Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Tuesday ADD Irregulars, Refugees, Phamily, Early Birds, Dawn Patrol, Conversants, Lurkers and all the rest of you wonderful wanderers at Rubin Report, Phetasy and Padre's. How about venturing back to some quotes and commentary from your early morning Friar? Today's topic - honor. Something we could probably use more of in this shattered age of cultural skepticism and personal destruction. Off to the quotes!
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. - C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. - Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals
t is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them. - Mark Twain, Notebook
Throughout most of my life, clocking in currently at only 55, honor has been something that been called into the question, often mocked and routinely discredited and destroyed for as long as I can remember. I think the fall of honor happened sometime during the Vietnam War and the way our culture dishonored those men when they returned from their service. Many left thinking they were honoring and serving the nation and returned to the culture called them butchers, monsters and murderers.
Perhaps the issue prior to this massive fall of honor in our culture was the blanket honoring of professions and not being critical enough of individuals who did not merit the honor their profession might have possessed. I am not certain. Certain professions of service, sacrifice and dedication have the potential to be honored and ought to be honored if we want to encourage more people to chose a difficult path rather than a selfish path. It is far to easy to indulge our selfish side, the feed the ego rather than rise above it.
Once we felt free to categorically shame our men of sacrifice, the floodgates opened. No vocation was free from potential mockery, shaming or discounting. Dishonoring our service men was a fast act of dishonor and so many of our Vets bear those scars far worse than the scars of combat. The help and understanding they needed was often met with contempt. It wasn't until the the first Gulf War that I think we learned the lessons of collectively shaming such individuals. Sadly we have returned to that now in our treatment of law enforcement. No profession gets an uncritical pass nor should it be instantly & collectively denigrated. Ask, question and understand the whatness of the vocation before filtering if through your preprogrammed biases and blind spots.
Honor - so many vocations and professions that once depended upon the possibility to possess honor as its form of compensation have lost their luster in the current age. I am not sure of the remedy, but I do know this, I can honor individuals, tell them, thank them, acknowledge them. A little considerate humanity goes a long way. I also know I don't have to praise the clowns, honor the users, or idolize the idiots just because our culture cannot distinguish between them and vocations of service & sacrifice, the builders of culture and prosperity. Happy discerning mindful friends! Meanwhile somewhere else is this beautiful spot of reality - there are so many - Happy Tuesday!
Summer Fields At The Red Barn Photograph by Debra and Dave Vanderlaan
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
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XIII
The Proud Minister
One day there came into the Garden a man in torn clothes badly bruised and cut, who said to the Lover, “In the name of the Beloved I demand your help.”
So the Lover and the Disciple let him in and dressed his wounds and prepared the best of the vegetables from the Garden for him to eat. When his wounds had been dressed and he had eaten and rested the Lover asked him how he had fallen into this plight, to which the man replied, “I was Minister of the Beloved in a city near this place, where I preached His gospel and expounded His doctrine to the people. I pointed out to them how their sins had made them wholly hateful to the Beloved and how therefore they were utterly beyond the range of His love and He would condemn them to eternal torments, whereon some fell into despair and wept bitterly but many were angry. One day the magistrates called me before them and begged me to leave the city and preach elsewhere for they said I had made many people so angry and desperate that they feared there might be a riot and they might not be able to protect me but that I might suffer some injury. I, however, very zealous for the Beloved and believing that the magistrates only feared that their own sins might be proclaimed, preached the more vehemently, denounced the magistrates and made it abundantly clear that the whole wicked city was foredoomed to eternal punishment by the just provision of the Beloved. Whereon a mob, stirred up no doubt by the corrupt and venal magistrates, fell upon me with sticks and stones, nearly killing me and driving me out of the city in the state in which I came to you.”
“My friend,” said the Lover, “this was not a good deed of yours, for besides denying the unfathomable compassion of the Beloved, you have by your obstinacy caused these people to commit a grievous sin, and this cannot be pleasing to the Beloved, that through you who profess to be His minister the people should become worse. Surely you remember that He Himself said, ‘If they persecute you in one city flee to another.’”
Therefore the man was very angry, and cursing the Lover, said, “I see that I have had a very false report of you and I do not believe that you are a servant of the Beloved at all. When I came to you so injured for the Beloved’s sake you set before me only herbs and fruits although the garden is full of birds which you could have killed to make me a worthy meal. I shall proclaim everywhere that you are no true servant of the Beloved but a mere falterer who dares not suffer in the cause of the Beloved. Be sure that you are foreordained to eternal torments who suffer nothing here.”
For the man was so blinded by his own pride that he could not perceive the scars on the hands and feet and the brows of the Lover nor how the cloth beneath the armpits of his tunic was dyed with a red dye. So he went out of the Garden cursing and shouting.
But the Lover looked sad and said, “A man like this does much harm to the cause of the Beloved, for by thus speaking falsely about the Beloved he may bring men to fear Him but none to love Him, and by love alone can any man approach the Beloved.”
