Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Census Protest
The following is a blog posting by Dr. Walter Block lifted from here. Obviously this message needs maximum exposure:
I pass this along [sic] letter on the census for your information, only. I do not counsel anyone to break the law. Of course, I’m not real sure of what the law is. A direct and literal reading of the U.S. Constitution it seems to me, a non lawyer, is clear as to what the law is: people are legally obligated, only, to cooperate in a head count for political representation purposes. But, my fear, my expectation, even, is that present courts will not interpret the law in that way, and may instead punish census rebels who refuse to furnish additional required (requested?) information. In any case, the following will undoubtedly be of interest to all people concerned with liberty; I offer it exactly as it was sent to me:
From: on behalf of DarkLaw
Sent: Tue 3/9/2010 9:02 PM
To:
Subject: Re: [ronpaul-200] Ron Paul CNN on Cafferty Files 2/27/10My response to the Census
I compiled this letter and inserted it into the Census envelope, along with my 2010 census form.
I marked off that ‘02′ people reside at this address….and, well… read the rest!Use this as a template! This is just another small step in which we can show the Feds we won’t take this nonsense lying down!
______________________To Whom it May Concern,
Pursuant to Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution, the only information you are empowered to request is the total number of occupants at this address. My “name, sex, age, date of birth, race, ethnicity, telephone number, relationship and housing tenure” have absolutely nothing to do with apportioning direct taxes or determining the number of representatives in the House of Representatives. Therefore, neither Congress nor the Census Bureau have the constitutional authority to make that information request a component of the enumeration outlined in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3. In addition, I cannot be subject to a fine for basing my conduct on the Constitution because that document trumps laws passed by Congress.
Interstate Commerce Commission v. Brimson, 154 U.S. 447, 479 (May 26, 1894)
“Neither branch of the legislative department [House of Representatives or Senate], still less any merely administrative body [such as the Census Bureau], established by congress, possesses, or can be invested with, a general power of making inquiry into the private affairs of the citizen. Kilbourn v. Thompson, 103 U.S. 168, 190. We said in Boyd v. U.S., 116 U. S. 616, 630, 6 Sup. Ct. 524,―and it cannot be too often repeated,―that the principles that embody the essence of constitutional liberty and security forbid all invasions on the part of government and it’s employees of the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of his life. As said by Mr. Justice Field in Re Pacific Ry. Commission, 32 Fed. 241, 250, ‘of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves, not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers from inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value.’”
Note: This United States Supreme Court case has never been overturned.
Respectfully,
A Citizen of the United States of America
cross posted at: Fighting in the Shade™
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
They promised not to turn a deaf ear to the American people. Now it’s time to call them on it.
202-225-5406. 202-225-2565. 202-225-6265.
Kathy Dahlkemper Jason Altmire Zack Space
Please note. Because so much pressure is being brought to bear on swing vote House Democrats, they’ve fallen into the habit of changing phone numbers, not answering their phones or whatever. The numbers I’m listing are the Washington numbers for these Blue Dogs. Taken from their websites or from the website of Dick Morris. However, you may be able to get a better number or may decide on another way to contact them. Regardless, if our voices are loud enough, they’ll eventually hear is. And vote “no” on ObamaCare. And “yes” to the will of the American people. As you know, the reasons to vote down ObamaCare number in the trillions. But this isn’t just about dollars and cents. It’s about government Obama wanting total control of your lives.
Both figuratively and literally, deciding to call Congress about their ObamaCare vote will be, for many of us, a life and death decision. Government bureaucrats can’t be given the power to override the treatment decisions that are the province of you and your doctor.
You know, most of you I don’t know. And you don’t know Rachel Peepers. I guess you could call me a girl on a mission. What I believe is that America is standing against tyranny from within. We’re united against it. If Washington, Franklin, Adams and the other founding fathers were alive today, I believe they’d say, stand up and be counted. This is our crossing of the Delaware on Christmas Eve. This is our Valley Forge. This is our battle of Saratoga. Nothing less than a turning point in the history of this great nation. Before government Obama does a number on our freedom and our healthcare, let’s make our numbers felt. America, I’m starting to think the progressives are shaking in their boots. They don’t have the votes to ram healthcare down our throats. And they’re the ones starting to blink. Obama is bluffing. Fact is, Obama is all smoke and mirrors; the one that’s being smoked out. The Slaughter Rule is laughable; simply a paper tiger. It’ll never be used. More and more, I’m thinking the whole progressive boat is taking in water from stem to stern. I believe they don’t have the nerve to stand up to us. Right now, they’re busying themselves arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, aka SS Nobama.
You may not realize the power of the people because the people aren’t often called on to wield it. But the creeps who would destroy our healthcare system and our country can feel it. I don’t know if these are the worst of times. But this is our time. And our country. And if some pipsqueak politician thinks he can dictate surrender terms to lil’ ol’ blond haired blue eyed Rachel, well, he’s got another think coming. Government Obama. Government controlled healthcare. I call on you, America, to pick the phone up and put this 2,800 page monstrosity of a Bill out of its misery. We’ve got it in our sights. Now it’s time to pull the trigger.
ObamaCare. Your number is up.
And here’s the numbers of other crucial fence sitters.
Charlie Wilson 202-225-5705
Joe Donnelly 202-225-3915
Brad Ellsworth 866-567-0227
Baron Hill 812-523-5500
Tim Holden 202-225-5546
Patrick Murphy 215-826-1963
Henry Mitchel 202-225-2190
Gabrielle Giffords 202-225-2542
Ann Kirkpatrick 202-225-2315
Jerry McNerney 202-225-1947
John Salazar 202-225-4761
Jim Himes 202-225-5541
Monday, March 15, 2010
All through the Night
English lyrics:
Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee
All through the night
Guardian angels God will send thee
All through the night
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping
Hill and dale in slumber sleeping
I my loving vigil keeping
All through the night
While the moon her watch is keeping
All through the night
While the weary world is sleeping
All through the night
O’er thy spirit gently stealing
Visions of delight revealing
Breathes a pure and holy feeling
All through the night
Though I roam a minstrel lonely
All through the night
My true harp shall praise sing only
All through the night
Love’s young dream, alas, is over
Yet my strains of love shall hover
Near the presence of my lover
All through the night
Hark, a solemn bell is ringing
Clear through the night
Thou, my love, art heavenward winging
Home through the night
Earthly dust from off thee shaken
Soul immortal shalt thou awaken
With thy last dim journey taken
Home through the night
A Turnaround?
Your humble and semi fearless blogster just yesterday broke one of his most important and long standing self imposed rules. While surfing between the local news broadcast and the weather channel he paused on one of the Sunday “talk shows” and within one minute needed to hastily retreat to the nearest water closet and be relieved of his breakfast. The author of the need to visit the vomitorium was a talking head that assured one and all that the latest “polling data” reveals that the American boobioiese is now welcoming the arrival of Obamacare as blessed relief from “skyrocketing” health insurance premiums.
Oh goody! The Fed has inflated the “money” supply by over 100% in the last 18 months and “costs” for goods and services including insurance premiums are beginning to rise. According to the cretin spouting this “logic”, the miraculous turnaround in the acceptance of socialized medical delivery is due to a clamoring for price controls and rationing. Who knew? Welcome to the Zimbabwe/Cuba system of “social progressivism”.
Moral Clarity: A Bonus Rumination
Fran here. I know Monday is supposed to be an off-day for me and the Curmudgeon, but when a conception literally refuses to let me sleep, what am I supposed to do?
I dreamed last night. It's not a frequent occurrence; at least, I don't often remember my dreams. But this one was a corker. It concerned a massive burglary, an attempt to snatch some priceless bauble from a heavily guarded museum -- and I was the mastermind and chief executor of the plot.
Those who know me will understand why that upset me. Those who don't will have to take it on faith for the moment.
The facet of the unconscious that produces dreams has been commented on by many, but no one can claim to understand it exhaustively. Remember the prediction-is-knowledge rule: If a "dreams expert" can predict neither what a test subject is going to dream nor what some specific dream will cause him to do when conscious, he has no knowledge worthy of the name. When a dream such as the one mentioned above afflicts someone morally straitlaced, such an "expert" is utterly confounded. He can talk about "repressed urges" all he likes, but demonstrating their reality is beyond him.
Of course, dreams don't arrive with an attached backstory. Perhaps the bauble I was trying to steal was rightfully mine; there's no way to tell. At any rate, the act of breaking and entering for the purpose of theft is difficult to justify. At least, it's more problematic than applying to the proper court for a writ of replevin. I think I'd have tried that first.
Just now, the C.S.O. and I are revisiting (and greatly enjoying) season 1 of F/X's blockbuster series Sons of Anarchy. If you haven't yet treated yourself to this remarkable dramatic production, you have no idea what you're missing, and no idea how morally profound television can be. The DVDs for season 1 are already available; season 2 should be coming onto the market quite soon.
Sons of Anarchy concerns an inland California small town named Charming, which is effectively ruled by a motorcycle gang: the Sons of Anarchy, Redwood Originals chapter. The principal protagonist, Jackson ("Jax") Teller, is the vice-president of the chapter, despite being one of its youngest members. His late father, John Teller, was co-founder of the club; his stepfather Clay Morrow is its current president.
The club, which goes colloquially by the moniker "Sam Crow" ("Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, Redwood Originals"), subsists on the profits from gun-running between the IRA and certain other outlaw California groups. That trade puts it into direct conflict with other forces, including another motorcycle gang, the Mayans. An undeclared war has been in progress between the two for some time. There are frequent clashes and occasional deaths.
As in most situations where an outlaw gang has attained the effective rule of a city, Sam Crow has a sub rosa alliance with elements of the regional police, including Charming's chief of police Wayne Unser. Not all the police are in on the deal; Deputy Chief Hale, a very straight arrow, is particularly unhappy about it. Yet there is this: Sam Crow is phenomenally effective at keeping violence and lawlessness out of Charming. Its methods are crude, even brutal, but they're more effective than anything one might see from the "official" police.
The key dramatic thread that animates the series is the halting evolution Jax Teller undergoes toward moral clarity. Like his stepfather Clay, he starts from a single principle: Protect the club and its prerogatives. This is a version of the attitude Tom Kratman calls "amoral familism" in his novel A Desert Called Peace. Unlike Clay, his experiences, including the birth of his son, his concern for a dear friend, and a threat to his lifelong love Tara, cause him to reflect on the insufficiency of that principle.
Yet Jax is reluctant to cross-cut his loyalty to Sam Crow. He repeatedly violates the law -- any law you might care to name -- for the sake of the club and its members. Only slowly, with the passage of much time and several grisly events, does his readiness to submerge his embryonic moral principles in Sam Crow's supremacy undergo any significant modification. When that process's effects on the club become perceptible, Clay goes from being a semi-affectionate stepfather to an enraged and vengeful potentate.
But no one ever said moral clarity would come at no cost.
The moral code of the Christian Enlightenment has undergone a number of alterations in recent decades. It was at first unusually strict about just about everything, to the point of being more prescriptive than proscriptive. We've loosened up on several fronts, the most visible ones being sex and entertainment, with mixed consequences. On the one hand, the Grundies and Bowdlers of yesteryear have lost their power to intimidate us, a good thing in my estimation. On the other, such alterations "on the margin" have been used to attack the rest of the code, including aspects of it that are vital to the conduct of a peaceful and acceptably orderly civilization. Those attacks aren't always beaten back with sufficient finality.
Consider as a test case the old notion that the law should always be applied without regard for personal considerations -- the "justice is blind" rule. We've departed from that standard in more ways than I can count. The enabling mechanisms are prosecutorial and judicial discretion: ideas from which the Founders would have recoiled in horror. In consequence, the typical murderer spends less time behind bars than the typical tax evader. The usual rationale for going lightly on the murderer is his age: today, most homicides are committed by the very young, and "we wouldn't want to sentence a child to life behind bars." Yet no one could argue that such "mercy" shown to the murderous young makes law-abiding Americans any safer.
Consider alternately the "reparations" movement, which has received a baffling degree of respect both from various members of Congress and from a significant portion of the American citizenry. Racialist agitators are attempting to use whites' sensitivity to pre-Civil War slavery as a club with which to bludgeon us into paying societal Danegeld to contemporary Negroes. Mind you, no American Negro has been kept in bondage for 144 years. More, slavery persists in the Islamic states, a practice about which we hear nary a whisper from Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. But what's critical about this campaign is its target: the pocketbooks of contemporary American whites, the overwhelming majority of whom aren't even distantly related to any historical slaveholder. The old rule that restitution can only be sought from the proximate cause of one's suffering is of no interest to the racialists.
There's no way to reach such outrageous positions by rational argument. Indeed, no rational arguments are advanced for them. Yet the ancient principles of right and justice, rooted in human nature itself and most concisely expressed by the Ten Commandments of Mount Sinai, are being set aside in service to bizarrely inverted notions of "compassion" and "guilt."
My juxtapositions might seem strange. What, after all, could a drama about a motorcycle gang have to do with the ongoing assault on America's founding principles? Well, perhaps this is what comes of a too-vividly-remembered dream. I can't imagine condoning, much less designing and executing, a theft such as the one I dreamed of masterminding. Yet I find myself accepting, and often applauding, Sam Crow's ultraviolent fictional exertions in defense of the peace of Charming and, not coincidentally, its position as the supreme arbiter of what will be permitted there. And this very same moral thinker holds tightly to the old rules as our Founders knew and expressed them: that no one is above the law; that justice must be completely impersonal and objective; and that no man, organization, or government can be allowed unlimited, unchecked power or authority.
Is this clarity or the reverse?
My hope is that my reactions to the events in Sons of Anarchy are an appreciation of what comes from discarding principles. American law and justice have failed signally in many ways. Some of those failures stem from legislative overreach; others from a hypertrophied "compassion" and inappropriate "mercy" toward the guilty. But a society needs the predictability that comes from reliable laws and reliable law enforcement. Without a stable foundation of that sort, no man can arrange his affairs or plot his course with the slightest degree of confidence. In consequence, when "official" law and justice fail us, unofficial mechanisms will emerge to take their place. We're not guaranteed to like the results.
That was the lesson of the "vigilance committees" of the nineteenth century West.
Clarity of any sort comes from understanding the fundamental principles that undergird one's field of study. Without unifying principles, a system of "justice" is nothing but a collection of arbitrary rules, against which others might counterpoise a set of contradictory and equally arbitrary rules. How does one decide between them? Why is the American scheme of incarceration for theft superior to the Arabian one of amputating the offender's hand? Why is the American response of divorce with alimony to an adultery superior to the Arabian one of stoning the adulterers to death? What bedrock principles, dictated by our nature as thinking beings, support a verdict for one system over the other?
Today, "law" is running riot, arrogating ever larger sectors of human enterprise and experience while performing ever less well at its core function of protecting individuals from force and fraud. If there was ever a time when we needed broad, trustworthy principles more desperately, it's not springing to my mind at the moment.
Thoughts?
Now that you mention it.
The evil of such as system and the fact that the English tolerate it and have not risen past indignation and strongly worded notes, shows one how befitting of total collapse English society is.
And where are the Royals? Where are the God chosen defenders of English faith, culture and law? Where are those, designated by God to rule and veto this insanity? . . . . A sorrier lot is hard to imagine.
I don’t agree with Stanislav’s conclusion about why the British Crown is AWOL in this most critical hour for Britain, i.e., because of hedonism. Engaging in sensual pleasures doesn’t necessarily neutralize common sense and resolve. Nor have all of them been touched by scandal. Nonetheless, even allowing for merciless press coverage where every quirk or mistake heads straight to page one, one is struck by their lack of any kind of serious purpose, military service aside, and Stanislav is not without evidence for his opinion.
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It’s just more obvious when the screaming silence issues from those who possess royal authority, no less, and who at the same time can look back to examples of consummate English leadership, royal or otherwise. Even if their political power is today reduced to almost nothing, there is a vast reservoir of royal moral authority. Any one of the Royals could electrify the British if he or she would but describe reality accurately and demand that Britain cease its surrender to a vastly inferior culture and religion and defend its ancient liberties.
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But there is only silence. A silence that is appropriate for the grave of a great nation.
Queen Boudicca led a revolt that killed 70,000 Romans and others after the Romans flogged her. That was how one queen of the island dealt with enemies of her people.
What does the present one do with her time?
”The Failed State of England.” By Stanislav, Matt Rodina, 3/13/10.
Neurotic, dishonest society.
And it isn’t just the Netherlands.
H/t: Jilosophy.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Democrat action plan.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and Britain are still deeply mired in recession, having acquired a vast amount of new government debt to no constructive purpose. No amount of juggling with unemployment figures can obscure the fact that in both countries real jobs are still being lost and that the creation of phony government ones is not altering the drop in family incomes. . . .
* * * *
One of the great modern myths taught in some university economics departments is that government treasuries can be run in a fundamentally different way from the finances of private families. This mythology includes the belief that adding to public debt is a form of investment and that spending the taxpayers’ money on a colossal scale and in a wanton manner may have positive economic virtues.
But before we deal with these minor details, let’s be sure to get wrapped around the axle over the completely extraneous issue of health care. And let’s not create a business-friendly atmosphere, say, by cutting corporate tax rates and increasing domestic energy supplies. No! Let’s screw with business.
And when we’re done with that, let’s be sure to bring up legislation—“comprehensive” legislation, have no fear—that will grant instant citizenship and a free medical school education to illegal immigrants.
Our workers will be back on the job, wages rising, and the economy humming before you can say “bad national acid trip.”
”There Is No Keynesian Miracle.” By Paul Johnson, Forbes.com, 2/12/10?
A modest proposal. Instead of killing the unborn, let’s kill the uninsured.
“For preventing the children of poor people or the poor people themselves in the United States from being a burden on the taxpayers of said country, and the hospitals that presently cannot cast them aside or asunder when medical care is their necessary and needed service, I do hereby forthwith and in good and considered conscience and with the sole and solitary intention of unburdening a tax laden populace, respectfully ask, request and inquire why we can’t Swiftly end the suffering of the medically uninsured before their futures bringeth to them any more pain, hue and cry. In other manner of speech, let us bid them adieu from the world of life and limb demands.” Or not.
Good, kind and compassionate Democrats, I ask thee, thumbs up or down? Well, cats be nimble, I’ll bet every Congressman, and this includes Nancy Pelosi, wants the uninsured to live and let live. Isn’t that special. Let’s let the uninsured breathe on and seek for themselves the American dream and perhaps find it. Let us raise our glasses to their health. For they are our brothers and sisters and we wish them nothing but well. They truly are. We really do. Okay, Rachel’s cool with that. I’m very comfortable driving down that road. In fact, Rachel, obviously, was pulling your leg, tugging your chain, taking the road less traveled, pulling a Swifty; not considering seriously the actual implementation of an end of life decision that neither Rachel nor a governmental panel, under man’s law possesses. But here we come to a fork in the road. And don’t forget what Yogi said.
So what about the other side of the coin, the north end of the south bound question, the dependent clause of the proffered, preposition-inhabiting proposition? Pelosi, Reid, Barack, I’m speaking most directing to these three. If they were reading, I’d say “Don’t look away. Look me straight in the eye and say so I can hear clearly that disposing of unborn inconvenience, ripping brains from bodies like wrapping from presents; “well, yes, I’m comfortable with that.” Yet, how can that leave you at peace?
Is not an unborn life as valuable as an uninsured one?
The unborn life could grow up to find the cure for greed and corruption; or, for that matter, some other awful disease. Likewise, the uninsured could conceivably do the same. However, one of these groups the Congress as a body values; the other is taken out with the trash. Pelosi, Reid, Obama and every other one of you who just couldn’t resist keeping your precious abortion language in your insane, uncouth, unacceptable and unconstitutional, bleeping StealthCare Bill, I’m here to say in no uncertain terms, you make every serious life taker preceding you in death look like the choir boys at St. Anne’s church in Fairlawn, New Jersey. If I weren’t so lady like in manner and way, I’d call you three lost leaders from the local five and dime pompous, pig headed, excuses for civilized life. I’d deplore your zest and zeal for baby butchery in spades. I might even grab the heavy artillery and call Pelosi, Reid and Zero, Tom Hanks in disingenuous disguise. I can’t say how others feel, but you’ve killed my last nerve in the abortive attempt to dress up your actions to unbeat the hearts of the unborn in the attire of “caring for women’s rights.” No such right exists speaketh the United States Constitution. The right to life and liberty trumps the right to jive with the Slaughterhouse Three whose overriding concern is caring for themselves.
When that Stimulus money is taken, and vote friendly pals are paid off with jobs and whatnot born of unspent Stimulus funds, people smarter than I will follow the money; track you down and bring you down. As George said, “Nothing but scurvy spiders weave their webs of deceit until the People stand up and say enough’s enough”. You do what you will. You go on and tell yourselves the ends justify the means. But they never have and never will. You have a right to your opinion, but not to the truth. If this Bill is the abortion I think it is, the people behind it and the ones who sell their souls and votes to the Devil, are infinitely and interminably worse. What’s ahead for them?
The irony of all ironies. Pelosi, Zero, Reid, et al could have lived out their natural lives in the lap of luxury, and been eternally at peace. But when they started picking off the unborn like the soldiers of Japanese descent hiding in the Guadalcanal palm trees picked off the Marines, well that’s a game changer. The Almighty deal breaker. For as wonderful as all their days turn out, there is one that might not work out quite as well for the Pelosi crew. Everybody, even hapless Harry with his multi million unborn kill rate, can figure out where this is headed. It’s where the James Earl Jones voice is heard. It’s not a Friday. Or Monday. Or even a Sunday. Trust me. You don’t want to go there.
(Respectfully I cite Jonathan Swift, 1729, A Modest Proposal for the idea of the entire piece), (It’s a Wonderful Life, writers, Philip Van Doren Stern and Frank Capra, for the great quotes) and my mother and father who always encouraged me to travel my road, even if at the end of it is a brick wall. (And Arthur Herzog who reminds me that truth doesn’t need an exclamation point.)
Hard Times: A Sunday Rumination
Americans began to experience hard times about two years ago. Unfortunate changes in the distribution of political authority, and insane policies enacted by our new ruling elite, made them harder still. As the dynamics inherent in those policies seep into the motivational structure of the American economy, times are likely to become harder than any generation has known them since the Great Depression.
A people that faces hard times is a people in need of sustenance and comfort.
No man's temporal sustenance is guaranteed. It's not always the case that "the sweat of your face" will buy you what you need to survive, much less to flourish. This is particularly true of an economy that promotes extreme specialization, such as that of America.
Most of us are still "above water." Most of us. For those that aren't, physical and emotional survival could well depend upon the generosity of a neighbor, or a stranger. Yet among us who are still doing all right are many who, because they're not quite as well off as they were before the dislocations struck, feel they can't afford to be charitable, or as charitable as they were before the recession.
That's an understandable attitude. We tend to be charitable in proportion to our discretionary incomes. When our margins decline, we retrench along with those margins. Looking out for oneself and one's own is, after all, the first of anyone's temporal responsibilities. But that doesn't change the consequences of such a retrenchment.
I've been overjoyed to note these past two years that, in aggregate, Americans have been as charitable as ever, despite our national economic setbacks and our sense of heightened danger from a government run amok. There appears to be a conviction abroad that, in the best sense, we are one another's keepers. We might not be objectively liable for the well-being of our countrymen, even in a sense that God would take seriously. Yet we've responded to needs national and international with the generosity that's characterized Americans since we became a nation. It's a marvelous thing to witness.
But that's only half the job.
"Man does not live by bread alone," as Christ said to Lucifer near the conclusion of His time in the wilderness. He requires food for all three of his active agencies: body, mind, and soul.
Food for the body, whatever its provenance, is consumed by an individual for his own benefit. It need not serve anyone else's purposes to sustain his life. He eats it, its nutrients couple with his physiology, and his body gains strength. Whether we take our repasts in solitude or in company, there's nothing more individual than the consumption of food for the body.
The food of the mind, though we normally seek it as individuals, is societal in orientation. It consists of tasks suited to our individual skills, by which we demonstrate that we're still capable and valuable to others. It's not the sense of personal power that nourishes one's self-regard nearly so much as the sense that others want and can benefit by what we do. When there's no consumer for our efforts, we close in upon ourselves. We wither away.
The food of the soul is more complex yet. Few persons can consume it all by themselves; no one can harvest it without the active assistance of Another.
Spiritual sustenance consists of reassurance that we matter: not in the ephemeral sense of mattering to other human beings, but in the absolute sense that cannot be destroyed by the passing of those who've loved us. For one who resides exclusively in time, among beings as mortal and forgetful as we, cannot hide from the ultimate loss of such significance as he can attain during his lifetime.
The reductio ad absurdum is Robinson Crusoe. Imagine if that unfortunate had known, beyond all question, that there is no God and no eternal life, that he would never again seen a human face, and therefore would never again matter to anyone. What would that have done to his labors for his own survival? Is it even imaginable that he would have struggled on, doing everything in his powers to tame his new home and amass comforts within it? I can't see it, and I doubt that anyone else could convince me otherwise.
Yet Crusoe, marooned alone for a long spell on his island, never ceased to give thanks to God for what deliverance He had vouchsafed him. His faith was all he had to sustain him, and even in the absence of human company it proved sufficient. His story is suffused with Christian feeling from first to last: a conviction of absolute significance, meaning that transcended his mortal life by an infinite degree and that obligated him to strive to his utmost on his own behalf, that he could not possibly have sustained without his faith.
One of the great puzzles of life is why so many persons, in straits of one sort or another, turn away from Christian faith when it would be of greatest benefit to them.
The reason I've heard most frequently from those who've turned away when under unusual stress is that "I haven't got time for that right now." Yet somehow, "right now" never seems to elapse. The distance between the afflicted one and God grows greater with time. After some unspecifiable point, he sees the gulf as unbridgeable, and his departure as permanent.
Such a severance constitutes a tragedy beyond my ability to express. Why, when food for the body or the mind becomes scarce and hard to gather, would one voluntarily eschew food for the soul? What benefit could be gained that way?
It could be a devil's bargain, I suppose. One who isn't thinking clearly might be seduced into believing that spiritual nourishment can be traded for other sorts. But that's not the way human life works.
It could also be a misconception about the demands of Christian faith. Neither God the Father nor Christ His Son demanded anything of Man but appreciation of Creation's gifts to us and respect for the laws graven into human nature. Self-abnegation is not required of us; neither is the renunciation of any wholesome pleasure. Granted that various clerics and churchly bodies have made such demands, those were and are men speaking, not the tongue of God. I believe wholeheartedly that such persons will face Divine justice for their presumption.
Christ Himself said it:
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. [The Gospel According To Matthew, 11:28-30]
In return for faith in God and respect for our fellow men, we get the hope of eternal life, and the assurance of unquenchable Divine love. No sacrifices are required. Nor will the ushers throw you out for having nothing to put in the collection basket. As Ann Coulter wrote recently, if you can find a better deal than that, take it!
I often come to the end of these Ruminations feeling as if I could have condensed the whole thing into a single paragraph, perhaps even a single sentence. Christ did so, as indicated above. But (as a certain Robert Zimmerman would surely remind me) I'm not Him. I have to circumnavigate my points if I'm to feel they've been properly encapsulated. I hope that doesn't put too many Gentle Readers off.
Every man has a burden or twelve: a "cross to bear" that often feels too heavy for mortal strength. Faith, actively used, can and will lighten the load. Pray! Don't be an arrogant asshole; admit that you need help! You'll get it, though its form might not be what you specifically request. When the wood begins to rub your shoulder raw, call upon Jesus. Presently you'll feel His shoulder right alongside yours.
Of course you will. You matter to Him. Look at the burden He undertook to carry for you.
May God bless and keep you all.
