You’re Doing It Wrong

A friend once recounted how a mutual acquaintance of ours had told her God spoke to him, which he meant both literally and verbally.

It’s enough on one point to note the gent didn’t say God spoke with him — which wd seem to be preferred, all things taken together — but that isn’t what I’ll note here. What I replied then and repeat now is that perhaps this occurred because this fellow needed a good talking-to. That is, it wasn’t a sign of excess spirituality (is there such a thing?) as of deficient. I don’t think we need to assert defective, but that may’ve been so as well.

Reminded me at the time of the cartoon — a New Yorker-type, if not the thing itself — wherein a mom unloads piles of work papers from her briefcase while her daughter, looking on, observes, ‘Maybe you need to be in a slower class?’

+

A bug of mine I’ve come to see as feature is an ability oft if not always, commonly if not completely to flip the ol’ spyglass 180° and look through its t’other end. Chesterton a’course made a quarter or so of his career on such chiastic reversalism; I’m a piker by comparison but hope to make it to the Bigs one day.

Thus when a couple who’d been to Spain and that famous unfinished church and noted as how it’s all of a series of curves — no corners … summat like that — and followed that with the observation, there are no right angles in nature, it did occur to me to note, ‘Right — that’s our job as humans.’ Much as I enjoy curves, there are reasons right angles exist and it’s not just to torment 10th graders with shapes and formulae.

And when during a group discussion of personal agency a friend blithely lobbed the Kristofferson at us, it being just another word for nothing left to lose, well, oughtn’t one ask, ‘Izzat so?’

+

Same sort of error’s made all the time with rules and regs and laws and limits. We’ve come to think a ‘rule of law’ is some kind of heightened existence when it’s rather one of the lower types possible. If a rule is needed it’s not because we know what to do and how to do it — know in a fiber of one’s being sorta way … know as of an interactive relationship with — but because we don’t.

If we did, we wouldn’t need the law.

When the father tells the son, ‘take out the trash’ and the son replies, ‘I know‘ as if the old man were as doltish as Mark Twain’s when the writer was 14 … well, he simply doesn’t: if he were interactively relational to the reality and truth or even the fact of ‘take out the trash’ the trash wd already be out — it wd not need to be said a’tall.

Four-year-olds do not know not to cross the street without looking both ways and therefore need to be told. And told. And told. And told. And told. With reinforcement at every no-pun-intended turn.

+

Rules are required not desired.

If they’re needed, it’s a bad sign.

If they’re relied upon, it’s worse.

As a recent look at Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Commencement address noted,

“The legalistic framework of life … is inadequate for human development. … breed[ing] moral mediocrity because people tend to rest prematurely, being satisfied with doing the minimum required by the law without going beyond what it prescribes.”

Laws for grownups stunt growth.

+

Of course, we’re talking about the problem of rules for adults. Because four-year-olds do need them.

Duh.

This is about whether ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished; it’s on the question of whether the preponderance of them reflects maturity or … else.

The desire to be (very very very) young again.

The demand to be four when one’s forty-four.

The expectation that another will handle this.

The aim, as Eliot put it, to make a society and its people so rule-bound, we won’t have to do anything.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

Read More »

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

Read More »

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Read More »

Random

Plague Dog

During the lockdown read The Plague, turned page next to The Book of the Dun Cow. Not an immediately clear connection not least because Dun Cow is far lesser known. Both chronicle communities within a larger one within a larger world. First, of course, is the full circle vicious and virtual, during a pandemic; latter

Read More »

The Walmart Fairy

Want to know when you can be sure the economy is in the turlet? It’s when even Walmart’s not hiring. According to this item, the company has hired essentially nobody for the last six years. Nobody says it’s since the bankers ripped us off again and the government let them, and all the oceans stopped

Read More »

I’ve Said Too Much

There’s a danger of saying too much. There’s always that. I wrote previously and succinctly about stories. Here’s a longer exploration I’ve been working on, off and on, for about a year. * Every true story starts with realizing something is out of place and involves people asking who they are in a world where things (they now see)

Read More »

Lyric Lent

Mostly I gave up meat for Lent. Or to put it another way, I gave up meat (mostly) for Lent. And this is how Lent often goes and the difference I think isn’t usually that it doesn’t go that way but that it’s OK when it does. Not that it’s OK to give our word

Read More »

Related

Not a Eulogy

(A Eucatastrophe) * Love the words, my friends. Pay attention to the words, I say. Christians don’t die One reason we know this is Jesus said it. In John’s account he told Michael: “You shall never taste or see death” (Indeed, as the Psalmist says, “taste and see that the Lord is good.”) Another reason

Read More »

Dirty Rotten Scoundrel

Some of my best friends have a problem with the dirty poor. These are the folks below the dirt-poor — which describes a financial level not the person himself. These are the dirt-encrusted, unemployed, possibly begging (relying on strangers, kindness, and a fair economy as much as the rest of us, anyway), frequently transient (the weather

Read More »

Steps

Adore and obey, don’t fulminate and flee Be a man not a guy A producer not a consumer Solution not problem (or be quiet) (which doesn’t mean don’t talk ever) Measured not random Good not bad Lean not fat Walking not sitting Writing not watching Reading not watching Watching not sleeping Pay attention! People not things

Read More »

What Are The Stories

“What are the stars?” No, not “big balls of gas” — that’s just their form. Just as people aren’t blood and guts so are stars not big balls of gas. What then are the stories?  I started with two divergent thoughts — There is only one plot: things are not what they seem. Jim Thompson and With a

Read More »