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| Sunday March 07 |
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[2:45 pm] remind you of anyone?
In the Asian Philosophy graduate seminar I'm taking, we recently studied Confucius. I'm really inspired him, on a number of levels. He was a lifelong student of Virtue and Rightness, and like his fellow virtue-ethicist Aristotle, saw moral goodness as flowing out of a person who has cultivated a lifelong pursuit of right action in a wide variety of circumstances. The virtue ethicist understands that what is good in a particular situation may well not be captured by simply following a set of exceptionless rules under which the circumstance may fall: knowing and doing the right thing requires maximal sensitivity to the needs of the particular situation and the particular people involved; this sensitivity is something that can only be cultivated over a life of experience. Ideally, what one aspires for is to "act without acting," (wu wei, 無爲), so that one can simply behave appropriately in any circumstance, without having to stop and think about which rules apply, for example.
I'm really inspired by this "virtue"-driven approach to ethics, and more generally as an instance of a sort of Zen-like sensibility about things that accommodates ineffability, and "mystery" in the sense of "depths of which one never finishes plumbing." (In the same sense, that is, of the Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary.)
All this is just to preface this very striking passage in Confucius's Analects, which anticipates a very specific personage. I leave it to the reader to discern who.
Zigong said, "If there were one able to broadly extend his benevolence to the common people and bring succor to the multitudes, what would you make of him? Could such a person be called Good?"
The Master said, "Why stop at Good? Such a person should surely be called a sage! Even someone like Yao or Shun would find such a task daunting. Desiring to take his stand, one who is Good helps others to take their stand; wanting to realize himself, he helps others to realize themselves. Being able to take what is near at hand as an analogy could perhaps be called the method of Goodness." (6.30) |
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| | Sunday February 28 |
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[9:32 pm] against "zap theology"
The plan ahead: I want to do two or three posts that set up some important issues that were crucial to my joining the Catholic Church, in preparation to my "testimony" that explains my "conversion" in the context of an overall spiritual journey over many years. So that's the context. Here goes the first such "setup" post...
Yesterday's daily reflection from the Lenten devotional "Little Black Book" focused on Mark's Gospel portrayal of "Jesus the Hero," and noted how there are no other heroes in Mark's Gospel besides Jesus. All of Jesus' apostles, even Peter who had taken the lead in confessing Jesus' lordship and in swearing faithfulness to him, deserted him when the Pharisees' strongmen showed up to drag him off under cover of darkness. The Black Book says that "By describing the failures of the 'great ones,' Mark teaches us: Don't underestimate the struggle of staying with Jesus, or overestimate your own strength." Don't underestimate the struggle, don't overestimate your own strength. That thought really struck me. Likewise, "work out your salvation with fear and trembling... so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent..." (Phil. 2: 12,15)
There is a tradition that is prevalent in many Protestant circles that at least one person has aptly described as "zap theology". It has its roots in Martin Luther's novel doctrine of justification "extra nos", that is, completely "outside us." This doctrine is apparently motivated by the desired end of making absolutely sure that no one is Pelagian—that is, thinks that they can merit God's approval by their own efforts alone. And it does accomplish this. Justification extra nos is also completely compatible with the apparent conclusion of much Protestant theology, which is that one's salvation need have no concrete, visible effects on one's life. Or rather, if there are any such effects, that they're merely "to show that" one actually has faith and of no intrinsic consequence to one's salvation itself. This, in essence, is "zap theology"—the thought that we are "zapped" into heaven-worthy status just by believing in Jesus Christ for one's salvation. And when we die, likewise, we get instantly "zapped" into perfection and enter heaven immediately thereafter. "Zap theology" has the effect of minimizing just what is important in the Lenten reflection of the previous passage, and I am now passionately, as this post's title states, against it.
Now, I'd wager that very few people think that they adhere to "zap theology," or that by any other name. (And "Intelligent" "Design" "Theorists" won't outright say that their program boils down to the assertion "science cannot explain such and such," but it's manifestly true that it does.) That is to say, very few people will say that "being good" or "doing good works" or some such is completely beside the point—if someone persists in doing evil but maintains belief in their own salvation by faith, most would say that there has to be something wrong with that faith, such that it fails to be salvific (what a strange word). But which one of us does not in fact "persist in doing evil"? Each of us has our own standards of what we're comfortable with—the level of "peccadilloes" that we're willing to ignore even if not condone. Well, anyone who persists in evil at any level—whether something that I personally would find censorious, or not—is doing just that. Yet the true objective standard remains the same: Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. (Mt. 5:20) At this point what's often done is to throw up one's hands and say "justification extra nos," which nothing that the context, or anything else Jesus said for that matter, remotely suggests, and that for 1500 years, no Christian believed.
A lot, if not all, of the motivation for this conclusion, however, is the thought that the alternative is something called "faith plus works," which is presumably thought as essentially equivalent to Pelagianism. But this does not follow, as I've discussed before. However, justification extra nos itself does lend significant support to a most pernicious idea, never explicitly stated but in my experience quite actively operative in many of us, which I shall call "It's-Okay-To-Sin" (IOTS, hereafter). Now, no one will ever agree to such a thing explicitly, but many people really do adhere to a disposition like this with regard to whatever aforementioned level of sin that they're personally comfortable with; "grace" is invoked with a shrug of the shoulders: "oh well, there's grace"; thus, IOTS. According to this view, one is automatically forgiven for everything just by believing that one is; you only need to have repented once, and that takes care of all future sins too: IOTS, so we can go forth and sin without consequence. Well, not without the temporal, observable consequences, but none of that matters once we're dead, right? Well, I suppose not, if "zap theology" is true.
But what if Jesus was perfectly serious about our having to be perfect? What if we do in fact have to get to be Saints with a capital S in order to stand in the presence of God? What if IOTS is false, and not merely because of the temporary effects of sin that will get all "zapped" away anyway just because we die? What if the "working out of our salvation" in the here and now is continuous with (i.e., involving no "zapping") our eventual enjoyment of the Beatific Vision? What if the righteousness that is supposed to result from faith is part of that process, and not purely "extracurricular," or "for show"? Then we might need to confess and repent of our sins on a regular basis as needed, in the Church. And pray for God's grace to do better in the future. And enlist the intercession of the Saints, The Church Triumphant who have gone before us and in communion with The Church Militant here below, who pray unceasingly on our behalf. If "zap theology" is false, then all this could be true, and extremely significant.
A final word, and this explicitly on behalf of Purgatory, which may need its own post. If it is literally true that "unless your [my emphasis] righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven," and if "zap theology" is false, then given that the vast majority of us do not attain Sainthood in our earthly lifetimes, it is a very good thing indeed that there is such a thing as Purgatory. |
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| | Saturday February 20 |
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[5:01 pm] lent inside and out
I went to the Ash Wednesday mass at my neighborhood church, and the Gospel reading for the day was one for which the priest opined that whoever selected it for that day "must have had a sense of humor." In it, Jesus seems to enjoin us not to make any outward indication of one's fasting and acts of piety. But that very day was one in which each participant in the mass received a mark of ashes on one's forehead. The priest pointed out the apparent contradiction, and seemed genuinely at a loss to explain it.But an explanation can be found in light of the context and intended meaning of Jesus' teaching here. The Pharisees whom Jesus so stridently criticized imposed a long list of "dos" and "don'ts" on others and themselves, thinking that was what righteousness consisted in, that that was the full measure and spirit of the Law. Ironically enough, many seem to read Jesus' teachings as if they were just another set of legalistic proscriptions to replace those of the Pharisees. On that reading, one may well come to the conclusion, don't mark your forehead with ashes on a certain day of the year. Period. But as is sufficiently clear upon reflection, Jesus isn't at all trying to supplant one form of legalism with another, but to examine the interior motives of people in their pious actions. The point, then, is not "don't have any exterior signs of your practices," but "don't do these things in order to be seen doing so." The undertaking of religious observances as an act of piety and devotion is not in itself at all incompatible with some accompanying sign that may be visible to others—e.g., Ash Wednesday ashes. That may have its place as an appropriate embodiment of the significance of the event, as long as it's not being done in order to be seen as someone who undergoes pious observances. It's the "in order to" that is all-important—that is, the interior disposition by which the action is done. The ashes themselves are distributed with the words "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return," and to actually be marked with a cross of ashes is thus intended to be a concrete sign of the onset of a time during which we are to ponder our own mortality, and that of Jesus Christ the Son of Man, and the impending observance of his death that is to be our propitiation for our sins, and to thus ponder the progress of our sanctification—that is, the process of subjugation of "this body of death" so that we can eventually take on a new embodiment like that of the risen Christ. In short, an apt beginning for a preparation for Easter. |
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| | Tuesday February 02 |
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[12:16 am] this semester...
...is well underway, and it's going to be another whirlwind of divers scholarly activities. Seminars I'm taking are Asian Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind (Reasons and Reductionism), and Kant's Critique. Although I'm basically back to bachelorhood, I don't feel as though I suddenly have gobs of time on my hands—there is plenty to do. I'm TA-ing four discussion sections out of a lecture-hall "Philosophy and Social Ethics" course, and finally feel as though I'm getting my "teaching legs"; after hemming and hawing my way through the previous three semesters being my usual mumbly fumbly self, I feel as though an appropriate "person-in-front-of-the-classroom" persona is beginning to emerge. It's all about selling yourself. Not such a bad thing, if that's what it takes to get the material across. I've also been getting a bit more involved in service opportunities at church, and at a ceremony just yesterday attained my Knights of Columbus second and third degrees (having joined in the first degree last September). I haven't actually done any K of C service yet, but expect to before long. They're a pretty super organization with a lot of swell guys.I'm looking forward to flying to Dallas this weekend where I'll spent a few days with my beautiful children that I have dearly missed, who will be driven up from Stephenville. It's great to have generously hospitable relatives there who can host us while I visit. My Mom is actually flying out there too. It should be a good time, plus my birthday and the Super Bowl is this Sunday. (When it rains, it pours!) There are still umpteen blog posts on the Catholic Church burning a hole in my pocket that I hope eventually to begin to unload, someday... |
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| | Monday January 18 |
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[10:21 pm] The Only Day in Existence (by Billy Collins; hat tip to Christie!)
The early sun is so pale and shadowy,
I could be looking up at a ghost
in the shape of a window,
a tall, rectangular spirit
looking down at me in bed,
about to demand that I avenge
the murder of my father.
But the morning light is only the first line
in the play of this day—
the only day in existence—
the opening chord of its long song,
or think of what is permeating
the thin bedroom curtains
as the beginning of a lecture
I will listen to until it is dark,
a curious student in a V-neck sweater,
angled into the wooden chair
of his life,
ready with notebook and a chewed-up pencil,
quiet as a goldfish in winter,
serious as a compass at sea,
eager to absorb whatever lesson
this damp, overcast Tuesday
has to teach me,
here in the spacious classroom of the world
with its long walls of glass,
its heavy, low-hung ceiling. |
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| | Tuesday January 12 |
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[11:46 pm] transitions
Movers came out a few days before Christmas to move out Deidra's and the kids' stuff and send it off on its journey to Texas. I spent Christmas at my parents' in California with the kids, while Deidra was with her parents. Then I flew back to Dallas with them, dropped them off at the airport with their Mom, and spent New Year's with my grandparents, aunt, uncles, and cousins there. On New Year's Day I flew back to Connecticut and came home to a pretty empty house. That the kids don't live here anymore is something that had to gradually set in, with grief. That they're my children, and I'm their father, and I can't be there most of the time to be their Dad continues to feel just wrong. When you bring your own children into the world, it's with no thought, ever, that they're going to be children of divorce. That's a real grief that's going to need time to find a permanent place. In order to get through over the long haul, feelings that acute will have to be sublimated somehow, but not ignored or left to molder over.
It's not like I'll ever not be their Dad. Which is to say, I have to work with the situation as it's been given me and act like it on purpose. In ways both good in mercy and bad in principle, they're going to grow up not really knowing any different. I've been talking to the kids on the phone a lot, and will come visit them a few times this spring, as well as for a spell over the summer. It will help a lot that when they get a computer, I'll be able to video chat with them via gmail or Skype (the one everyone talks about but with which I've had no personal experience). Continuity will continue, in whatever ways are available to me, and the fatherly concern that makes for the grief will also make for the motivation for it. I'll just have to keep being a presence in their lives in whatever way I can, even as I move on to a different life.
A whole new life is what it is, too. A passive-aggressive sham of a marriage fell to an EPIC FAIL of one, and my finding out on August 24th of last year that it was too late was, well, too late. Not much else about that that would be appropriate to expound upon here, but in any case I'm back with my own life to live and establish, and with what really seems like quite a different outlook and set of values than it was for the 25-year-old me.
When I was 18 (ach! was I ever?), I looked back on my life up to then and realized it could be divided rather neatly into three six-year periods (imagine having only just that extent of life experience to work with!). Going forward from there, it's kind of interesting that it's continued to roughly fall into six-year phases. My seven-year "attempt" at "marriage" doesn't fall neatly into one of them, but one represents most of it. It seems like my adulthood so far has only taken the form of a long and fitful birthing, only to really start now, as a newly single and unyoked person (legally, the proceedings have basically just begun but should conclude in relatively short order). Putting it all out in terms of those six-year periods outlines how I look at it retrospectively.
1976–1982: Pre-Singapore
1982–1988: Singapore
1988–1994: Post-Singapore
1994–2000: College and Limbo (awful period)
2000–2006: Settling
2006–2012(?): Transitions
(Nice how the end of the current stage coincides helpfully with the end of the world!) Most of the divisions should be self-explanatory based on labels and then-ages. The last two need some explanation. "Settling": firstly trying to settle with graduate school in organic chemistry and it not "taking" to me—okay, that's still "limbo," in a way... but then settling in Austin with a long-term job, deciding it was time to find me a woman and "settle down" that way. Then I discovered philosophy and a few years later decided I needed to be doing that for a living. (Start of "Transitions" stage.) I went for it. And went for it again. And moved for it, and started to do it. And having found that the "one holy, catholic, and apostolic church" had been there waiting for me all along, decided it was worth my while to up and join it. My "marriage," being basically that only in name all along and my having done nothing to make it anything else, crashed out. And now I'm at the beginning of a big "Reset," more impassioned and motivated than I have been before, by my Catholic faith and chosen academic vocation, no longer waiting for life to "really" begin nor marking the time with nothing to break me out of the stupor of passivity. The future is bright, the challenges many and humbling. Thank you. This has been blog post #450. Good night. |
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| | Tuesday December 29 |
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[12:54 pm] on love
In the undergraduate "Philosophy and Social Ethics" course I TA'd for this last semester, we spent the last few weeks discussing Plato's Symposium, which is all about different conceptions of what love is. It's pretty all over the place, and is really only all about eros, of "The Four Loves". And the course lectures didn't distinguish between these, but talked as though eros were materially equivalent to the English "love." So without those distinctions, it can seem as though when we're talking about the characteristics of eros, that these are the characteristics of love, simpliciter.
In any case, some of what is discussed in the Symposium, and in lecture, does apply to how the Judeo-Christian monotheist (like myself) conceives of love in the eternal, God-rooted sense of agape—in other words, what must be the most fundamental "kind" of love—and that can also be manifested in the best of human relationships. One thing that was brought up in lecture at some point, I don't remember the specific connection to Symposium, was the idea of some sort of self-reinforcing love between the mutually loved. This was something I thought worth emphasizing to the students in my discussion sections, because I think that really gets at what love is really supposed to be. I drew the below diagram on the board illustrating how it's supposed to be, and what happens when agape, charity, loses its place in the relation.
As I've discussed before, persons are essentially relational, and so human persons, as such, are meant to have certain interpersonal relations with one another. (This much should seem obvious, at least from a commonsensical standpoint.) The dispositions that are already there between people, that instance their essential relationality, make it the case that there is the potential for either situation A or situation B, as represented above, obtaining.
In situation A, which could be described as a part of the "Beatific Vision" of heaven itself, there is an upward spiral in which each person tries to outdo one another in pleasing the other, giving ever more inspiration to agape, which itself plays an indispensable role in the relation: without it, each person will be looking to see whether they are being loved as part of deciding whether, themselves, to love. Agape is thus a necessary condition for heavenly love, whose ecstatic perfection knows no bounds. Situation A is, in fact, what an ideal marriage looks like.
And thus, the given interpersonal relations that make for the possibility for situation A obtaining entails also the possibility of situation B obtaining. In B we find what is wrong with all human relationships that go wrong; all kinds of insecurities keep people from withholding love until they are first loved, and there is a self-reinforcing cycle there, too, a Cycle of Resentment, that takes the form of a downward spiral. And I think this really applies to a large part of the Problem of Evil: why does God allow all the pain that comes from broken relationships that are instances of B above? Because, as just mentioned, the possibility for A entails the possibility of B. The possibility of B cannot be ruled out without also ruling out the possibility for A.
Given the topic of Love, the professor in this class discussed a lot of the content of the Symposium in the form of "love advice," more or less. For the students in my discussion sections, I only had to add to that a cautionary note from my own experience, which I shared with them at the very end of our last discussion, in the form of another diagram, this here. I dearly wish someone had put something like that to me many years ago. |
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| | Friday December 04 |
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[7:35 pm] more kids
John continues to grow like a weed, while remaining a finicky eater. He has been sleeping a lot lately, such as going down for his nap in the late afternoon and then sleeping right through the night. I don't think I've mentioned that a few months ago he graduated from using a booster seat at the dinner table to not using one at all. Like he did with the high chair, he just seemed to get really fed up with it, so going straight to the big-boy chair was the answer! He has sort of lost interest in going "potty" these days; the novelty has worn off and he's over it, except occasionally if we suggest it... and if he doesn't say "no," which tends to be his stock answer to everything. John is pretty sensitive, and seems to find a lot of things "scary" ("keh-yeh"). He's scared of the dark and shadows, and of anything emphasizing the eyes. You know how in a cartoon when somebody's in the dark and only their eyes show up? When that happens, even in his favorite show Calliou, he gets terrified and cries. Laurel, by the way, loves Dinosaur Train.
John continues to pick up more and more words and phrases, always surprising us. Awhile ago I had noticed a bit of a stuttering tendency in him (not that big a surprise, really), and for a spell it seemed to get rather pronounced and severe (which really upset Deidra). Now it's gone back to being more subtle, but still there. Hopefully with therapy or whatever that can be taken care of. I know for me, over a period of years at a certain point in my life it was the very bane of my existence.
Laurel is multi-talented, in case you hadn't figured that out. She loves to dance and to sing, and is very artistic. She loves to draw, and has taken advantage of the drawing tools on the computer (the AppleWorks program, specifically) to make a number of quite striking creations, a generous sampling of which, them being in electronic form, I can share with you...
"Rainbow Girl"
"Talking"
"They Both Need to Go to the Bathroom"
"Black & White"
"Opening a Door"
"Very Happy Girl"
"Two Mermaids"
"Red Dress"
"Army Man"
"Sprinkle Sparkle Girl"
"Red Girl with Blue Dress"
"Sun-Lipstick" |
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| | Tuesday November 10 |
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[11:16 pm] kids' stuff
Yikes, another month come and gone since my last stopgap post. Time for another stopgap post. I won't even try to describe how busy I've been, but...John has been (adorably) picking up all the polite expressions. He says "kee-ko" (thank you), "koo-me" (excuse me), and I think maybe some form of you're welcome, too. His latest little thing is to say "Oh." when we tell him something. He's getting noticeably bigger, but I don't know how, seeing as how he hardly seems to eat anything, especially at dinner. Laurel has lost three teeth, in rather quick succession, on the lower row. She's enjoying her ballet class, and seems to have picked up some nice moves from it that she displays in her everyday around-the-house dancing, which anyone who had spent any time around the Steve & Holly Newman household when any of my sisters were little girls would immediately recognize. She has been doing some pre-reading school work in Kindergarten, and her reading skills are coming along very well—she can read lots of words now! |
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| | Wednesday October 07 |
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[8:21 pm] John's latest
John now goes pee-pee on the potty! From time to time he says "poo-poo payeh" and wants to sit on the potty, and usually he pees some. Good to see developments on that front... in any case, he couldn't possibly be more difficult to potty-train than Laurel was!
John's quite a communicator; he's very intent about telling us things he's been doing, showing us stuff, etc. But he has a way to go with his enunciation, so it takes a bit of decoding to understand him... one has to know that "beyeh" is bunny, the aforementioned "payeh" is potty, "geyeh" is glasses, "hayeh" is hiding, and "deyeh" is strawberry (go figure).
There's also a clutch of vocabulary that John has picked up directly from Laurel, including: "Eee uuup!" (Pick me up!), "Wait!", "Me too!", "Don't go!", "My [noun]!", and "Hey!" |
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