Hard at it

I got a quite unusual anonymous comment on here the other day and it had me thinking. Not that that's a particular accomplishment. Thinking is what I do. Compulsively.

Anyway, some post-comment ruminations.

He said I was not as hard as I appeared to be. Passing by any sophomoric double-entendres, I have to say that I am not sure what that means. Ex Cathedra is the place where the author --who has a real name and a non-ExC life-- rants, mostly. And sometimes puts up pictures of parts of God's creation that he finds inspiring. But it's mostly ranting. Since I live in a part of the world where no one I meet on a daily basis is at all on the same page with me politically, it is my safety valve.

And aside from representatives of groups, like the utterly unfortunately chosen POTUS, most of my ranting is really at groups rather than individuals. That's an important part of my character: I very naturally make distinctions --for people that I know-- between them as individual souls and them a members of groups or holders of ideas and beliefs and attitudes. Most of my friends and at least half my family are unreformed liberals. My regular non-casual relationships include people of color, people of both sexes. My patients at work all hold political and religious views with which I am utterly unsympathetic. But I am not unsympathetic to them. Not at all. Because in that space they are their unique selves, not bumper stickers...(even if they occasionally sound like them.)

So there is truth in what the commentor says. Not because I really like Islam or the demographic destruction of America, but because I naturally treat individuals in one way and groups (and ideas) in another.

As for my difficulty in believing in love...well, of course. Anyone grownup who peers deeply into history and experience should have some hesitation. Whoever the God is who has created the world, He is not Mr. Rogers. Yet there are people in my life whom I love and who love me. I know that.

And then there is the vexed question of what that slipperiest of English words means.

My lack of the theological virtue of charity is a given. In Catholic theology, one must be in a state of grace for that gift to be present and operative. I am long out of that state.*

One final thought. I imagine, but do not know, that my commentor --very likely a Catholic-- finds my political anger at liberalism evidence of my lack of love. I would point out that the vast majority of Catholics in history, including saints, have held political view galactically more "right wing" than mine without any sense of uneasiness about their faith. They took the fallen world as they found it, uninfected with the idolatrous and groundless utopian passions of egalitarian moralists who have replaced God with the State as Modern Self Writ Large. The modern Revelation of Liberalism and its highminded and destructive discontents has nothing whatever, nothing whatever, to do with actual historical Christianity. On the contrary, it is a deep disfigurement of Christianity, masquerading --like its Marxist inspiration-- as an uber-ethical transcending of it.

Yet my commentor was kind enough to say that he thinks well of me. For which I thank him.

Now, on to the next rant.


*If you will pardon a coy postal (vs post coital) note, I am in the State of California, which, in its current condition, is about as far from the state of grace as you can get.