WFTD – Page 2 – Brave Ole World

Day Bidet #84

June 27, 2022June 27, 2022 by WFTD, posted in Uncategorized

There is a love deeper than theirs who seek only the happiness of their beloved:

“He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”
“I’ve watched a baby take her first steps and a saint breathe his last breath. But it’s that smile that pushes all seven wonders of the world from mind and memory and claims pride of place.” (Related: “On Saturday evenings, he would go out back and practice his Sunday sermons by preaching to his old mare he called ‘Evangeline.'” Related: “[E]very Sunday, she would cook a large meal after church, open to anyone who was hungry.”)
“Malachi was indeed a prophet for his time and ours.”
“Carnivore gave me back my mobility and my life.” (Related—you can’t trust the experts. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related. Related.)
“Ten Reasons to Think Jesus Cleared the Temple Twice”
Correct. Correct. (Related.) Woof.
Evelyn Waugh: “To make an interior act of renunciation and to become a stranger in the world; to watch one’s fellow-countrymen, as one used to watch foreigners, curious of their habits, patient of their absurdities, indifferent to their animosities—that is the secret of happiness in this century of the common man.”

Biased feedback…or… (Related. Related: “Women are totally off and don’t really know what they want.” Related. Related—why, indeed.)

“What does the Bible Say about Dreams?”

Clown World. Clown World. Clown Church. Demon World. (Related. Related.) Demon World. (Related. Related.) ~~Clown World~~ ~~Demon World~~ Always Both World: “US officials are reportedly happy to plunge the world into a global recession and mounting hunger (starvation) to ensure that Russia doesn’t win in Ukraine.” (Related. Related—language warning. Related. Related.) But—lest we forget—a wondrous and beautiful world nonetheless. (Related: “Let me help you with your wings.”)

“Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?” (Related. Related.)

Somewhere Else There Must Be More of It

June 24, 2022June 24, 2022 by WFTD, posted in Apologetics, Art, faith, Literature, worldview

Rachel Telian, “where all the beauty comes from”

“Oh cruel, cruel!” I wailed. “Is it nothing to you that you leave me here alone? Psyche; did you ever love me at all?”
“Love you? Why, Maia, what have I ever had to love save you and our grandfather the Fox?” (But I did not want her to bring even the Fox in now.) “But, Sister, you will follow me soon. You don’t think any mortal life seems a long thing to me tonight? And how would it be better if I had lived? I suppose I should have been given to some king in the end—perhaps such another as our father. … Indeed, indeed, Orual, I am not sure that this which I go to is not the best.”
“This!”
“Yes. What had I to look for if I lived? Is the world—this palace, this father—so much to lose? We have already had what would have been the best of our time. I must tell you something, Orual, which I never told to anyone, not even you.”
I know now that this must be so even between the lovingest hearts. But her saying it that night was like stabbing me.
“What is it?” said I, looking down at her lap where our four hands were joined.
“This,” she said, “I have always—at least, ever since I can remember—had a kind of longing for death.”
“Ah, Psyche,” I said, “have I made you so little happy as that?”
“No, no, no,” she said. “You don’t understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine…where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.”
She kissed both my hands, flung them free, and stood up. She had her father’s trick of walking to and fro when she talked of something that moved her. And from now till the end I felt (and this horribly) that I was losing her already, that the sacrifice tomorrow would only finish something that had already begun. She was (how long had she been, and I not to know?) out of my reach, in some place of her own.
CS Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Day Bidet #83

June 20, 2022June 19, 2022 by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

The Moon and the Pleiades have set:

“[H]is was the most beautiful worship I’ve ever heard.”
Build—patiently and quietly. (Related. Related—makes ya think! As does this—and this. Related.)
“Love,” to riff off Dante, “is the secret force that moves all things.”
“The brain craves predictability more than happiness.” (Related. Related.)
“[F]or the early Christians the imminence of Jesus’s return was not a matter of dogma but of hope.”
“[T]here simply aren’t as many gainfully employed men to go around as there used to be.” Progress!
Matthew 10.38-39: “And he that taketh not his crosse, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake, shall find it.”

She is beauty, she is grace. (So is she.) She is…not. (Nor he.)

“I trust that the child I will meet in heaven one day will unmistakably bear some mark by which I will know what I did to him.” (Related.)

Content warning.

“Jesus is telling his disciples that their meekness, poverty, and even their state of persecution means they are already in a state of shalom, the kind of happiness that comes from being exactly where God intends you to be.”

They Love All Men

June 16, 2022June 16, 2022 by WFTD, posted in faith, History

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. … But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.
The Epistle of Diognetus

Day Bidet #82

June 6, 2022June 4, 2022 by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you:

Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Demon World. But let us dwell on beautiful, excellent, and wonderfully strange things!

“Jesus’s objection is Pharisees using an otherwise neutral practice to draw attention and honor to themselves.”

Too Few Good Men

June 2, 2022June 4, 2022 by WFTD, posted in Culture, Men and Women, politics

Language warning.

“[I]f they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed.” So they didn’t. They chickened out. (Related. More.)

In the background of the gun control debate, and many other political debates, is the implicit assumption that there will always be enough “good guys” around—and they are mostly guys—to fix our stuff and keep us safe when crap hits the fan. However fashionable it may have been to hate on cops two years ago, we all still want someone to pick up if we have to call 911. Especially if our kids’ safety is involved.

But it turns out we’ve begun to exhaust our supply of good men. Feminism hasn’t helped, perpetual war hasn’t helped, the opioid crisis hasn’t helped, “Progress” in general hasn’t helped. Many men are shirking their duties as men, precisely because the payoff for being a man just isn’t there. Boys will be boys, but many men will only be men if you give them good reason to be. Our society hasn’t given most men such reason, and so here we are.

But we need good men. In particular, we need courage, the paradigmatically masculine virtue. The problem is that we’ve jacked up our courage supply chains even worse than our baby formula ones. And that problem cannot be fixed by anything less than a civilizational reset.

Lewis:

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. … In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

We call cops pigs and expect them to risk their lives in active shooter situations. We laugh at masculinity and are shocked to find dead children in our midst.

Day Bidet #81

May 30, 2022May 30, 2022 by WFTD, posted in Day Bidet

In Flanders fields the poppies blow:

“By grace through faith you have been declared innocent to live a rehabilitated life. Devote yourself to this new life—stay clean, sober, holy, and watchful—and the Lord will reward you when he returns.”
“There is a hundred times more reality in any novel by Michel Houellebecq than in a thousand run-of-the-mill sociological essays.”
A handy list of divine attributes. (And a handy list of foods to avoid.)
Carnivore success story. Carnivore success story. Carnivore success story. Carnivore success story.
“A strong case can be made for the divinity of Jesus from 1 Peter.”
‘Tis the season. (And a side of Cummings I’d never seen before!)
Jeremiah 22.16: “He judged the cause of the poore and needy, then it was well with him: was not this to know me, saith the Lord?”

Clown World. Clown World. Clown World. Demon World. Demon World (related)—Lord have mercy. But always, no matter what, a beautiful world nevertheless.

“[T]he early church fathers believed that evidence for the canonicity of books can be found in the books themselves.”

We Are Not Bound for Ever to the Circles of the World

May 26, 2022May 26, 2022 by WFTD, posted in faith, Literature

“Nay, lady, I am the last of the Númenóreans and the latest King of the Elder Days; and to me has been given not only a span thrice that of Men of Middle-earth, but also the grace to go at my will, and give back the gift. Now, therefore, I will sleep.
“I speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men.”
“Nay, dear lord,” she said, “that choice is long over. There is now no ship that would bear me hence, and I must indeed abide the Doom of Men, whether I will or I nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Númenóreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.”
“So it seems,” he said. “But let us not be overthrown at the final test, who of old renounced the Shadow and the Ring. In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!”
JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings