A War of the Heart

If the “culture war” over abortion is ever to be won, then the heart must be taken captive. No legislative measure will ever secure victory. Epithets such as “baby-killer” or “murderer” will never soften an opponent’s heart or change her mind. No slogan of “My body, my choice,” will ever mute the fact that such a choice silences a beating heart. No shock-tactics like handing the president an aborted fetus will ever reach beyond the turning stomach into the darkened heart.

If victory is to be achieved, it must come by love, by compassion, by innovation, and by honesty. Posturing and politics are not necessary, nor are they very helpful. The science is simple, and if taken at face-value, we must admit that conception inaugurates a life. That life will soon become a person, provided the mother’s “choice” provides no impediment.

It must be argued that this so-called “choice” is unilateral, since the life in formation is given no choice. It is obliterated before it could ever had a say. Any number of excuses have been concocted as to why that the innocent’s voice is arbitrary, but the fact remains: if given the choice, the innocent would choose life.

Love. Compassion. Innovation. Honesty. In this debate Logos, Ethos and Pathos must all be employed according to these criteria. Modern technologies provide those of us on the side of life with ample ammunition. “The pen is mightier than the sword.” We might also include the keystroke, the Web address, the video camera, the ultrasound.

Those of us on the side of life must recognize that the vast majority of aborting mothers are not cruel or inhumane. They are distraught, confused, frightened, or misled. They are given to persuasion, provided the information is available and tactfully presented.

Scientists and designers can be of tremendous value in this effort. Alexander Tsiaris provides an excellent example of simple and tactful, yet powerful use of technology in the war for the heart:

Factual and direct ads such as this can be designed by fresh campaigners:

Politicians such as the one below need not try and force morality upon us, but only help us navigate the question with direct and honest stimulus:

Brave women such as this one have a message that can be shared, discussed, and wrestled with:

Logos, Ethos, and Pathos employed by love, compassion, innovation, and honesty. This is a war of the heart, and we must treat it so. In waging this war, we must never forget that the forces we are engaged against are truly demonic, but the persons we engage in the battle are not themselves demons. They are children of God, imprinted with His image, and therefore worthy of our love and empathy.

Two Interesting Studies

It’s good to see the Internet can be so useful. And it’s tragic to find that our lives can be so easily manipulated by the information sources we trust. Perhaps the problem lies less with those trusted sources, and more with ourselves, insofar as we actually expect these media to provide us with true things, to be without bias, and – in the age of the consumer – for the information they provide us to be not-for-profit.

This painful reality is only reiterated by two recent studies that illustrate the media trend in the current Republican campaign race. I stumbled upon both studies today, and they both corroborate the notion that the media picks our winners for us, and writes the narrative for our losers as well.

Case in point: Congressman Ron Paul. The Atlantic Wire reports on a study that shows Paul’s clocking in at last place regarding overall news coverage, behind all other Republican candidates, in spite of his avid grass-roots support and hefty campaign fund-raising. Not to mention his multiple and consistent straw poll victories, and heavy active and retired military support, and a base that seems to transcend party lines the likes of which not even Obama enjoyed.

Another report cited in the International Business Times finds just how little face-time Paul has received in the multiple televised Republican debates. While his polling numbers are consistently higher than Bachmann, Gingrich, Santorum, Hunstman, and until recently, Herman Cain, Paul enjoys less attention than all of them, clocking in again at dead last. I can’t cite the exact number of two-hour debates there have been since I got interested in the race (at least five, I’d say), but it’s pretty clear who these stations don’t want me to listen to when the outlets give the man only 18 minutes total over the course of all those debates (and then some). Instead, they’d much rather me listen the petty differences between Romney-Perry-Cain, and for a while Bachmann.

Ah, well. All this goes to show, I guess, that the Revolution truly will not be televised. Our affable Big Brother wants us to know he has only our best interests in mind; but for those of you who don’t like the taste of government kool-aid, then please consider fighting the system, f-ing the Man, and all other such clichés. You can start by killing the messenger.

Let evil be.

The following is taken from Wounded by Love: the Life and Wisdom of Elder Porphyrios –

“You don’t become holy by fighting evil. Let evil be. Look towards Christ and that will save you. What makes a person saintly is love – the adoration of Christ which cannot be expressed, which is beyond expression, which is beyond… And such a person attempts to undertake ascetic exercises and to do things to cause himself to suffer for the love of God.

“No monk became holy without ascetic exercises. No one can ascend to spirituality without exercising himself. These things must be done. Ascetic exercises are such things as prostrations, vigils and so on, but done without force. All are done with joy. What is important is not the prostrations we will make or the prayers, but the act of self-giving, the passionate love for Christ and for spiritual things. There are many people who do these things, not for God, but for the sake of exercise, in order to reap physical benefit. But spiritual people do them in order to reap spiritual benefit; they do them for God. At the same time, however, the body is greatly benefited and doesn’t fall ill. Many good things flow from them.”

via Glory to God for All Things.

These is good medicine for one such as I who lately struggles much with fasting and its benefits. Even more than that, the notion of not becoming holy via fighting evil is compelling. This matter has weighed heavily on my heart lately. When I came into the Church, my sponsor advised me that I had three enemies in this life: the devil, the world, and myself, and he told me always to blame myself first (it robs the devil of his chance to do so!). As of late, however, I feel stuck in the mire of all that’s bad in the world, and find myself wanting to flee everything. My family’s future goals of living self-sufficiently on a farm could easily be construed as such, and none do so more than I in my own heart.

But the Lord counsels otherwise: “What makes a person saintly is love – the adoration of Christ which cannot be expressed, which is beyond expression, which is beyond…”

Oh, the Games they Play

Q: it must be driving the party leaders crazy that you’re in third place in the polls, right?

A: I was thinking the other day that I’m third in national polls and we had a two-hour debate and they gave me four minutes.

via My interview with Ron Paul | NJ.com.

It’s really a shame that we let the Media choose our candidates for us. Ron Paul is either explicitly labeled “crazy” or simply by suggestion. Even Jon Stewart knows this, and calls them on it. That people would buy into it without actually reading the man’s words, or considering his positions, is really a failure of our “enlightened” perception of ourselves.

Vote Ron Paul.

“One Day in a Monastery”

Byzantine, Texas: “One Day in a Monastery” movie trailer.

Follow the link to see the trailer for what looks to be a very interesting cinematic look at monastics.

National Non-Persons

“First, Ron Paul, Herman Cain and Jon Huntsman are all, for different reasons, being treated as national non-persons by the political media.

Second, political media has become a national freak show that moves from one flavor of the month to the next, without seriously addressing the things that voters care deeply about. Like jobs, wars, mortgages and poverty.

Who looked more asinine, Donald Trump running for president against the president’s birth certificate, or political television personalities who treated him seriously as a potential commander in chief?

Poor Rick Perry. He never understood that the beast that praised him, as it now praises Christie, will devour him, as it will devour Christie if he runs, which he is almost certainly too smart to do.

Third, it is impossible to have a serious discussion about serious issues on political television. The country hungers for serious politicians who will address serious matters, and for political television that does not treat the audience as though they are political consultants or village idiots.”

via Ron Paul should kidnap Chris Christie – The Hill’s Pundits Blog.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and the doors of perception (and cynicism) are wider, but it’s all too clear this year just who is being chosen for president by the media. They will not discuss anyone but Romney or Perry, and neither of those guys are very impressive. Neither would have my vote, even in the general election. It’s one of the few times I am thankful for the Internet.

New Normal

“This world is spiritually very, very dangerous. It is only because addiction has become the ‘new normal’ that so many are oblivious to its siren song of seduction.” ~ Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

via Roads from Emmaus.

These days, I think of this nearly any time I look at an advertisement. Every thing around us seems to be preaching its own gospel, its own “good news.” This morning, while getting ready for work, I glanced at the back of my Old Spice ”Afterhours” deoderant. It quipped: “Drag races. Pillow fights. Never forget the most awesome things in the world happen at night.”

Beyond the asinine implication that nothing really worthwhile happens during the day – with sunshine and light and warmth – it occurred to me that the examples the ad uses as evidence for the strength of its product don’t actually even fall into the category of “night activities.” Any drag race I’ve ever seen has been filmed and aired in the day. Pillow fights are by no means restricted to night, just as food fights aren’t restricted to day.

So the ad uses a flawed argument. So what? It’s just an ad. And perhaps there isn’t actually a “what” to all of this, as this is clearly a silly thing to get excited about. The point is this: we are fatally complacent, willing to buy just about anything, lace our bodies with it, buy into the image it helps us to create for ourselves. Listen to anything it tells us. Ignore the blatant falsehoods it puts off as gospel truth. In so doing, we stare longer and harder into the still pool while our hearts waste away without help.

Pertinently Perennial

In light of my last post, I thought this quote from Milan Kundera could not be more applicable…

From Immortality:

“The concept of human rights goes back some two hundred years, but it reached it’s greatest glory in the second half of the 1970s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had just been exiled from his country and his striking figure, adorned with a beard and handcuffs, hypnotized Western intellectuals sick with a longing for the great destiny that had been denied them. It was only thanks to him that they started to believe, after a fifty-year delay, that in communist Russia there were concentration camps; even progressive people were now ready to admit that imprisoning someone for his opinions was not just. And they found an excellent justification for their new attitude: Russian communists violated human rights, in spite of the fact that these human rights had been gloriously proclaimed by the French Revolution itself! And so, thanks to Solzhenitsyn, human rights once again found their place in the vocabulary of our times; I don’t know a single politician who doesn’t mention ten times a day ‘the fight for human rights’ or ‘violations of human rights.’ But because people in the West are not violated by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity the more it loses concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone towards everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. The world has become man’s right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speedlimit the right to exceed the speedlimit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street….”

By the way, everyone should read this book. They have used copies for a single brown eye at the above link.

An Ancient Struggle

“The argument against homosexualism is fundamentally a contest against the reign of voluntarism, the reign of desires furnishing their own justification against reason, the natural purposes of our being, and the conditions in which we dwell.” ~ James Matthew Wilson

via Marriage Ends in New York, An Ancient Struggle Continues | Front Porch Republic.

Much has been said recently of the vote in NY to refashion marriage to be inclusive of those who call themselves homosexual. Interestingly, a demographic that accounts for roughly 2% of the national populous has managed to seize headlines every day since the historic legislation. No other group so small – for instance, farmers – has been able to garner such a vibrant spectrum of coverage in regards to their imperiled interests. Apparently, the Media determine the causes they will themselves champion.

However, in spite of the barrage of reports, stories and commentary, neither wing of the Media seems willing to break the only real taboo in this discussion around this homosexual orientation; in other words, what does homosexuality, as a lifestyle and an orientation, do to the human soul?

The group of individuals who comprise a phenomenon known simply as “ex-gays” is one that is highly scorned by the Left and somehow ignored by the Right in the public debate. We have become so convinced as a culture that homosexuality is somehow normative that to even suggest the possibility that a person might not want to be gay is scandalous. When such a person actually overcomes – or at the very least, acts contrary to – his homosexual orientation, it is treated as if he were the one going against his nature. The vitriol once reserved for practicing homosexuals themselves by a “homophobic” mainstream culture has been redirected to spew only upon those who are so bold to deny that they are biologically homosexual, created by God to be as such, and happiest when living out the proclivity. In short, they are the true pariahs.

Please allow me to demonstrate my point. This week, as my wife and I were at the theater to take in the newest offering from Terrance Malick, The Tree of Life (recommended), we were subjected to a trailer for the movie, Pariah. This flick features a young african-american woman struggling to come to terms with her homosexual orientation. More than that, she is drawn to the masculine expression of lesbianism, a highly condemned mien within the black community. Ironically, the trailer simultaneously tried to affirm the young woman’s femininity while extolling her courage to practice masculinity. Given the black community’s disposition against this kind of behavior, I somehow doubt the producer had that demographic in mind in funding this film. Rather, this film was created for “White Liberals,” who are open-minded enough to assume their worldview must be accepted by everyone. The title of the film, Pariah, only speaks to the notion that a black homosexual girl is representative of one of the last few clusters of individuals who have yet to be embraced – or at the very least, tolerated – by their surrounding communities. Likely, the film could have substituted a Latina for the african-american, with similar product and effect. Regardless, the narrative of the suffering homosexual yearning to be free of social constraints has become so commonplace that the trailer, no matter how fantastic or sentimental, went relatively unnoted by those in the theater with us (except for the elderly couple behind us whispering, “Ooh, that looks good!”).

Now put the shoe on the other foot: imagine such a film in which the main character is a homosexual who is actually trying to relinquish herself from her orientation; to be free of same-sex attraction and all the chaos it has brought upon the life and soul of the individual. Who would have sat quietly through that trailer? Would it even have been deemed fit to air in the theater without fear of heavy repercussions? Surely at some point in the ensuing debate the cankerous curse of “hatespeech” would have landed on the table.

My point is this: the American media has so quickly adopted the “homosexual as normative” narrative that the public has hardly had time to bat an eye. Those who believe homosexuality is a disorder and the support around it little more than sentimentality on steroids constitute a new leper colony, so much so that it has become professionally and even personally treacherous to publicly discuss or question the viability of the homosexual orientation. Anyone who does is automatically understood and lambasted as “homophobic,” bigoted and tantamount to the KKK, and all this in the name of tolerance and freedom.

While we have certainly reached a point that to question this assumption would be professional suicide for any politician interested in re-election, and it boggles the mind to imagine a “forward-leaning” newspaper to print any commentary contrary to the dominant narrative, the Internet is yet uncensored. As vast and incoherent as the Internet has become, this must be the medium for those who dissent. In order for this to be an actual debate, both balanced and open, it is necessary to hear those who have gone beyond the pale and renounced their homosexual orientations. At one time in recent history, homosexuality was on the books as a psychological disorder, and a cure was sought. Now those who seek the cure are the sick ones. But to read their words, they do not sound sick. Rather, they sound like those who have emerged from the cage that confined them, those who have truly come out of their personal prisons. And what they tell us, having been on both sides of the bed sheet, is that the dominant narrative we’re ingesting now is the poison that kept them sick all that time.

For those still reading and interested, I want to recommend two such accounts. The first is by far superior writing and goes beyond the personal experience of the author to analyze the phenomenon of gay culture and its growing acceptance, but both are well worth the read. Be warned: both authors are devout Christians. This is often enough for any skeptic to immediately write off the account as religious babble. But the significance behind these men’s faith is that Christianity does not simply condemn homosexuality, as every major religion does. Instead, it offers healing from it through the Creator and Healer of the world, Jesus Christ. If homosexuality is indeed a disorder of the soul and mind (and no science proves the contrary, regardless of the popular sentiment that homosexuals were “born that way”), then the proper treatment must concern both mind and soul.

Please read carefully. The first account is somewhat graphic in its descriptions.

The Books Were a Front for the Porn: the Truth about the Homosexual Rights Movement by Ronald G. Lee

How a Gay Rights Leader Became Straight by Michael Glatze

You can read more about Michael Glatze in a recent New York Times Magazine article. The writing is good, and the testimony true, but even within the article you can sense the wriggle of the idea that maybe this guy Glatze is somehow not being truthful, or was never gay in the first place, or is just plain crazy. To be sure, the actual response to this man’s conversion from homosexuality was much more irate and rancorous than the article intimates. One need only peruse sites around the blogosphere to get a better idea of what kind of kerfuffle this “coming out” of Glatze’s created for the gay community.

The Fullness and the Center

“Yet I certainly believe that Orthodoxy is simple Christianity—not an elaborate Byzantine ritual, but simple Christianity. When I first came in contact with the Orthodox Church, the music, the icons, the total experience of the liturgy influenced me greatly, but I did not become Orthodox because of that. I became Orthodox because I felt that it is simple Christianity.” ~ Met. Kallistos Ware

via Q & A: Bishop Kallistos Ware on the Fullness and the Center | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.

Recent discussion with non-Orthodox friends got me thinking about much of what Orthodoxy is and what it is not. They were very disapproving of the style of Orthodox worship, the use of icons in a Byzantine style, and seemed to think it was all very exclusive. I was troubled in my heart, because in Orthodox terms, the Church is exactly that. The Tradition passed down through the ages is not a burdensome mantle to be mindlessly borne, but the complete robe of Christ, whose burden and yoke is easy and light. This has been my experience within the Church for the past two years. You are permitted to go as deep as you please, and wade in the shallows for as long as you need. The depth of the Church is the very depth of Christ, for He is eternal, as the Church is from ages to ages. From the outside, I admit, it may seem that this is all simply “man-made tradition,” yet the faith we hold is in the Holy Spirit, who moves and lives throughout the unpolluted Holy Tradition.

And yet not ever tradition in the Church is Holy Tradition. Especially in the West, where Orthodoxy is a relative newcomer, the Holy Spirit must guide us in sifting through the robes of our forebears, allowing for some traditions to fall out so that others – more indigenous to our native land – can supplement and nourish us as we need.