Wednesday, March 26, 2014

The Taste of Wind

Morning out at Castle Rock where wind scuffed the ocean in whitecaps and you wondered if such wildness could uproot even the monolith below. Were rocks immune to rage? You opened your mouth partly in awe and partly to taste this air, in its velocity as pure as a cup of new snow taken from uninhabited mountains.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

On the Book to Write

Write that book that you cannot find in the library that you desperately want to have been written so you can enjoy the great cadences of that cosmos you have always hungered for.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

How to Get the Crowded Churches

The way to win people is not to lower the bar but to raise it to the level of holiness.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Moral Equality?

Are we all as you say suited to be moral equally? I wonder. We are all unique. We all have the capacity to do good and evil (but equally so?---I just wonder what that means?) This is what I mean about the uncritiqued word. Would you claim to be a moral equal to the Marquis de Sade? Or the moral equal to Mother Teresa?

Yes, you mention that not to embrace 'equality' is to consider the female gender inferior to the male gender. Why should this be the assumption? Why isn't it reversed or not even considered? This is my entire point about the rose and the oak. We are conditioned to hear when we read someone lauding the distinction and decrying the 'equality' which is often forced or at least encouraged today. How many girls dress differently any more than boys? Is this accidental, just a quirk or has there been a concerted influence by those that wish to erase any distinction whatsoever? And nowhere did I state one group was more or less morally inferior or superior for that matter. People are conditioned to think this because of the mantra of 'equality'. It was what Marx sought to incorperate economically and what has been accepted uncritically with regard to the differences between the male and female. My point all along was only to point out how most of us have so imbibed this term without a healthy critique. I wonder why we so readily presume to raise the uniqueness, the distinctiveness, the glorious inequality, if you will, is to automatically default to inferiority---this I think is the conditioning, the manipulation with language. And of course this is only one of the many terms molding us in conformity to the world.

The Glorious Inequality II

The whole point is that we have been seduced by the term. Elisabeth Elliot coined "the glorious inequality". I think we err in seeing this as somehow denigrating women as inferior. This is the seduction. God made us with these glorious inequalities that has nothing to do with inferiority or superiority. I like what my friend Connie says (who's very happily married by the way, and quite glad she is a woman): "I am a stronger woman than my husband and he is a stronger man than I." The whole point of the comparison between the oak and the rose is just this: that the inequality or lack of sameness is not a matter of inferiority or superiority. The oak is better at being a tree and the rose is better at being a flower.

The Glorious Inequality

For the past century the gender equalizers have been constantly conditioning us. We have been so seduced. May I suggest that it would be the strangest thing would it not if the rose wished to be equal with the oak? Would this not be the strangest perversion?