There is clearly a false humility. One species in the genus is spite or despite for life itself.
We can see where it begins. Dead sand is "clean"; living humus is "dirty." Which would you rather have on your hands, SAE-30 motor oil, purified and dead, or snot? Who among us has escaped the humiliating experience of being pooped on by a bird? Ah! Life! NOT!
Human life can be seen as more of a plague than the occasional avian insult. While cities should be monuments to creativity and civility, yet they too have their excretory functions, and it takes planning and discipline for humans in cities to avoid fouling their nest.
And in this we can see not only our ambivalence, fallen as we are, about the burden and delights of our animal life, but the fell hand of the enemy, and his disastrous thoughts seeping into our minds.
"Too many children!" is the cry. Diapers in landfills. Children squalling in restaurants. Babies yowling in church. Parents "punished with a baby," as our president once said -- worried, frustrated, unable fulfill their potential, their dreams.
We must, we are told, prevent fecundity. We must make our beds sterile, while we impose no obstacle to orgasm, however achieved. For the good of life, they tell us, we must adopt the practice of death and snatch, scrape, and tear the pre-nascent human from the place ordained, "appointed" as the Bible charmingly says, for it. Otherwise our lives will be ruined.
But they are not our lives, not OURS, not really. As Lewis says, to pretend this is MY life, MY body is ludicrous. Imagine a prince, the young child of a king. In love the royal father makes him lord of some small principality. He receives the honor, the title, the coronet. But still the principality is really governed by the king and his counsellors.
How foolish would that child be who wanted to exercise for himself the princely power! Before his subjects could hear, laugh, and possibly rebel, the kingly sire would send him to his room without any supper!
Yet we claim sovereignty over ourselves, our 'persons' as the old language has it, and seek to extend that sovereignty over the mystery of ensouled life around ourselves, and even in ourselves, all in the name of our dominion.
And the outcome? When we set ourselves against the Lord of Life and Love, what can the outcome be but death and misery?
We humans have been given the titles of dominion and many powers. Beguiled by our seeming majesty we exercise this lordship but in pride and disobedience, not in the wonder which Life, mucus, smells, and all, should compel -- does compel when our eyes are open and our hearts alive.
What false charity to destroy our own kind! What false humility to despise the miracle of our life! What sorrow and wrath we bring down on our own heads, and those of our children, when we, as our pagan forebears did, sacrifice our children to ensure our ease!
May we be forgiven. May we be given new hearts. May we bear life-giving Love, the Son of Love, into a world where we are so lost that to many of us the way to joy is through the death of our heirs.
Lord have mercy upon us.
Christ have mercy upon us.
Lord have mercy upon us.
Good morning MD! Thanks for sharing your morning mutterings. The above line made me think of an awesome country music song, Love Like Crazy by Lee Brice. One of the lines is, “where she blessed him with six more mouths to feed” … this is the exact opposite perspective to the ‘too many children’ mantra … and the one God wants us to have, IMHO.
Lord Have Mercy On Us indeed!
Deuteronomy 30:
15Consider that I have set before thee this day life and good, and on the other hand death and evil: 16That thou mayst love the Lord thy God, and walk in his ways, and keep his commandments and ceremonies and judgments, and thou mayst live, and he may multiply thee, and bless thee in the land, which thou shalt go in to possess. 17But if thy heart be turned away, so that thou wilt not hear, and being deceived with error thou adore strange gods, and serve them: 18I foretell thee this day that thou shalt perish, and shalt remain but a short time in the land, to which thou shalt pass over the Jordan, and shalt go in to possess it. 19I call heaven and earth to witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Choose therefore life, that both thou and thy seed may live: 20And that thou mayst love the Lord thy God, and obey his voice, and adhere to him (for he is thy life, and the length of thy days,) that thou mayst dwell in the land, for which the Lord swore to thy fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he would give it them.
So let the way wind up the hill or down,
O’er rough or smooth, the journey will be joy:
Still seeking what I sought when but a boy,
New friendship, high adventure, and a crown,
My heart will keep the courage of the quest,
And hope the road’s last turn will be the best.
-— Henry Van Dyke
TRUE TRUE.
THX THX.
Great post - is the Lewis you refer to "C.S. Lewis"? Beautiful sentiments - prayers for all of us...
I’m speechless.
Pretty thought provoking stuff.
Life is not pretty. It poops, it bleeds, it is messy.
Life is what happens off camera, not what the TV shows present.
Changing my daughters diapers isn't glamorous, but it is love. And love is not some bubbly feeling, it is a bond, a commitment, a choice.