Pensées

Sometimes lots of good ideas just hit you at once.  Indeed, it happens to me quite often that I'm overwhelmed with all the good things I want to do, the things I want to plan, the books I want to read, and the things I want to write.  The main problem is they can't all possibly be done at once, so it just leaves me in a frantic rush to do as much as I possibly can and then fizzles out by the time my alarm goes off the next morning and I don't feel like getting out of bed.  My goal here, writing today, is simply to write a few scatter thoughts that have been on my mind, each worthy of a blog post in their own right.  A big problem for me is that I am too meticulous in my writing.  I try almost too hard to express precisely what I want, when in fact no words will be perfect in describing what it is I'm talking about.  I spend too much time trying to find the perfect phrase, etc.  So I am trying to do the exact opposite right here and now.  I'm just simply going to write.  I hope my scattered thoughts you might find interesting, but in someways I just want to get them down on (virtual) paper.  It's quite possible that this way of writing might just be the perfect way to make ideas stick.  Peter Kreeft, philosopher at Boston College, thinks that Blaise Pascal's Pensées is one of the best books ever written precisely because it is unfinished and scattered.  If it had been completed and followed a perfectly logical progression, it would have been ruined.  So God in his mercy killed Pascal before his book was finished.  I don't know whether I agree with Kreeft, but Pensées is pretty good and if I volunteer to write down unfinished thoughts, maybe God will spare my life.

One things that's been on my mind is the idea of self forgetfulness.  There is another answer to the riddle which I proposed in my last post.  The Self.  The only way to find one's self is to completely forget one's self.  Get so caught up in what you are doing, that you become completely unselfconscious.  Self-consciousness is generally a bad sign.  If you are self conscious, you can never truly be yourself in social situations.  If you are self conscious about the kind of job you are doing, you are probably doing a bad job.  To paraphrase Kreeft, no one ever made a good impression by trying to make one.  Just think about the absentminded genius.  They are so lost in their work, that they forget to take care of themselves or they even forget where they are.  Learning to become disinterested to even one's own desires and happiness is moving swiftly down the road to joy.
I love the change of the seasons.  Much to my joy, I've discovered that the smell and feeling of Fall is the same in London, England as it is in Southeast Michigan, or South Bend, Indiana.  The first days of any change in season are always so wonderful.  The smell brings back memories of the same time in years past, as does the feel of the wind or the weather.  Running around the nearby park has brought back memories of playing high school soccer on windy days in October.  It reminds me of my backyard during fall, both in Michigan and even dimly in Indiana, though I was seven or younger at that time.  I think of playing kickball in the backyard with friends.  I think of the leaves falling around the lakes at Notre Dame, and driving up Notre Dame avenue just after Fall break, the golden dome in view.  I am reminded of beautiful faces.  Fall makes me feel lovesick and homesick at the same time.

Friends.  It's struck me that those friendships which I most especially value are those which make me feel completely humbled.  I've been blessed through my life to meet many wonderful people.  Sometimes I just wonder to myself in sort of awe, "How is it that I am so lucky?"  There isn't anything that I could possibly have done to make myself worthy of this friendship.  And so I experience their friendship as pure gift.  Friendship is a gift you give, but more importantly is a gift that you receive.  When I go wrong is when I think "shouldn't these people want to be my friend.  Yeah, I've got lots of great personal qualities."  The reality is that I do not deserve to have friends and that I can't make anyone be my friend.  It is pure gift.  It's about standing in receptivity to the gift of another person.  For a Christian, I think friendships are particularly important because they teach us how to be a receiver, the relationship we always stand in towards God.

I think this bit about friendship ties in nicely with the theme of self-forgetfulness.  In a true friendship, the self-consciousness of meeting someone has fallen away.  You no longer think about thinks like "What sort of questions should I ask this person?  What should I say?  What do they think of me?"  Ironically, it is losing this self-consciousness in relationship that allows one to be oneself and to actually share more of oneself.  Deep friendships have reached the point where sharing deep truths about one's self is easy and natural.  It's as though the barrier of the self has broken down.

What about love?  (Upon reflection, that questions terribly deals with the ambiguity of our language.  Let me rephrase: "What about Eros?")  I have found it difficult to think about marriage in terms of this ethic of self-forgetfulness.  In my present thinking, I haven't been able to see the married state as something which does enough to "draw one out of The Self."  I'm not saying the problem is with marriage, but rather the problem is with my own inadequacy.  When I look a marriage, I see a good thing, a beautiful thing.  There are many things I find attractive about that state of life.  But were I drop everything and get married today, I would be pursuing it as something that I want, something that I think would make me happy.  I want this woman to love me and I want to love her and spend time with her because that gives me joy.  Thought of like this, that is hardly a drawing out of the self.  But like I said the problem is with me.  I've never reached the state (or if I have, I don't remember it particularly well), where I've been so transported by the joys of Erotic love that my own desires have melted away and my self so forgotten so that the 'I' becomes 'we.'  I've not reached that place where lifelong love and commitment becomes not something that I want as I, but as some completely natural and seemingly inevitable next-step to join together a selfless 'we.'  Perhaps I'm romanticising love too much.  However, it does make perfect sense to me when older, happily married couples say that "We've more in love now that when we were first married."  It's because they lived through so much together, and have been required to make so many sacrifices, that they most certainly had to forget themselves and their own wants.  I mean they have made sacrifices not in a petty, "We'll do what you want because it makes me feel good to give you what want," sort of way, but in a way which requires real pain.
(Edit: I don't mean to introduce a discontinuity between friendship and Eros.  Indeed, I think a true romance will inspire a feeling of humility just as a true friendship does, and that romantic love will be experienced as a gift, just as friendship is.  I also think they pose a similar challege, in that both are often initially sought in response to a personal desire, but in both that desire can be transcended.  What I wrote about Eros could easily have been written by someone else about friendship.  Perhaps, I should just retract the whole paragraph.  Nevertheless, I think it is true to say that perhaps because there is greater attraction to Eros and the possibility for self-transcendence is even higher, it is more difficult to initially escape the self-seeking element.  The reflection above betrays the subjective state of the author and should be understood accordingly.)

The last paragraph took me an outrageous amount of time to write compared with the rest of the post.  If it's the worst paragraph, it certainly proves Kreeft's theory.  In anycase, I hope I can return to a more free-flowing style for the last few thoughts here.  The first is, when thinking about self-forgetfulness and such over the past few days, its occured to me that perhaps I should blog less.  While blogging might initially seem more other-directed than simply journaling, for me this is entirely not true.  Way too often I am motivated to blog in part by a vain desire to have others admire what I've writen, combined with a need to share what I am thinking.  But perhaps what is even more annoying, is that when I have an awesome thought, I can automatically think to myself "Boy, that would make a great blog post.  Won't people think I'm awesome for having such a great thought."  That spoils the thought as a thought in its own right, and is pretty vain to boot.  Although, if I decided just to journal about these thoughts, I'll probably still have an intrusive complusion to journal.  Perhaps the easiest solution to allay some of these qualms is to just check my Blogger stats much less often.

Finally, related to the blogging/thought hoarding problem, I've often gotten frustrated in my past trying to obsessively seize with my mind beauty things or cool experiences.  The worst is when I have a camera, which becomes an extension of my mind, and I begin to take pictures complusively, trying to save the memory of what is there.  Not that I discourage picture-taking, but I've found the enjoyment of a thing is often spoiled by trying to enjoy it.  Better just to be receptive and to let things come as they are.  Then you'll be surprised what you can enjoy if you are not trying.

Later Dudes (and Dudettes for those feminists who claim that the word 'dude' excludes 'dudettes.'  Actually, why do some feminists insist that terms like 'waiter' works now for both 'waiter' and 'waitress,' but get really mad if I don't specify 'woman' in addition to the term 'man?'  Perhaps they would get offened that I specified 'dudettes.'  I'm so confused.  And I wish everybody would stop making generalizations.)!

The Riddle

Here's a riddle for you: What's one thing that everyone is searching for, but is impossible to find while trying?

The answer: Happiness.

As long as you are looking for happiness, you will never find it.  Happiness can never be had on ones own terms.  Happiness is always a gift.

Too often, especially over the past couple of months, I've been inclined to think about what I want and what will make me happy.  "I've got to work on developing good relationships with other people, because that will make me happy."  "I think I'll write a blog post, because then other people will read it and tell me how good it is, and that will give me satisfaction."  "Living in London should make me happy."  "I'd better pray I get accepted to work ND Vision this summer, because that will be really fun and will make me happy."  But time and time again I am reminded that none of these things are going to still the restlessness in my heart.  Human expectations always seem to be disappointed.

So I have to ask, "What's the point?"  What is the point in living for oneself?  What is the point in meeting people, if you only care about them because they re-affirm your own feeling of self-worth?  What's the point in writing, if all you care about is how many people read what you've written?  There are so many other people in the world: it would be a shame to limit yourself to thinking about just one.  Happiness may be the final cause of all our actions, the only thing it makes sense to seek in its own right.  Yet, somehow I can't make sense of my life if happiness for myself is all I'm trying to get.  It is a paradox indeed.

Yet, when I least expect it, happiness comes barging in.  Some of my favorite moments over the past week have been just wandering around London, with absolutely no expectations about what was going to happen.  I enjoyed every minute.  Today, fighting against the lazy side of me, I went for a run around Battersea park.  It was absolutely wonderful.  The autumn smell was in the air, and leaves were starting to accumulate on the ground.  There was a strong, cool breeze along the Thames and throughout the park.  It reminded me of playing high school soccer,  of childhood romance, and of back home in Michigan and Indiana.  I felt free.  I felt a part of the wind, and the air, and the season.  Song after great song came on my iPod, and they sounded fresh to my ears, lacking the stale quality over-repetition brings.  Their melodies vaguely brought back associated happy memories.  As I crossed the Thames to go head back to my dwelling, the sun stood just right behind the clouds and over a distant bridge, making a picturesque urban scene.  I was happy.  It came when I wasn't looking.

The period of time when the sun is below the horizon

It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.  ~Lemony Snicket

There is something I simply love about the night.  In the night, the busy concerns of the daytime fade away.  The world changes to a calm, quite place.  At night, when we can see the stars and the moon, our very place in the universe is put into perspective and questions about what it means to be human come to the fore.  We can enter into the depths of our humanity.  What am I?  Who am I?  Where am I going?  These are the questions of night.  Night is also the time for intimacy, the time when the depth of one's humanity, the movement of one's heart in response to the questions of the night, can be shared with another.  One human grows closer to another as they together discover the sameness of their response.

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.  ~Henry Beston

Perhaps this is why I've become the sort of person who stays up fairly late, at least more often than I ever imagined I would.  But "blessed are the owls, for they shall inherit the mystery and magic of the night," says an anonymous person.

This is all not to say that the day doesn't have its own beauty.  Day brings the return of hope of victory in battle, and the renewed possibility of life and rebirth.  It's all part of the cyclical universe, where each part of the cycle communicates its own mystery.

Every night, when I go to sleep, I die. Every morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

Cosmos

I recently finished reading Carl Sagan's wonderful book Comos.  It is filled with a wealth of historical and scientific information.  Sagan has a grand vision of the human race in space, and some of the most interesting parts of the book concern the possibility of contact with another intelligent race in the universe or the possibility of interstellar travel.  These are fascinating concepts and the book goes a long way to inspire awe and wonder at the Cosmos.

Cosmos comes from a Greek word meaning order.  It is the opposite of Chaos.  There is a beautiful orderliness to the universe.  There are fractal patterns: moons orbiting planets orbiting stars orbiting galaxies orbiting each other.  There are billions and billions of stars and galaxies, and the same laws of nature which apply everywhere.  And most wonderful of all there is at least one place in the universe where matter has become alive.  Humans beings, creatures made from matter, from the same protons and electrons that make up the stars and were once in the stars, are conscious and able to ponder their own destiny.  What wonders!

Yet, Dr. Sagan's book is not just a search for order but for meaning.  In fact, this is largely how Sagan views the human endeavor in space.  Our current forays into space parallel the great historical voyages of discovery.  He writes:



The Eagle nebula



The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean.  From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles.  The water seems inviting.  The ocean calls.  Some part of our being knows this is from where we came.  We long to return.

If we discover intelligent life on another planet, Sagan thinks we will have a better grasp on what it means to be human.  As we continue to learn about the expanse of the universe, we learn what it means to be live on earth.  We learn that such a habitable world is precious, but that it pales in comparison with the rest of the universe.  As we seek to learn more about the universe, we seek to learn more about ourselves.

Meaning.  Perhaps this is the thing that people are searching for.  We want to know what our lives are all about, what life itself is all about.  When something captures our imagination, be it a sunset, a song, or a beautiful face, and we feel that twinge of restless longing that can never quite be satisfied, it's as if we're on the verge something profound.  It seems like the meaning we are looking for is finally within reach, but, like the end of the rainbow, it always remains just ahead of our outstretched hands.  And so we keep searching.

Thoughts of space, time, and the cosmos are tantalizing.  They are exciting.  They fill us with wonder.  It's tempting to think that we can find the answers to some of life's most persistent questions out there among the stars.  Science has worked wonders and given humans so much.  With it, we have fed the masses, eradicated disease, and traveled around the world and into space.  Science has answered questions about gravity, the lives of animals, and how our own minds work.  What can't science do?  Yet, Palmer Joss (character in the film Contact based on the Sagan novel by the same name) reminds us that "Ironically the thing that people are most hungry for, meaning, is the one thing that science hasn't been able to give them."

No matter how long we listen with our radio telescopes among the stars, no matter how many light-years we travel, no matter how much our hearts ache as we gaze at the night sky, we will never find meaning there.  Sagan is fascinating, inspiring, and uplifting in his book as he searches for order and meaning.  He is also dead wrong.  Science can say nothing about the questions that matter most.  Allow me an example.  It is a scientific fact that if you were randomly inserted anywhere in the universe, the odds that you would be on or near a planet would be less than 1 in 10^33.  The odds that you randomly select a place in the universe where there is life is considerably less, much less intelligent life.  It would be fair to say that beings such as humans are rare.  This is a fact of which modern science makes us acutely aware.  Yet Sagan goes on to write, "Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another." I don't disagree a bit, but his statement is one of pure philosophy.  He assumes that because something is rare it is therefore precious and ought to be preserved.  But mightn't it be the other way around?  Might not humans be like ugly recessive mutations in a universe meant to be perfectly smooth and uniform?  Wouldn't it then be better if we blew our tiny planet up and squashed conciousness out of existence?  Science or nature by itself tells us nothing about the value of our lives.  It's worth repeating here part of the GKC quote from my last post. (I think it rather apt here.  Sorry for the redundancy.)

Nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject...We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first...It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.

Orthodoxy, Chapter VII, The Eternal Revolution

If Sagan's logical leap from saying that life is rare to saying that life is precious seems natural to you, that is because you and he are both humans.  The conclusion does not come from science, but from the very thing that makes us human.  To paraphrase Pascal, our heart tells us what our reason cannot.  Science is by no means useless in the pursuit of ultimate truth.  The facts of science can challenge our worldview and help us to think in new ways.  Philosophically, it did make a big difference when we realized that the earth was not the center of the universe.  It makes a difference that our universe is big and not small.  It makes a difference that there are beautiful, unexplored worlds out there.  It makes a difference that the human spirit is not bounded to this planet alone.   But these facts only make a difference because humans are humans. We are influenced by the world we inhabit.  At the end of the day, the answers are not going to be found out there, but in the depths of our human hearts.  It is ironic that we should look billions of light years away in search of ourselves.

How to Save a Life

My job during the summer is to be a lifeguard.  Watching water all day is surprisingly hard work, at least when you work at a waterpark, so there's not a lot of spare mental capacity while I'm on the job.  Nevertheless, I have found myself musing while I work about the role of a lifeguard. As a lifeguard, my job is, broadly speaking, to protect human life.  My job is not to ask whether life is something which is worth protecting.  I am not concerned with whether the people I am protecting want to be alive.  I do not ask such philosophical questions such as whether it is better to be alive or dead, or what the social benefits of a particular person's life is.  No, my job is just to save your life if it comes to that.  Life is the value and the good I am single mindedly charged with protecting.

I suppose it's worth mentioning that I am employed by the county government.  The municipality I am working for has, for whatever reason, has decided that life is worth protecting.  And so it pays me to do just that.

Just as we need lifeguards (and doctors, firefighters, etc.) to enforce the ideal (here that life is a chief good to be protected), we need philosophers (and theologians, lawyers, politicians, etc.) to protect the ideal itself.  There needs to be someone who reminds us why we place a value on the things we do.  Chesterton always seems intrude upon these posts.  Needless to say, one can hardly go wrong by submitting to Mr. Chesterton's intrusions.  Therefore, I unapologetically place one of my favorite quotes from him here, which concerns the importance of ideals.

Nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.

Orthodoxy, Chapter VII, The Eternal Revolution

Since nature doesn't give us ideals, we need human ideals and we need unpractical people to argue about them and hold the right ones in place.  Human nature ensures that we are going to hold some doctrine, so it's worth making sure the doctrine we are holding is the right one.

A Patriotic Post

This Independence Day is coming quickly to a close, so here is a quick attempt to say something about my country.  I won the lottery of life by being born in America.  There is no better place I could live.

The strength of America has come from its citizens.  People who lived and died for the ideals of freedom like the founders of this country.  The only way America will be strong in the future is if people continue to work hard and live up to the rightest ideas of liberty and human rights.  Nothing good ever comes without a lot of hard work and sacrifice.  My great fear is that too many Americans today live with a sense of entitlement and in a way which is inward and self-directed.  Being a true citizen means living a life which is poured out for others so that they can live with the same dignity you do.

Our country may not always live up to its founding ideals, but it needs heroic individuals like you who will carry them out.  It needs people who will recognize the founder's vision of human beings as creatures with special dignity and essential equality.  In the words of Chesterton, America needs men and women who will "hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing"

"Men did not love Rome because she was great.  She was great because they had loved her."
-GKC

ADDENDUM:
Above I wrote about the danger of Americans living "with a sense of entitlement and in a way which is inward and self-directed."  While a sense of entitlement is at all times to be eschewed, working hard to better primarily one's own lot is not such a bad thing.  Upon reflection, I realized that one of the American ideals is the ability to shape one's own destiny.  When the colonists dumped tea into Boston harbor, I doubt it was because they were concerned with the tea tax shrinking the discretionary income of the working classes.  They were upset because it raised their tea prices (and of course the general intrusion by the crown it represented, plus all those other taxes...my point is that they were acting in self interest.)  The American revolution is a story of people fighting for their freedoms and their land.  Rosa Parks stood up (or rather sat down) for her right to a bus seat.  Of course she knew it wasn't just about herself, and there were others who supported her even though desegregation didn't benefit them. My point is that Rosa Parks wasn't fighting for Abe Lincoln's right to wear a tall hat, although she might have worn one alongside him if it came down to that.  America was built by people who wanted to make life better for themselves and for their children.  Even our prided economic system, capitalism, contains the basic idea of self-interested action which ends up benefiting everyone.  America will continue to be a great country if it continues to remain a land of opportunity.  It must continue to be a place where hard work and ingenuity is rewarded, where the social classes are mobile, where anyone can be president.  This is and forever will be the challenge to America.

Concerning Aliens, Faith, Reason, Memory, and Religious Experience

The following gem comes from the movie "Contact" based on the novel by Carl Sagan.  A video of the scene from which the dialogue is taken can be found here.

Senator: You come to us with no evidence, no record, no artifacts. Only a story that, to put it mildly, strains credibility... Are you really going to sit there and tell us that we should just take this all on faith?

Ellie Arroway: Is it possible that it didn't happen? Yes. . . . As a scientist I must concede that. I must volunteer that.

...

Mr. Kitz: Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony and admit that this journey to the center of the galaxy, in fact, never took place?

Ellie Arroway: Because I can't. I had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision of the universe that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how ... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not — that none of us — are alone! ... I wish I could share that. I wish, that everyone, if only for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope! But ... that continues to be my wish.

 Dr. Arroway, an admitted unbeliever, is here describing and defending the reality of her remarkable journey into deep space.  The surprise is that everything which this woman of science is describing about the effect of her journey can be applied to a mystical/religious experience.  Religious experience (and the resulting belief in God) is something which can't really be proven.  Evaluated in the cold light of reason, there is always another possible explanation, which is often simpler (cf. Occam's razor).  Yet faith is something given which touches the very core of a person's being, transforming the believer and opening up a way of seeing things which is endowed with meaning.  "The thing that people are most hungry for, meaning, is the one thing that science hasn't been able to give them," reflects the character, Palmer Joss.  Religion, on the other hand, has.

There is a difficulty, however, in communicating a faith which stems from experience.  It is the experience itself that creates certainty in the believer.  Reason cannot verify the experience, but somehow the heart knows what it has experienced is true.  As Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know."  But if faith comes from experience, my personal experience will probably not be convincing to you, no matter how vividly I feel it.  Recall Dr. Arroway's line: "I wish I could share that. I wish, that everyone, if only for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope! But ... that continues to be my wish."

In reflecting on the relationship between faith and reason, I've thought that perhaps faith ultimately has to come from experience, or something like it.  By some means or another, the heart has to be moved to believe.  Reason can't give us faith, because, without any premises from which to start, it is impossible to prove anything by reason.  We cannot even prove that we are awake instead of dreaming.  Again I turn to Pascal:

We know that we do not dream, and, however impossible it is for us to prove it by reason, this inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, but not, as they affirm, the uncertainty of all our knowledge. For the knowledge of first principles, as space, time, motion, number, is as sure as any of those which we get from reasoning. And reason must trust these intuitions of the heart, and must base them on every argument.

Here is the real problem: If God is known through experience or intuition, then why are there unbelievers? Wouldn't God want everyone to know him?  Why doesn't he make his presence more known?  Why doesn't he give us surer intuitions or experiences, ones which our reason cannot so easily question?  There may not even be a satisfactory answer to this question, so I will not attempt a detailed explanation here.  Perhaps God reveals just enough of himself so that only those who want to find him can, and those who don't want to don't have to.  Pascal proposes another reason: it is our sinful passions which obscure God from us.  "Convince yourself [that God exists]," he writes, "not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions."  But if Deus absconditus est most of the time, God does appear in hints and shadows, if only in hints and shadows.  Orual sees the palace for a split second in C.S. Lewis' novel Till We Have Faces, a work which conveys Lewis' own answer to the problem.

I want to suggest that memory is indispensable for having faith in a universe where God's presence isn't overwhelming.  Experiences, like Orual seeing the palace, are isolated to a particular point in time.  Memory allows those experiences to be brought into the present.  This is part of the reason memory plays such an important role in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.  The Jewish feast of Passover is a memorial of the original Passover meal, when the Jewish people were freed from slavery and bondage in Egypt.  When Jews today celebrate the Passover meal, they understand they are not simply reenacting the meal that saved their ancestors thousands of years ago.  Rather, they understand that they are participating in the ongoing saving action of God, who saves them personally in the here and now.  It is in a similar light that Christians understand the exhortation of Christ to offer bread and wine "in memory of me." The act of commemorating the Last Supper is understood as something which brings Christ's once-and-for-all, saving sacrifice on the cross into the present, so that the merits of this action can be communicated to the believer. 

Perhaps we've all had those moments of great clarity or insight, when we finally we able to see the meaning in all the work we've been undertaking.  Or we've had that moment when we're sure that God exists because of some great grace that we've received.  Some of the great saints, the mystics, report having experiences in which they were indescribably enlightened.  St. Ignatius reported mystical experiences that were so powerful that even if the Bible didn't exist and he had no other source of religious knowledge, he would have willingly died for the faith in light of his experience.  At the same time, the mystics, who had such vivid experiences of God, were often the ones who went through the greatest experiences of isolation, the dark night of the soul.  How could they have possibly gotten through those times?  The answer must be memory.  Their only source of hope was the memory of the Lord's blessings, the trust that at some point they would be brought from darkness into light.  Though to a lesser extent, I reckon we all go through moments when life seems meaningless and lonely.  These moments are the true test of faith, when a trusting leap is required.  It is then we are called to remember.

Faith is an inexhaustible subject for reflection.  I in no way intend to be definitive about the relationship between faith, experience, and memory.  Perhaps, I miss the mark in saying that faith comes from experience and intuition.  But, I do believe that faith is a gift.  It is not reducible to reason, but is something, like love, which goes far beyond our reason.

By the rivers of Babylon we sat mourning and weeping when we remembered Zion.
If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.
May my tongue stick to my palate if I do not remember you, If I do not exalt Jerusalem beyond all my delights.

Psalm 137:1, 5-6

Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School

I recently finished watching this film for the second time.  If you get a chance to watch it, I highly recommend you do so.  (You should be able to instantly watch it on Netflix.)  It's sentimental and a little sad, while weaving together a number of different threads, making for a thought provoking movie.  To provide a bit of context, I had to watch this film for the first time as part of Professor David O'Connor's wonderful Ancient Wisdom and Modern Love class.  One of the themes which comes through in the movie's thoughtfulness about love is the connection between romantic love and art (specifically dance).  My intent is not to summarize the plot, but rather to take a quick look at some interesting thematic elements.

A chance encounter leads the protagonist Frank Keane to Marilyn Hotchkiss' dance class where he is at first unwilling, hesitant and uninspired on the dance floor.  However, in what I take to be one of the most striking scenes of the movie, Mr. Keane, asked to demonstrate the lindy hop, loses all his inhibitions and lets the dance take control.  This is a powerful moment, one of deep emotional expression for Frank.  At this moment, Frank in some way is able to move past his grief, and is opened up for what is a budding romance.

Here, Mr. Keane learned an important lesson about dance.  "Dance is a very powerful drug Mr. Keane," says the Marienne, his instructor, "If embraced judiciously, it can exorcise demons, access deep seated emotions and color your life in joyous shades of brilliant magenta that you never knew existed."  Throughout the movie, we see how dance helps characters to channel their feelings and to exorcise their demons.  Yet, dance is not something meant to be unbounded.  In this moment of abandon Mr. Keane must be reproved and called back within himself.  He is disrupting the dance class.  This is why dance must be "embraced judiciously."   Marienne continues: "One must shoulder its challenges with intrepid countenance if one is ever to reap its rewards."

You see dance, just like anything else of great power, has a right way it is used.  If there were not rules for dance, it would no longer hold its form and degenerate into something disorderly.  This is not only true of dance.  Marienne admonishes another character: "There are rules, Mr. Ipswitch, in life, just as there are rules in dance. Those rules may seem arbitrary at times, they may seem impossible at times, they may seem unfair or onerous, but they are rules nonetheless. And they must not be broken."

This connects to another aspect of the movie which involves the flashbacks to 1962 when another key character, Steve, is twelve and is unwillingly signed up for Marilyn Hotckiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School.  Steve is at the age when he is starting to be interested in girls, but hardly knows how to express it.  The closest he gets is giving Lisa Gobar a black eye.  What Marilyn Hotckiss is doing, though her students hardly realize it, is teaching these young men and women a way of expressing these new feelings appropriately.  The boys learn, though it is at first full of rigid formalism, how to ask their partner for a dance.  The girls then respond with the formulaic "I'd be enchanted.."  Then the two begin a rigid boxstep.  If you've tried to learn how to ballroom dance, you know that this process of learning how to dance can be kind of awkward.  You try to avoid stepping on your partner's feet as you count your steps (hopefully not out loud) and pretty much just stick to the basic formula.  It is only after learning the basics that dance can become a creative, beautiful, flowing thing which takes on a life of its own.  But it still must stay within the bounds of what makes it a dance.

I reckon that one of the things we are missing in our society today is ballroom dance.  How many of us were really taught how to show our feelings of love and affection properly?  How many of us were taught how to show proper respect to members of the opposite sex?  I'm not here to pine away for a bygone era, but there was a reason for the rules of etiquette, and something is lost when many of them have fallen away.  Sure they may be rigid and awkward to get used to, but it is within those guidelines that true love and respect can be given direction and allowed to flourish.  In the same way, the rules of dance allow true expression and creativity to be realized.  This leads me to the Chesterton quote of the day: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."

Let it suffice to say that this film is one whose imagination very much brings out the connection between love and art about which I have previously written here.  Here, the art is a way to give expression to feelings and emotions which are otherwise inexpressible and even unmanageable.

Another interesting connection to which this film gives a nod is the connection between violence and love.  Watching it this time through, it seemed to me that violence was often an expression of some emotion and even of love that was perhaps misguided.  We see this when the girls insist on joining the boys' game of British Bulldogs, a rough and tumble version of sharks and minnows, and we see it when Steve (accidentally) gives Lisa a black eye.  This almost innocent "violence" connects with my own experience that teasing and picking on another is often a sign of affection.  For the adolescent (boy at any rate), nothing says I love you like drenching the beloved with water or decking them with a snow ball.  Indeed, I don't know if that is ever really outgrown.  We just learn other ways to express our affection as well (like hopefully ballroom dancing).

Of course there are many other things I could say about the movie, and many details that could be interesting think about.  For now, my hope is that I have sharpened and not dulled your interest in seeing this movie.  I hope you can enjoy the beauty of the movie for what it is, and appreciate the richness and depth of the film.

Leisure, the Basis of Culture

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the some of the characters escape from civilization into what is called the Green World, a forested place of enchantment.  It is here in the Green World, away from the constraints of society where love is able to flourish.  Granted, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Green World is not quite so simple as that.  There is plenty of romantic confusion until the lovers finally end up with the right people.  But my point here is not to provide a literary analysis of Shakespeare's Green World.  Rather, I want to seize upon the basic point (or at least the point I want to make): reaching the place of true love and enchantment requires movement away from other considerations and into the wilderness.

The lesson, as I take is, is that we all need to spend time in the Green World, able to completely forget about the cares of society.  We need a chance to eschew work, school, and all the familiar places. It is the Green World, where we learn to fall in love again.  Here, we learn to love the beauty against which our hearts have been hardened.  We learn to love life itself once more.  We learn to love the people around us once again (or for the first time).  Here, we learn to love God.

In a phenomenon which may be related, I've recently experienced the desire to surround my self with beauty.  This past week/weekend I was stuck in a car for several hours I had nothing better to do but listen to Bach and read Evelyn Waugh (at the same time!).  The Bach and the Waugh were amazing, and filled me with a desire to spend all my days immersed in beautiful things like those.  Then a rainbow showed up.  Ahh!  These are the moments we live for, moments that pierce the soul.  I hope I'll remember that moment forever, just like I remember going to see Jeremy Denk and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra perform one of Beethoven's Piano Concerti (No. 1 in C Major, I believe).  It was absolutely stunning, but perhaps not as memorable as Denk's encore piece, in which he played a movement from Charles Ives' Concord Sonata.  He executed the piece so well, that the audience literally laughed out loud at one of Ives' musical jokes.  Real laughter came from my mouth because of what someone played on a piano!  Or I remember the time I was able to go backpacking in the Sangre De Cristo mountains.  One incident in particular from that trip I remember.  We were on a precipice, several thousand feet up, from which we could the place where the mountain range on which we were standing began to rise out of the plain below.  The rock on which we were standing was most unusual: it was pitted.  We're talking softball sized holes that held rain water.  There must have been hundreds of them in the surrounding area.  They were made, so I was told, by lightning which naturally strikes the highest point in the area.  And as I was standing there, staring at the beautiful scene below me, I could feel energy start to build in the atmosphere behind me, that exciting, stirring change, which signals a storm is approaching.  I could see the thundercloud swiftly approaching.  Something was so exhilarating about that moment, on the verge of extreme danger and extreme beauty.  The situation also seemed to serve as a living reminder that all things are passing away, that we have to come down from the mountain eventually.  It's moments like these which we remember most, which we are forever grateful we experienced, which shape us into better people.

Now comes the plug for Aristotelian Ethics.  Like experiencing the Green World, experiencing the beauty described above requires a movement away from the ordinary.  It requires, in a word, leisure.  We do not recreate so that we can be a more effective production factor in our capitalist economy.  No, we work precisely for those moments of leisure so that we can nourish the soul, and learn what it really means to be human.  This is why civilization kicks barbarism's butt.  Civilization allows the flourishing of the arts.  When people are just trying to stay alive, living in a subsistence economy, the arts can't flourish.  It is only when a culture has 'left over' time, after keeping everyone alive, that time can be devoted to artistic pursuits.  We get individuals who can devote their time to nothing but creating beautiful things, and others who can take the time to appreciate them.  Here the arts flourish.

The astute reader will have noticed that I described the Green World as necessarily a place of removal from civilization, while at the same time praising civilization for giving us the arts.  Is there a contradiction somewhere in here?  I expect any seeming contradiction is resolved upon realizing that both natural beauty and artistic beauty are necessary at times to help us get in touch with that part of us which is most human, to sharpen our sensitivities, and to help us love.  Leisure is needed for both.

Thought: Philosophy is parasitic, just like the arts, coming out of society's collective leisure time.  It has a lot to do with love and beauty as well.  Lurking somewhere here might be a justification for my academic discipline.

Note to Self:  Read Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture.

Concerning the Name

My favorite word is "Mooreeffoc."  You won't find this word in the Oxford English Dictionary (I checked).  However, this word is associated with the likes of Dickens, Chesterton, and Tolkien, and represents a wonderful concept.  Tolkien defined mooreeffoc as "The queerness of things that have become trite when they are seen suddenly from a new angle" in his essay "On Fairy Stories."  The ability to see things from a fresh perspective is integral to the value of a fairy tale, as well as a pretty important element in G.K. Chesterton's thinking on life in general.  Enamored with this concept, I decided to name by blog after it.  What follows is a reflection on mooreeffoc.

Today we live in a world of wonders.  I can contact almost anyone I want to almost anywhere in the country almost instantly, by means of a cell phone.  I could be almost anywhere in the world is less than a day, by means of a jet airplane.  I can find much of the information that I want about countless subjects by pushing a few buttons.  If I hadn't grown up in a world with such wonders, these things would be almost unimaginable.  Less than 150 years ago, to go around the world in 80 days was unthinkable.  Yet we have become so accustomed to things like cell phones and airplanes and Google, that we no longer find anything remarkable in them.  They have become trite.  It takes something like being deprived of them to make us realize how fantastic and wild these things really are.

Yet, these modern marvels are really the most insignificant of the things to which we become habituated.  They are just the easiest to recognize because we know there was a time when they didn't exist and because we can actually live pretty well without them.  It's things like breathing oxygen, walking on green grass, and having two legs that are at once the most amazing and the most easily overlooked.  But the fact is that the world could have been such that our bodies needed an element other than oxygen for metabolic processes, that most vegetation was red, and that you were born without legs.  The world is a great "might have been."  Yet we so easily lose our sense of wonder at life.  Fairy stories allow us to reclaim that sense of wonder.  Their value is partly therapeutic.  "These tales," Chesterton wrote,  "say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green.  They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

Recognizing that the world is contingent, that things could have been other than they are, properly leads to a feeling of gratitude.  Because I might not have been, I have reason to be thankful that I am.  Indeed gratitude is a natural response to wonder at life.  But we naturally want someone to whom we are thankful.  Chesterton wrote, "We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers.  Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?"  This feeling of gratitude leads us naturally to God, as the object of thanks and praise.  Gratitude is also connected to morality.   Reality itself is construed in such a way that happiness depends on certain conditions.  This is another thing that fairy tales teach us.  "A box is opened, and all evils fly out.  A word is forgotten, and cities perish.  A lamp is lit, and loves flies away.  A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited.  An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone."  But because the world is a gift, who are we to question the conditions whereby that gift is given?  Gratitude naturally leads us to act morally.  "Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman."  If this isn't clear to us, what we need is to see the world with the fresh eyes of a child.  What we need is, in a word, mooreeffoc.

Being able to see things with fresh eyes also informs Chesterton's apologetic for Christianity.  In The Everlasting Man, he wrote that "the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it."  When we are far enough away from Christianity, detached as it were, we can see Christianity unprejudiced and for what it really is.  The Christian faith is nothing less that remarkable, for it claims that God has become man.  A sense of wonder at the mysteries of the faith is not only important for leading people into Christianity, but is also something which Christians needs to reclaim.  How often does prayer and liturgy become trite as we become habituated to it, how often do the paradoxes of the faith fail to move us?  If we could attend every Mass as if it were our first, how awestruck would we be at what is happening?  And how grateful would we be?

This is the power of mooreeffoc.  Mooreeffoc allows us to see the beauty that is everywhere, but which we have forgotten.  It gives us the eyes of a child, who wonders at the world and has learned at a young age to say "thank you."

Unless noted in text, all quotes came from the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" from the book Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton.
To see the selections in Chesterton and Tolkien where the word "Mooreeffoc" is discussed, see this post from the American Chesterton Society blog.  I suggest you check it out.

Living in a Story

"I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?" -Samwise Gamgee

When asked what my favorite book is, as I was this past week, my answer is The Lord of the Rings.  I think the reason this book resonates with me, is that its ending is the most powerful and satisfying that I have ever read.  Upon recently concluding my second reading of Tolkien's novel, I was left with a perfect feeling of awe.  What contributes first to the potency of the ending is the epic nature of the work.  A lot is at stake in the book, and many different interconnected threads are brought together.  The Lord of the Rings is able to take that powerful build up and resolve it in the most fitting way imaginable.  The novel takes the time (6 chapters) to really tie up every imaginable loose end.  This might drive some people crazy, but to me it seems necessary after the hundreds of pages of build up.  This combination of a complex, yet well connected story with a well-contrived, fitting and smooth ending is something The Lord of the Rings does exceptionally well.
 
As amazing and satisfying as the Lord of the Rings is, I want to propose that even the Lord of the Rings has a certain dissatisfaction, but that this dissatisfaction is true to life.  The problem?  The story has to end somewhere.  At some point, Tolkien had to stop writing.  When it's all said and done, after all the loose ends are tied up, we are left with Sam sitting in his home, wondering how life will go on.  We are left to ponder if he will ever join Frodo across the sundering sea and what life will be like for him and Rosie and his children.  How will middle earth get on after Aragorn is dead?  Although Frodo and the elves going into the West seems fitting, why did the elves have to leave and will Frodo be fully healed of his wounds?  Even if we did continue the story to learn how many children Sam had and to learn if Sam was reunited with Frodo, there would always be more we could say. What about Sam's grandchildren?

This dissatisfaction is the very thing Tolkien prepares us for by his characters' understanding of themselves as part of a larger story:
 "'Don't the great tales never end?' [asked Sam].
'No, they never end as tales,' said Frodo. 'But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended.'"
Sam and Frodo know they are a small part of an ongoing story.  In fact the whole 'story' of the Lord of the Rings is only a small part of the larger story of Middle Earth.  The writing itself reflects the smallness of the events which are happening.  Sauron, the Lord of the Rings, is only an old servant of Morgoth, the one who first brought evil to Middle Earth.  Shelob, the spider-like creature which Frodo and Sam encounter, is only a child of Ungoliant, the original such creature which destroyed the trees of the Sun and the Moon long ago in Valinor.  Aragorn and Arwen are but a reminder of Beren and Luthien, the original romance between a mortal and an immortal.  The events in the Lord of the Rings are hardly the most important that have ever happened in Middle Earth.  They are just a small part of the story.

This is why we can never be truly satisfied with any story.  The story is never actually over, and we can only ever tell or listen to a part of the greater story.  Tolkien’s writing reflects this.  I want to propose that our feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with storytelling is true to our experience of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with life.  As amazing and exciting as all our plans and achievements are, at the end of the day we are dissatisfied.  This is true no matter how complete or how fulfilling we think they will be and how satisfying they actually are.  There is always a lingering dissatisfaction.  This is because the things we do are just part of the larger story.  After we graduate, life goes on.  After we win the Nobel prize, life goes on.  When our lives our complete, our story comes to an end, but new characters enter the story and the tale continues.

Are we doomed to be forever dissatisfied?  And if we are just small players in an enormous story, does it really matter if we play our part well?  What was even the point of everything that happened in the Lord of the Rings and what is the point of our lives?

Recall the experience Sam had nearly despairing deep in the heart of Mordor:
"There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach." 
Sam could have given up because the shadow was only a passing thing, but instead the realization filled him with hope.  He had hope that good would triumph in the end.  Assured of that, all he could do was his best.

If we find our efforts frustrated, dissatisfying, or pointless, our greatest source of hope is remembering that we are part of a great story.  Goodness will triumph in the end, and all our human efforts can help bring that about.  When goodness finally triumphs and the great story, the story behind every other story, comes to The End which is beyond our imagination, then we will find true satisfaction.  This, I suggest, is the tale we have fallen into.  We are living in a story.

Blogging and the Nature of Creative Expression

Creative expression is something which is profoundly human.  We create things.  We design buildings.  We write songs.  We paint pictures.  We dance. We act.  We write poems and books.  And yes, we write blogs.  There is something about this human desire for self-expression which is inherently outward directed.  I could write songs that no one else but myself will hear.  I could create whole fantasy worlds and commit them to paper, without sharing them with anyone.  I could draw up fantastic buildings and contraptions that no one else will see.  I could write in a journal that no one else will ever read.  There is nothing wrong if you have some sort of creative work which you hope never sees the light of day.  It is, however, my experience that we want at least some of our art to be noticed and admired.

Whence comes this desire to produce something external to ourselves that is noticed by others?  First of all, creative expression is a profound way we have of getting ourselves "out there."  It is a way we can bridge the gap between the self and the other.  We hope that our thoughts and expressions will some how resonate with others.  It proves to us that we are not alone and we are not the only ones in the world who have felt a certain way.  Perhaps on a deeper level, producing art, producing something that is external to ourselves, is a way for us to make a difference in the world.  It is a way for us to survive ourselves.  It is, in short, one of the ways human beings participate in immortality.  This happens most tangibly with things like paintings, buildings, movies, plays, books, and music which we may happen to produce.  These are things which can last long after we are dead.  However, even dancing, acting, or performing music still can achieve immortality because these particular artistic expressions shape the other people who experience them.

If art is indeed a result of the human desire for immortality, that might explain the close connection between love and art.  With certain forms of art in particular, romantic love is extremely closely woven with the art.  Dancing, poetry, and music (just think of how many 'love songs' there are), come to mind as particularly powerful examples.  What stops us from expressing ourselves creatively to others is the same thing which stops us from expressing love for another: fear of rejection.  Once George McFly can express his love for Lorraine, getting his book published is easy.  This love-art connection should not be surprising when we realize that love is something which is essentially creative.  The natural end of erotic love is the creation of new life.  As it happens, having children is one powerful way in which we humans can survive ourselves and participate in immortality.  The power to create and the power to love may just be two sides of the same coin.  This view is supported, I think, when looking at two of the primary ways of thinking about God in the Christian tradition.  One is the 'God is Love' view.  The other is based on seeing God as he is in relationship to the universe, namely as its Creator.  Creation is nothing less than an act of love.

Thus, I move to the what might be called the heart of this post.  In deciding to start a blog, I have joined with many others in an endeavor which I presume is centered on a desire for self-expression that wants to be noticed by other people.  (I do not presume people start blogs because they are in love, although one would not preclude the other.)  Should you read my blog?  In all honesty probably not.  Of all the volumes and volumes of books that are published and articles that are written everyday and have even been written, few are really worth your time.  Almost certainly there is something better than the unprofessional reflections of a college student you are reading right now.  But the hope of the artist is that his art is worthwhile, that it is meaningful, and that other people can appreciate it.  So I hope that you come back for more, as I give expression to my thoughts and try to participate in immortality in my own creative and expressive way.