biblical language and redefine traditional understandings of terms such as "sodomy" on these racial terms - Liebenfels for instance redefined "sodomy" as sexual relations between two different races, and he even basically affirmed homosexual activity, saying it was OK as long as the two individuals were the same species (these early racists equated "race" and "species" as being one and the same based on the polygenic view of origins advanced by Haeckel in particular).  It was this type of thinking which oftentimes targeted people with just eccentric traits as being "abnormal," and it would be an important subject to research to study how eccentrics were killed and what the stats were concerning that, not only in Nazi Germany but in the whole West.  Some of the more targeted behaviors I have read about which were seen as "feeblemindedness" included such unique traits as being left-handed or having preferences for a weird food combination.  In reality, the perpetrators of these atrocities were more than likely more clinically insane than the people they targeted, as to engage in such behaviors would display an underlying issue of lack of empathy or an unnatural obsession with either the perpetrator's own imperfections or their insecurities about their own unique traits.  This was certainly true of Hitler, and I would argue equally true of both Stalin and Mao as well.  So, what does this mean?  Let us unpack that by going back to a basic philosophical lesson I often refer back to from my Master's degree coursework a few years back.

Dr. John F. Crosby, who is the Philosophy Chair at my alma mater, Franciscan University of Steubenville, notes in his book The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996) on pages 14-23 that there are four things that individual human persons co-experience in regard to morally relevant acts, and they are as follows:

1. Persons are ends in themselves and not mere means

2. Persons are wholes of their own and never mere parts

3. Persons are incommunicably their own and never mere specimens

4. Persona est sui iuris et non alterius iuris (each person belongs to themselves and not to any other)

These four affirmations as I would call them substantiate something very integral to our being as individuals.  In Scripture, God proclaimed that mankind was created in his image, and to be honest there has been some misunderstanding of that over the years.  It does not mean God created us as clones of himself - we are not "little gods" as popular televangelists such as Paul Crouch and Kenneth Copeland would have you to believe.  On the contrary, I heard it better explained once by a Methodist minister at a campmeeting I went to in Florida years ago, and to be honest, his perspective was perhaps one of the most revolutionary insights I had ever heard, and I understand this mystery even better as a result.  Of course, God did reflect some things in us that he possesses, such as the penchant for creativity, but being created in God's image also has a whole other dimension that is based on foreknowledge - God created every human person unique in the image he envisioned for them.  In other words, all of our distinctive traits (incommunicability) are created in God's image.  When you start thinking of it that way, it will actually be transformative.  You may wonder why you have that interesting and harmless quirk and no one else does, and now you can appreciate it because God designed that just for you.  You are made a unique creation in God's image, in other words - not a clone of God, but his vision of you as he made you.  There is something fundamentally liberating about that, and this leads to a couple of other observations I wanted to make, with the first being a clarification.

In this present day and age, the LGBT movement has gotten lots of attention and it seems as if it has moved into a new phase with the push for "transgender rights." This nonsense of "personal pronouns" and unequally engineered surgeries and placement of biological men in women's sports where the former has an advantage has caused a lot of controversy.  Given the facts I noted above about being created in God's image, transgenderism is a denial of God's creation.  As a matter of fact. transgenderism has its roots in Darwinian biology rather than divine revelation, and its origins can be traced back to a German sexologist named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Ulrichs, who was a practicing homosexual himself, came up with the evolutionary view of "the third sex," and this proposed that homosexuals were "evolving" into a third sex due to their inclinations. For the most part, up to this point homosexuality was seen as a psychological disorder (rightly) and it was not considered normal behavior in society.  Over a century after Ulrichs though, we now have "personal pronouns" making their way into our vocabulary based on the same rationale.  Promoting transgenderism as "normal" is an ultimate slap in the face to the Creator - the idea of "a man trapped in a woman's body" is a fundamental denial of what God said when he created mankind (and everything else) in Genesis - over and over again, God said "it is good" when he looked at what he created and the way he created it. Essentially, transgenderism can be seen as a theological heresy that denies God as Creator, as well as his perfection - it suggests that God made a mistake when he made someone a man who "should" be a woman.  While many proponents of the transgender lifestyle are functionally atheist anyway, they have already denied God and instead embraced the evolutionary justification for the activity they engage in based on the faulty "science" of Ulrichs and others.  At its roots, someone trapped in these types of lifestyles are in a bondage, and instead of persecuting them as individuals, we should always treat them with compassion as what they ultimately have is a psychological disorder that merits compassionate treatment and not either indulgence or segregation (both of which are toxic fruits of the eugenics movement).  This also means that by definition, neither a homosexual or a transgender can be classified as merely "eccentric," as that is not what eccentricity really is. I know this is weird for this type of discussion, but given this is a hot-button issue, it needed to be addressed as it relates to eccentricity, and it is what eccentricity is not. 

The second issue I wish to bring up regards how many of us are treated by even our own families.  When I was a kid, I had a variety of things which could be labeled eccentricities.  For one thing, from an early age I developed an aversion to pickles or anything vinegary.  Now, there are many people who don't like pickles, and from the outset this is not anything unusual - there are other foods I don't particularly care for either, but I don't have the hatred of them like I do for pickles.  I guess under normal circumstances disliking pickles would have just been a matter of personal choice, but what turned this into an eccentricity for me was the fact my family often acted like a bunch of cruel jackasses when it came to that.  I guess when I was really young I expressed dislike at a pickle upon first encountering one, and my ignorant uncles and aunts picked up on it and used that as a sort of amusement against me.  To this day, many of them still treat this like a joke.  But, for me, it caused an initial dislike of a particular food to become an intense hatred.  I still despise pickles so much today that if one even touches a plate of food I am served, I will not even touch the plate - the damned pickle ruins the whole meal for me.  I also cannot stand to smell that stuff - this extends to any other vinegary food such as mayo, mustard, ketchup, salad dressings, barbecue sauce, and even Asian cuisine items such as kimchi and teriyaki sauce.  The slightest hint of odor of anything like that will make me physically ill.  That is both an eccentricity on my part but also it constitutes a conditioned response.  On this, I want to say something to those of you with a family member who displays eccentric traits. Don't make fun of them, tease them, or generally not take them seriously - it will do damage to them.  If you have that little niece, nephew, or cousin who maybe doesn't like pickles, please respect them and say "OK, cool - different strokes for different folks."  Believe me, your relative will appreciate that.  And, if you see someone else trying to antagonize them, step in and stop it - and, if need be, slap the offending individual upside their head for acting stupid and cruel.  In all honesty, to this day there are some of my cousins I would like to plant my foot in their backsides for what they did, and a few deceased uncles and aunts could use a kick in their keisters if they were still alive.  Maybe if you appreciated your eccentric relative instead of belittling and dehumanizing them, you might have a greater appreciation for life yourself as you could learn something. OK, rant over.

Shifting gears a bit, even the Church has a class of eccentric saints who have gained much devotion over the centuries.  While most of them are part of the Eastern Christian tradition, there are some in the Western Church as well.  In patristic theology, they are known as "holy fools" or "fools for Christ," as well as the Russian/Slavonic word Yurodivi.  A couple of these individuals are of note in Bishop Varlaam Novakshonoff, God's Fools: The Lives of the Holy "Fools for Christ" (Dewdney, BC: Synaxis Press, 1973).  One of these particular saints was Saint Terence the Wonderworker, a Russian mystic who died in 1886.  Terence only wore one shoe on one foot, and as Bishop Varlaam notes in pages 60-61 of his book, this saint was so eccentric that he chastised wicked people by breaking windows of their houses and throwing dirt on the "Karens" of his day (I like this guy already!).  Although he was taunted and disrespected by neighbors, he dealt with it by crying "to evil, to evil!" and chastising his oppressors.  He endured a lot of persecution for his actions, but there are many more like him in the hagiographies of both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.  "Holy Fools" are still a source of discussion in many theological circles, as two things can be true at once - first, their uniqueness was a creation of God, but God allowed the oddest things about them to be their greatest vocation.  This again proves that God gives us certain traits and abilities for a reason, and although they may be eccentricities and not fully respected or appreciated, God uses these things.  I mean, in Numbers God used a jackass to speak to Balaam!  So, what would limit him from using our own personality quirks?

I am a person of many eccentricities myself - I hate pickles with a passion, I engage in self-directed speech (I talk to myself), I possess a trait called synesthesia (which means I can "hear" colors in songs), and I like chili powder on my buttered toast.  I have many others too, and some of them I have dealt with in separate discussions here, but I view myself as the quintessential eccentric, and I love that about myself.  My eccentric traits have been misunderstood and I have been misrepresented and misunderstood, but I also am happy with the person I am.  And, you should be also.  Don't worry about what people say about the music you like, or a certain way you like to eat food, or anything else unique to you - you are not forcing them to conform to you, so they should afford you the same courtesy.  Any rate, I wanted to share that today, and hope you enjoyed reading.  See you next time. 

Adversity, New Seasons, and Other Thoughts

 As I write this today, it is the beginning of June.  Although the Summer doesn't start until June 21 I believe, unofficially summer started on Memorial Day weekend.  The summer season, for practical purposes, does not begin and end with the solstice cycles. Rather, it spans the annual quarter between Memorial Day and Labor Day.  It is during this time that kids are out of school, and that many vacations and other summer activities take place.  Especially in western Maryland where I live, you see this reflected in the weather as well.  Although I started mowing my yard in April, and will probably not do the last mow until mid-October, mowing is a hallmark of the summer season for many of us.   What is true of the summer activity calendar also oddly corresponds with the Church calendar as well this year.  As Catholics, the Church year essentially begins with the first Sunday in Advent - typically the Sunday following Thanksgiving - and it ends with the Feast of Corpus Christi which occurred this past Sunday on the Church calendar, an interesting coincidence in that the first Sunday in June ended the official festal seasons of the Church.  In the Church calendar, this now will be Ordinary Time (or Trinitytide if you are Anglican-use), also known as the "green season" due to the prominent liturgical color being green with the exception of some feast days.  The timing of the Church calendar is a matter of debate, as some would say the Church year begins with the Feast of All Saints in November, and others would say that Christ the King Sunday is the beginning of the festal seasons.  Also, the debate over whether Advent and Lent are festal periods would be a matter of debate, since both of those seasons are marked with solemn anticipation and emphasize preparation via penance and fasting.  I incorporate them here though as part of the festal aspect of the Church year because they prepare one for the bigger mysteries - the Nativity and the Resurrection of Christ.  This is not meant to be a primer on the Church calendar, but like the life of the Church all of us as individuals go through seasons of life, and perhaps using the Church year as a guide it could help us to grow in our faith when we encounter new seasons personally in our own lives. 

In my experience of 54 years, I have progressed through many seasons of life - I am actually in the throes of one right now in all honesty.  In my own experience, a seasonal change tends to happen with a crisis or a period of adversity - income may be drastically reduced or lost, a sickness may be experienced, the death of a loved one, etc.  The adversities tend to either be mild and short, or they can be prolonged and increasingly difficult.  Let me give you a "for instance" that is a composite of my own experiences.  Let's say that for years you coast along with no significant change in your life - you are generally happy, and you have settled into a comfortable routine.  Nothing wrong with that, and we all would prefer that in all honesty.  But, one day your boss at your company calls you in, and they announce they are making cuts and you are on a layoff list effective that moment.  So, you gather up your things, and although your company has given you an adequate severance package, you start to feel generally uncertain.  But, you also rationalize that with your experience and education, you will find a position fairly quickly. After a short rest of a few days in which you kind of welcome the break and can catch up on those projects in the house you have been wanting to get to, you begin the job search.  You update your resume, you reach out to contacts you already have, and you are constantly cruising job boards and your LinkedIn account on a daily basis.  Your search is slow - no bites right away, but you reason that these things take time so you keep on.  However, weeks go by, and then months, and that generous severance package ends and you are also having to rely on savings and credit accounts just to meet your basic expenses.  And, those expenses are piling up.  You begin to get concerned about how you are going to meet your next month's rent or mortgage payment, and thus you start to haggle with the landlord about working out some sort of arrangement.  You have never been late on rent before, and it is unsettling to you now.  As time goes on, income and other resources begin to trickle and then dry up, and you may find yourself applying for assistance to survive.  You get approved for some programs like SNAP, but they also are limited.  At this point, you are over a year since your layoff, and things are really looking grim - the landlord has put a court notice on your door, and no job leads are coming in, as all you are seeing on your email feed is junk.  You grow frustrated.  But, in that moment, you get some internal insight as to what may be happening - your time at where you are is coming to a close, and you feel a leading to look for a new home or even to change career paths.  So, if you are a religious person, you begin begging God for guidance - it seems silent though, and you get frustrated with God and start bargaining, putting out "fleeces," and even getting into some nasty shouting matches with God in which you call him every name in the book for not being there for you.  But, in the midst of that, something happens - from deep inside, you get this feeling that everything is going to be OK, and that you need to stay focused. Situations in your life continue to intensify, and at the point where you are about to give up, a breakthrough happens - you get a sweetheart deal from a potential employer, but it does require you to relocate.  This is the start of a new season in life for you, in other words.  If you take it for what it is, then you start seeing so many things fall into place, and you step out boldly into that new chapter of your life, and your stability is restored.  This experience has happened over and over again to me. I am sure that others reading this can also relate.  So, what does this all mean?  Let's unpack it some.

The first question that comes to mind for me personally is this one - if God wants me to step into a new season in life, then why does it always take intense adversity to motivate me to make that step??  We all hate adversity, and to be honest, I still don't understand why it happens.  But, an idea I have that may possibly offer an explanation may be this - it takes a little adversity to jolt us out of the comfort zone we have been in and motivate us to forge ahead into a new chapter.  It puts me in mind of a story I read in my childhood called The Rose and the Ring, a fictional satire authored in 1855 by the British novelist and illustrator William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863).  Although better known for his work Vanity Fair published in 1848, this satirical fiction story is what I am most familiar with regarding his work. The story itself centers around two individuals - a girl named Rosalba and a young slacker prince named Giglio.  When both of these individuals were born, they were heirs to their respective thrones - Giglio to the fictional throne of Paphlagonia, and Rosalba to the fictional kingdom of Crim Tartary.  However, Giglio's father dies soon after his death, and his corrupt uncle takes the throne and names his own daughter, Angelica, as his heir with Giglio relegated to a secondary life.  In Rosalba's case, her father is overthrown by a nobleman named Padilla, who executes her parents and she is left as a toddler alone in the palace but finds her way into the woods where a group of lions cares for her until she is discovered by the Princess Angelica and made a sort of maid-in-waiting to the young princess, who treats her as a slave.  Now, back to the birth of both Giglio and Rosalba, a matronly old woman called the Fairy Blackstick who serves as a sort of counselor to both royal families comes to the birth celebrations of both young heirs, and when everyone presents gifts to the new prince and princess in their respective kingdoms, all the Fairy Blackstick does is touch both gently with her cane, and her "gift" is "a little misfortune."  The mothers of Giglio and Padilla's son Bulbo though had their own gifts - Giglio's mother possessed a magical ring that made the wearer very beautiful and desirable, and Bulbo's mother had a rose that did the same thing.  As Giglio was really in love with his cousin Angelica, he gave her the ring, and she rudely rejected it and threw it out the window.  But, when Bulbo comes on a diplomatic visit to the Paphlagonian court, Angelica is smitten with him.  In the meantime, the fortunes of both Rosalba and Giglio diminish quickly - Rosalba is accused of trying to have an affair with the king, and she is coldly thrown out of the Paphlagonian palace.  Giglio is accused of another crime and has to also leave.  In their despair, Giglio decided to educate himself at a university, and Rosalba, after being discovered by a huntsman in the woods, is recognized as the rightful heir of the throne of Crim Tartary and her usurper, Padilla, is quickly overthrown.  In time, Giglio and Rosalba come together, without the rose or the ring, and they eventually fall in love and marry, being now the rightful rulers of their respective kingdoms which are now united.  Fairy Blackstick then reveals why she gifted both of them with misfortune.  In Giglio's case, it transformed him from a slacker to a capable leader, and with Rosalba it created a compassionate and humble heart she would not otherwise had possessed if she were raised as a spoiled and vain princess like Angelica.  The lesson in Thackeray's story is that adversity is what builds character, and without adversity at some points in our lives, we will never achieve the potential God gave us because we will grow too comfortable and not take on the challenges to expand who we are.  It's a good lesson overall, and as we all face changing seasons in life, we should probably and properly view those as growth experiences.  Often, unfortunately, we only get that in retrospect, as we feel overwhelmed by adversity in the moment.  The challenge then is how to stay focused and see the bigger picture when so much is being thrown at us.   Uncertainty is a scary thing, but we also need to overcome uncertainty with vigilance - we need to forge on and get done the task at hand, and not obsess over the situation of the moment, as the fear of that can paralyze us if we give it more attention than it deserves. 

Like the lesson of "a little misfortune" in Thackeray's story, another thing I have experienced in life is that often when we move into a new season of life, there is a disruption in our comfort zone - everything is shaken up it seems, and it is not a pleasant experience.  I hate that, and I am sure that others who have experienced it do too.  But, much like Jesus used agricultural metaphors to teach lessons in his parables, you look to agriculture for this answer too.  After a harvest, a field lays fallow - nothing growing or disturbed in it - for about a year until the next growing season begins.  However, during that time, a lot of weeds, rocks, and other things spring up over that field, and although it is a quiet and serene picture, nothing is going to grow in fallow land.  So, what needs to happen?  The soil has to be plowed to prepare it for sowing new seeds.  This means clearing out the weeds and other debris that have sprung up since the previous harvest, and a disruption to the field happens when the soil is rotated and tilled.  The initial appearance of this field is now not pretty - it is plowed up and looks desolate.  But, the plowing did two things.  First, it cleared away necessary debris and weeds.  Second, it also refreshed the soil by aerating it and allowing the rains to saturate it and make it ready for planting.  It is at this point the new seed is planted, and in the next several months it will grow into a bountiful harvest.  New seasons, therefore, produce new harvests, and that is the lesson here.  

If you are going through an adversity situation now, it could mean that your soil is being plowed and cultivated so a new season of planting can begin.  It doesn't look pretty, and you are wanting it to get over quickly, but what that means is that you are being prepared for a new season in life.  Therefore, keep focused on what you need to take care of, and don't let the adversity overwhelm you.  That way, when the new season comes you can enjoy it.  Thanks for allowing me to share, and have a good week.