Have Courage and Be Kind

Branagh's Cinderella (2015) was underrated at the time, and I have not rewatched it yet; but I suspect strongly that it holds up well to a second viewing.  The line I remember most vividly is the advice Cinderella's mother gives her, the line that Cinderella hangs on to through everything that happens afterwards: "Have courage and be kind."

That's a tough pair of commands to grasp, especially both together.  It's especially hard when one is afraid of what may happen next--politically, socially, culturally, medically, religiously ...

Nearly everyone I know who pays attention to current events is afraid right now.  It feels a bit like that scene in the Aeneid where the Trojans and Latins stand facing each other, ready for battle, but no one wants to start--and then some random goddess incites a random act of violence; and here we go.

There's not a whole lot one can do to ensure that such a thing won't happen: that we won't see a Selma, or a Tiananmen Square, or whatever your particular nightmare is.

Nonetheless, it's a bit facile to suggest that you stop having your nightmare (though cognitive behavioral therapy, or what one of my spiritual directors liked to call "spiritual jujitsu," works a lot better than some people give it credit for).

So, because it applies no matter how objectively horrible one thinks the present is and fears the future may be, the phrase I keep returning to is the one from Cinderella: "Have courage and be kind."

That pretty much covers it, from a human perspective.  Add in the divine motivation, and you're good to go.

Let the games begin; throw open the gates to the Coliseum.

Have courage, and be kind.

What If This Were Real (II)

But let me take that up a notch.  I think in a deeper sense, the semi-pros in that Princess Ida production aren't actually doing what they would really do.  The entire premise of musical theater relies on the absurd idea that people break into song and dance at moments of high emotion, or really any emotion at all.  That's not our normal universe--that's a fantasy world.  Fantasy worlds operate by different rules.  In a fantasy world like that, people don't sing awesome music while staring at the audience or nodding casually to each other; when they're choristers, they don't pair or trio up at random as people do at parties.  They are always doing what the music does.

Age quod agis.

Breaking news: it may look to you as if you are living an ordinary life, but if you accept--really accept--the Christian message, you're actually in a fantasy land where every single mote and moment is choreographed by a masterful director.  You can, of course, ignore that, and end up getting moved around like a piece of scenery.  Or you could, you know, act.  You could work with the director.  You could actually pay attention to the music of the spheres.

It's tempting to say, "But I am doing what I would do if this were real--see, I gave up X for Lent, and said a nice thing to Y, and refrained from this habitual temptation."

That's fine, mon frères.  But all that is actually still just level one whispers and nods.  If you were really listening to the music, if you really thought this were real--all those little, isolated instances of reality would actually be connected and coordinated and, yes, choreographed (not be you, but obviously with your cooperation, consent, and input) into something much more tremendous.

In other words, if you really believed in God, you would be a saint.

Also, we'd have far more excellent Gilbert and Sullivan productions with which to educate our children.

What If This Were Real? (I)

One of the things I learned from being in, and watching, merely competent musicals (as opposed to truly excellent ones) is the importance of doing what you would really do.

There's obviously a right way and a wrong way to do this.  For instance, in the (competent) production of Princess Ida here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9GRJESLQe4&t=2860s) there is a fair bit of the usual nodding and whispering among principals and chorus to convey the fact that we are Doing Something even when we don't have lines or notes because we are Real Characters--it is an attempt at doing "what you really would do."

In contrast, the (superb) production of Mikado here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbpUzCFCy_8&t=1813s) there is nodding, gesturing, whispering--but it is highly coordinated, stylized, and choreographed, limited to specific moments and places.

Maybe another way to put this is to say that the professional production is thoroughly blocked--the director(s) had a vision that entailed telling the actors (or more likely, determining with them) what they were to do at every single moment.  That overarching, all-determining vision is just not evident in the (I'm guessing) semi-pro production.

In both cases, the actors have been instructed to do "what you really would do," but in the case of the professional production, what one really would do is ordered to the whole.

It's an obvious metaphor for the spiritual life, no?  The capstone, the thing that takes you to the level of sanctity, is to order your doing to the whole.  The prior thing, the thing that gets you to level one, is to do "what you really would do."  You have to persuade yourself that this is important first, important enough not to just go through the motions--stand there and sing, survive your day--but to act as if this life you are in were real.

Disputed Catholic Questions, I

Here's a fun one.

The evil of usury vs. the permissibility of the death penalty.

Did the Church endorse both of these whole-heartedly?  In the same way?  And has the Church now contradicted or allowed to fall into disuse her former teaching on the matter?

I have some very vague thoughts.  But the first and most interesting one is that these are two issues that seem to split orthodox Catholics down the center.

This Is a Bad Argument, III

I do not endorse the last few paragraphs of this article.  But I think it's worth noting that someone on American Greatness--not a commie liberal site by any stretch of the imagination--recognizes excess coronavirus deaths, sweet memes and Johns Hopkins researchers to the contrary notwithstanding.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/06/yes-total-deaths-in-the-u-s-are-up/

By the way, I'm a bit amused by the whole trend of either side in the corona wars holding up an expert and saying "Look, see, they are so highly credentialed their opinion must be true!"

If someone with three PhDs says "wear masks" and someone with four PhDs says "don't wear masks" nothing is actually proven, is it?  Even if a hundred doctors with multiple doctorates say "wear masks" and ten doctors with multiple doctorates say "don't wear masks" (or the reverse) still, nothing is proven.

Smart people can be wrong too; and when smart people disagree (as they currently seem to do) then obviously, some of them are wrong.

It's all about the arguments, mon freres.

Our Post-Christian Culture is Forgetting the Radical Virtue of Forgiveness

 Every pandemic needs a good stack of self-help books, to keep readers entertained and sane. Fortuitously, this March Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer released such a book, based on their popular podcast. That book, How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self-Help Books, is dry, entertaining, but (caveat lector) salted with R-rated language. The coauthors sift through the self-help strategies they attempted to follow, praising some and discommending others. Sometimes their meta-advice seems to be the product of a luminous commonsense that makes one wonder what the original “helpful” authors were thinking. Sometimes it is clearly a product of their own backgrounds, experiences, and ideologies — progressive, feminist, secular. Almost always it is entertaining or at worst innocuous.

There’s one spot, however, that gave me pause. It wasn’t one of the many paeons to gender equality, critical theory, etc. It was Greenberg’s and Meinzer’s unwillingness to countenance forgiveness as a self-help strategy. Meinzer, who wrote most of that section, quotes a friend and fellow podcaster, Cameron Drews, saying that “There are a lot of options between unconditional forgiveness and burdened misery” (144). Meinzer then expands on that idea:

We can choose not to wish any happiness upon the people who’ve done us wrong and live happy lives. We can choose not to feel grateful to the people who’ve hurt us and be grateful for the lives we have. And, we can choose to have some anger in our hearts towards those who’ve abused us and still have hearts that overflow with joy.

The world is filled with in-betweens, and I honestly believe life is better when we don’t force ourselves to live on the extreme ends. If you want to, go ahead. But I, for one, don’t want to. And I feel at peace — unforgiving heart and all (144-5).

It might seem initially that Meinzer and Greenberg and Drews are being inconsistent. Left-leaning people tend to value tolerance and being open to other people and experiences, tend to profess live-and-let-live philosophies, tend to value niceness and kindness highly, and tend to condemn anger, rage and violence. These qualities are, to be clear, not exclusive to progressives; and they are values that people across political and ideological divides — especially Christians — can, do and should recognize. But they remain for all that stereotypically progressive values.

Unwillingness to forgive seems to strike at the heart of such a personal philosophy. So when Meinzer admits to still being angry at those who did terrible things to her as a child, it might seem to be incompatible with the philosophy upheld elsewhere in the same book.

I think, however, the incompatibility is superficial ...

Read the rest at the Register.

I Love You, And ... VII

When a child grows up hearing I love you BUT he or she learns tacitly that unpleasant things are opposed to love.  The parent loves him, but the love is constrained, or conditioned, by good behavior.  The parent may even love him very much—but there’s a limit to that love.

Of course, this is never the parent’s intention.  But that’s the message that comes through if the parent—whether empathetic or authoritarian—habitually contrasts love and discipline.

In contrast, the child who grows up hearing I love you AND learns that unpleasant things can sometimes (not always—cf. abuse) be signs of love.

“I love you, and because I love you I want you to grow strong and not get sick.  Broccoli helps you do that, and that’s why I gave you broccoli.”

“I love you, and so I don’t want you to get hurt.  That’s why I took the toaster away—because you could hurt yourself on it.”

“I love you, and so I put your pants on,* because pants are good for you—they keep you warm, and they make sure we don’t get in trouble with strangers.”

“I love you, and so we are going to [fill in the blank] right now, because it helps us [fill in the blank].”

“I love you, and that’s why I am not letting you scream in the family room, because if you learn to do that, it teaches you to be inconsiderate to others, and that will serve you very poorly later in life.”

A lot of the tough parenting calls actually come down to that last idea.  But really—teaching your children to be considerate to others—yes, that certainly includes their parents!—is one of the most loving things a parents can do, if we want them to grow up to be happy adults with good relationships.

And if many parents today have a hard time with this—maybe that’s because their own parents didn’t quite get it.  Maybe the parents of these modern parents were empathetically permissive, or harshly authoritarian, and taught today’s parents, in one way or another, that love and hard stuff are opposites.

Regardless, that’s one lie that we shouldn’t let stand in our own parenting.  Love and hard stuff have to be integrated, if human beings are to have a chance of dying to self, or living happily ever after, or achieving the happiness they pursue, or … whatever your phrase of the day is, n’est-ce pas?

* The canny reader will discern another True Story.