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Dear Laura,

G.K. Chesterton was happier in love than Martin Heidegger.

Love,

Jeff

Actually, they're NOTHING alike.

Laura and I had a fun conversation last night. We were on the subject of counseling and therapy. I was remarking that I've always enjoyed seeing a therapist/counselor/spiritual director, since I was a kid. What better experience for a self-doubting guy than to have the attention of another human being for a solid hour, whose entire purpose is to be understanding?

Laura asked, well, isn't that one of the perks of having a relationship or a marriage? Aren't we like one-another's counselor?

And for some reason, that I couldn't put my finger on at the time, I had to reject that comparison. "No. NO. Those two relationships are nothing alike."

That statement was impulsive, but the conviction with which I said it was real. I'm taking this chance to examine why I not only said it but stressed it. Something about the comparison between a counselor-client relationship, and a marriage, was repugnant to me. Why was that?

A clue actually came to me on the drive home, while I was listening to an interview on public radio with a psychiatrist. He gave up a comfortable practice in Manchester to serve the devastated victims of mental illness in Libya.

One of the things that he mentioned is that a powerful obstacle to practicing in Libya was maintaining emotional distance while listening to people's heartwrenching stories--the women whose shrapnel-wrecked husband died in her arms, the woman who, together with children, was used as a human shield by the Gaddafi forces.

I believe that a good counselor walks a thin line between, one the one hand, empathy and advocacy, and on the other, losing perspective. Counselors are mediators between a client's intimate experience and unveiling the blind-spots (whether that take the form of advice, treatment, consolation, etc). When a counselor loses perspective, he loses the capacity to be a mediator.


Professional distance is not only for the protection of the counselor but for securing the his ability to perform and succeed in enabling the client to reach psychological/emotional/mental/spiritual/social checkpoints. In fact, it is not so much a "distance" in the sense of being "far away," as much as a "vista"--an elevated view, that serves in the same capacity as a lighthouse in a storm.

That same professional or emotional distance, while not completely absent from a romance or a marriage, takes a radically different shape. In any case there is no expectation for lovers to maintain what anyone would call professional or emotional "distance".

Where the comparison is spot-on is that both a lover and a counselor provide an oasis of intimate understanding in a desert of empathy.

But where a romance is so much more profound is exactly where it is less useful.

When a couple become lovers, they enter the room of intimate mutual understanding; and when they become husband and wife, they close and lock the door behind them, and throw away the key.

They enter the labyrinth without string.

They walk one-another's forest without anything so much as breadcrumbs.

They dream each other's dreams, sans totems or kicks.

No ruby slippers.

The mutual self-gift of married lovers is total. That does not mean that said lovers lose their individuality--I've written on this point before. But they freely relinquish an eject button. They prioritize love over perspective--love, through faith, becomes the only perspective.

From this we might infer that married lovers do indeed serve one-another's need to be understood, but yet they do not substitute one-another's need for that mediator, that lighthouse, that is the occasional visit to a counselor.

I've written a lot.

I have no idea how I am going to collect and organize all of this.

Disclaimer: The above links are absolutely indiscriminate in their content and subject matter. They span ten years of writing and maturing.

Saying goodbye to Phi? Goodbye to natural beauty?

I have a history in this blog of waxing mystical about the golden ratio.

However, there is a fair amount of literature debunking the prevalence of the golden ratio. Very notable is an essay linked on Reddit, Fibonacci Flim-Flam by Donald Simanek. It's enough to make one abandon the idea altogether. (And, it reinforces my primary reason not to get tattoos: in a single lifetime, no concept or image is so enduring that it retains its meaningfulness forever--not even my best attempt).

 This speaks to the danger of having too much mystical admiration for any one thing in nature, whether that be the mysterious origins of living tissue, the Big Bang, or the self-organizing properties of matter. Attach too much meaning to something, and then when it is swept out from underneath you, what do you have left to stand on?

This is part of the pathos of the debate between modern atheism and belief. The atheists correctly tear down the idols, and the believers, whose belief was founded so thoroughly on those idols (their allegedly bulletproof arguments), then lose their faith. Neither the believer nor the atheist had ever considered an appropriately transcendent understanding of God.

Now to be sure, my enthusiasm for nautilus shells was a careful enthusiasm. I was less rapt by the exact numbers than I was by the more abstract loveliness of nature--nature is not an equilibrium of halves, but an asymmetrical dynamo. Equality and balance are not synonyms; they are actually opposed. True balance involves complementarity and difference; equality causes inertia and stagnation. The nautilus expresses some of my earlier conviction in a symbolic form.

But Simanek's article nevertheless creates a vacuum of meaning. Maybe it is all just random after all.

But Simanek himself explains that this is not the case.

The reason f shows up in nature has to do with constraints of geometry upon the way organisms grow in size. Irrational numbers (those that cannot be expressed as a ratio of integers) are often revealed in this process. The well-known irrationals are Ö2, f, e, p and any multiples or products of them. To make matters more interesting, these are related. For example, phi is f = (Ö5 - 1)/2. And the Euler relation, eip = -1 relates e, i and p where i = Ö(-1). The natural processes that display irrationals are not governed or caused by f in order to achieve some desired purpose or result, but rather they are constrained by the geometry of the universe and the limitations imposed by that geometry on growth processes.

His point is not that nature is chaotic; quite the contrary, his point is that nature is supremely simple. The processes that develop into beautiful spirals--which follow logarithmic patterns if not Fibonacci patterns--are based on the internally consistent properties of the bodies in question. Their matter is self-organizing, and this process undergoes countless influences with varying degrees of impact, producing different results. From this point of view, natural objects are not "reaching towards" an ideal; their apparent patterns and self-replicating structure can be explained by purely material, immediate causes.

The human mind likes parsimony. We are satisfied when diverse phenomena can be explained by the least number of possible rules. Fibonacci mysticism and mundane scientific observation both offer parsimony, but only the latter offers an explanation for it. True, if all logarithmic spirals had golden proportions, our hearts would be all aflutter. But the diversity of observed ratios is neither disheartening nor a point for atheists. Christianity must be comfortable with the messiness of nature.

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. (GK Chesterton)

Thus, we should should not be discouraged because nautilus shells, vines,  don't often reflect the golden ratio.

This issue then becomes a platform to begin the conversation about the validity of teleogical thought. Teleology is thinking about nature in terms of its proper "ends", e.g., "This egg is a chicken egg because, left to its own devices, it will become a chicken."

Teleology has been rejected as true knowledge ever since Descartes. For science, things are explained by what immediately precedes them--not what they will become. But this discussion is for another time.

Budget problem solving

I have a confession to make: I'm a spender.

Looking at my spending for the last ten days--since the last time I've budgeted--I have overspent by 60%. That is, I hoped to spend $10/day on average, and I spent $16/day instead.

What is the primary culprit? Food. I eat out a lot, because I can't be arsed to prepare lunch before going to work. I think I'm eating cheaply, because I usually get a couple "chicken snack wraps" and a large iced tea from McD's for less than $5. But blowing half of my discretionary daily budget on lunch isn't actually economical. If I did that every day, I would be over budget because of other necessary expenses that come out of my discretionary pool--kitty litter, actual healthy groceries, and entertainment.

Now, my situation isn't dire--the $10/day allowance plan was meant to allow for extra spending when necessary. But I am determined to reign in that spending with some smart planning. By my reckoning, I have 22 days left in my July plan to recoup the $60 I've lost so far.

Simple division says that, to accomplish this, my daily allowance is now reduced to $7 and a quarter. My discretionary fund is now roughly $50/week. Keep in mind that this does not include gas--that's a separate pool. But it includes food, entertainment, and other expenses.

Here are the steps I'm going to take to stay within the budget:

1. Think in terms of weeks instead of days. Thinking in days gets me into trouble psychologically, because I get an inflated sense of spending power that makes fast food seem like a good deal, when it's not.
2. Plan meals. In the short term, I'm not going to change *when* I eat (that's a project I'll need your help with, Laura), but I'll change *what* I eat.
3. Carry cash, leave the cards at home.

Now, let's talk about food.

I don't eat crappy food because I enjoy it more than healthy food; I eat it because it's easy and it seems cheap at the time that I buy it.

The key to successful change is to make it as easy and as possible. I don't want this to be a major project. I want real progress, and if that means microscopic steps, then so be it.

I found a great place to start: a blog post, Eating Healthy for $3 a Day.

I have no intentions of slavishly obeying this post, but it gives me a place to start and allows me to make substitutions as I wish. If I wind up spending $5 day it will be a success.

Here is what he considers a list of daily staples:

1. 3 cups cooked brown rice ($0.53)
2. 2 cups cooked pinto beans ($0.23)
3. 2 stalks cooked broccoli (360g) ($1.06)
4. 1 baked sweet potato (180g) ($0.40)
5. 1 tablespoon olive oil ($0.18)
6. 1/2 cup sunflower seeds, shelled ($0.22)
7. 2 cups nonfat milk ($0.37)

Let's forget number crunching and make some basic substitutions and additions:

• I don't like rice. But I'll eat pasta.
• I don't like sweet potatoes (sorry Laura) but I love regular baked potatoes.
• The shelled sunflower seeds is a really interesting possibility that I hadn't considered. Nuts are expensive--they hover around $5 for 8oz, and I don't normally think of them as a cooking ingredient, but for the added protein (or as a snack) I could see sunflower seeds as being pretty amazing. Otherwise I may just go with some unsalted mix nuts or peanuts.
• I'll take black beans over pinto beans any day.
• I'm cooking chicken cacciatore tonight, so I will need ingredients for that.

So my plan today is to grab $50 in cash, and try to get a week's worth of groceries (including tonight's dinner) for $30. Wish me luck, I'll let you know how it goes.

Desperation and evil

Sometimes, while listening to the news about various horrible events, I reflect on the traditional "seven deadly sins" (the wikipedia article here is fantastic). I am especially keen on the groupings of all of the sins into three: concupiscent (lust, gluttony, greed, envy), irascible (wrath), and "intellectual" (pride, vanity, despair, sloth).

Notice there are nine items here. The modern version combined pride and vanity into one, and despair and sloth into one. I think it's helpful to keep them distinguished. One can be vain without necessarily being narcissistic. Vanity or vainglory carries the connotation of futility, which I might loosely interpret as superficiality. A preoccupation with the meaningless.

Similarly, despair and sloth are related but not the same. Sloth or acedia (pronounced by one of my professors "aksedia") is more like what we would call clinical depression. And it is a mental illness. But calling something a mental illness does not completely empty it of moral significance. If one feels himself slipping into acedia, and he cannot overcome it by sheer force of will, then there is a moral obligation to find help and to persevere.

Despair, however, is less about activity (or the lack of it), but about ideas. Absolute despair is despair of God; but there can also be despair of friends, of love, of one's own prospects.

Anyway, as I listen to the news, I think about the collective sins that are sweeping the world, including my own, and I wonder how the traditional classifications apply.

In the first place, I think of poverty-stricken communities that coalesce into gangs, and here I believe desperation reigns. In terms of sheer numbers, I imagine that most crimes are desperate crimes. Desperation has the ability to turn any decent, good natured person into a criminal; even a murderer. On Paul Kennedy's "Ideas," I learned about Thucydides, who understood this well. Depravity is not a condition of some people, but a latent character of each of us when pushed to our physical and emotional limit. "War takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men's characters to a level with their fortunes."

How does desperation fit into the classical schema of sins? I am not sure that it does. Desperation is not born out of an over-reaching desire for what is not God. Rather, it is born out of an unreflecting impulse to the sudden loss of the entitlements due the human creation of God. It is the self-defensive reaction to violations of human rights and dignity. When food, water, shelter, and companionship are all robbed (whether by human agency or nature), the victim may enter into a mindset determined to reacquire these these things. The desperate mindset will place this re-acquisition at a higher priority than the lessons of civilization of which the comfortable human mind is more capable.

And there you have it: gangs. Collectives of fear within an atmosphere of hostility (cyclically reinforced), for whom the solitary rule increasingly becomes: whatever it takes, whatever works, to protect us and ours. Desperation is at once the greatest threat to civilization and the primordial foundation of it.

But desperation plays a much larger role in human behavior than this. Gangs are perhaps the most basic level of organized desperation. But feelings of desperation can obtain at every level of material wealth and comfort. Perhaps because of this, we can assign a spectrum of culpability to the phenomena of desperation.

The crimes of a truly desperate person might be forgiven on the grounds that, at the limits of human survival, few would act otherwise.

But the crimes of one who merely feels desperate, because of delusions or an exaggerated sense of entitlement, are less excusable. The wealthy who sacrifice thousands of jobs out of fear that their stock might be worth less the next morning. The husband who philanders out of fear that he will never have another chance to feel the thrill of fresh affection.

This exploration reveals that desperation is, in reality, a synonym for the irascible passions--the passions "against" something--in particular, the passions against loss. So desperation is really the opposite side of the coin of wrath, of extreme anger. But whereas wrath is directed at an "enemy", desperation is directed at a "need".

Desperation and anger are of course very close siblings. The whole phenomenon of scapegoating (thank you René Girard) is based on this partnership.

To that extent, aren't all sins, in some respect, desperate? No. The excesses of comfort and security invite a host of evils that have nothing to do with the fear of loss...

[sigh, the necessities of life].

The child in all of us

One may have noticed that my interest of late has not only been romantic but youthful. As I come closer to age 30 I learn to appreciate how the child in us never really dies. Without undue cult of childhood, I think its safe to say that the truest part of each human being is their childhood self.

This is important. It gets to the heart of successful relationships, good business, and a right relationship with God. When we understand that we are children in adults' clothes, not only will it transform he way we relate to each other, but it could be the salve to relieve "my" pain at life's endless disappointments.

Why is such a simple, basic truth obscured? Well, it's misunderstood. A lot of "inner child" talk is caricatured as patronizing. But patronization assumes that "I" myself don't accept my own status as a tall child. Only someone who imagines himself an adult among children can be patronizing.

But the reality is so elemental. We're helpless when we're born. We're helpless when we die. And in-between, the only difference is ultimately a facade. An important facade, but a facade nevertheless. Culture runs on facade. But culture serves the individual, who is and remains a child.

"I love you so much."

I'm currently reading a book, "A Happy Marriage" by Rafael Yglesias. It's a bitter sweet story, a mostly autobiographical novel about a 30-year marriage, told alternately from the vantage points of its beginning, and its end in Margaret's death.

I'm not quite half way through the book yet, so whatever I say at this point will be modest. However, there is a line in one of the sad chapters that touched me: Margaret tells Enrique, "I love you so much. I love you so much."

What an amazing modification.

In my present early years with Laura, my "I love yous" come abundantly, and each one searches for some way to top the one that came before it, sometimes failing. It's a tough exercise in creativity, actually. I expect the torrent to continue indefinitely for the foreseeable future. At the very least, their scarcity would be conspicuous.

But with the neverending "I love yous" comes a worry that the words threaten to become habitual, and perhaps eventually even hollow. This possibility terrifies me. And so each one is spoken self-consciously. If the words ever escape my mouth unthinkingly, I scramble to find a way to rescue them from banality. If the words are ever a mere echo of the past, they must be filled with novel, present-moment sentiment. That sometimes takes effort, but it is a pleasure, especially when it brings Laura a smile.

Margaret's words, "I love you so much," affected me in three ways.

First, she is topping her husband's preceding "I love yous," not competitively, but appreciatively and complementarily. With her words she acknowledges and reveals her awareness that her husband's "I love yous" are sincere without embellishment, and that she is absorbing them.

Second, Margaret's words reveal to Enrique a fresh sincerity in her love. In the novel, he is insecure, and he has not been adequately attentive to, or trusting of the fact of Margaret's adoration. With the tiny modification, "so", Margaret in her dying dispels decades of insecurity. In its simplicity and innocence, "I love you so much" is a child's verbal squeeze of affection.

Third, the word "so" always indicates something new and fresh. Maybe the word "so" is excused from ever being over-used. It's a constant renewal. "The grass is so green". "The mountains are so beautiful." "The day is so nice." The tiny word does a lot of heavy lifting, carrying so much weight as a banner of immediate, present-moment character.

And so, if I sometimes neglect to adequately embellish my "I love yous", I have, for the time being, a fallback

I love you so much.

Fulfilling human desire.

"My heart is restless until it rests in thee." Saith St. Augustine. And I do believe this is true. It belies some of the more austere and stoic expressions of Christian faith--the rigid systems that today's disaffected former Catholics say was their lot as children.

Contrary to all of that, there is a basic understanding that the Christian heart should not be restless. But what does it mean for the heart to rest in God?

For Augustine, it did not mean that the heart must disdain everything besides God. Rather, whatever the heart loves, it must love it in God. God becomes the cipher through which our love of everything in the world is purified and made good.

This doesn't mean that all of that Christian tradition of "contempt of the world" is invalid. To love something in God, it is necessary to be willing to give it away. This is the paradox of our existence. It is fine to love something so much that you would die for it. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13).

But Jesus' teaching presupposes that the love is already rooted in God. That very same act, of dying for what one loves, can be twisted. Think of Gollum pitching headlong into the lava of Mount Doom, clutching his filthy bauble. The difference is that Gollum's love was not rooted in anything. It was a closed love--a closed system. Therefore it became subject to entropy, self-enervating without the ability to replenish itself from any source beyond.

That kind of twisted, closed love can be had for human beings just as much as inanimate objects. Just because we are God's most sublime creation doesn't excuse us from entropy; and latching ourselves to one-another will not save us from the passing away of the world. And so, yes, we love one-another, but we do so "in God", always opening up our personal interconnections to an infinite source.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But the above text is not the reason I sat down to write. I wanted to reflect on an emotion I felt one night, while I was driving down AZ79 with Laura, from Florence AZ to Tucson, during our vacation there last March.

The emotion was a flood of pleasant childhood feelings and memories. Listening to the gurgling of a humidifier when I was sick. Mom on Christmas Eve telling me that a red light in the sky was Rudolph. Sleeping in the recliner in my parents' room when I was afraid of a nightmare.

I can't help but think that the most intense longings we have--the longings that drive our thousands of adult efforts--are shaped by our first experiences of tenderness. It sounds like common sense. Pop psychology. But I wonder if it might not be deeply true. How far can we go with this idea? Is our quest for happiness always a reclaiming of happinesses lost? Is the Biblical hope for the New Creation not also in some respect the individual hope for a personal new Eden?

I confess that a part of my excitement and joy at the prospect of being a family man is that Laura and I will have an opportunity to create the same wonders and joys and heavenly comforts for our children that we ourselves experienced. We get to bring back the long-past mysteries of our first life discoveries, and we get to live them again, only this time, as the parents.

Is it wrong to hope to live vicariously through one's children? Only if that means that one's children are nothing more than a vehicle of one's own self-project. We can't ultimately control our children, who they become, or even what they think of us. We can't impose our immature dreams on our children, as if their purpose is to leave a mark on the world in the way I failed to do.

But I don't think it's wrong to take great pleasure in our children's childhoods--to permit them to stoke the old glowing embers of our own childhoods, to relive old moments of tenderness with the same serenity of my eight-year-old self sleeping by the humidifier.

When we become adults, we never cease to be the children our parents loved--and the children that God loves. Everything we once have been subsists inside of a skilled social professional. But the social professional, the solemn choice-maker, the adult, is after all the expression and the servant of a soul that yearns to be held. The mother holding her baby is, at one and the same time, holding and being held; creating a new experience of love and reliving it.

If the elderly sometimes seem more child-like to us, perhaps this is not so much of a regression as an unveiling of what was always there. With age, and with relief from the pressures of professional life, perhaps the adult is allowed to recede a bit and permit the deeper and more persistent self to show.

"...for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these" (Matt 19:14). Jesus may not have been speaking loosely. I have heard priests explain that Jesus meant to emphasize a child's openness and faith. That may be true, but I think more can be said. To be child-like is to be vulnerable and passive in a way that we always are before God, but which we hide as adults to protect ourselves from a world broken by sin. Maturity is a defense mechanism--and a good and necessary one. But when the world has finally passed away in full, what need do we have for maturity in Heaven?

I need to make a distinction. The absence of maturity, i.e. adult defenses, professional social graces, etc. is not the same thing as immaturity as we conceive of it negatively. There is a difference between the one who is child-like and childish. To be child-like is to be innocent, naive, unafraid, open, awed, wondering. What we call childishness--brattiness, selfishness, etc.--is in fact the unrefined very beginnings of adult defenses.

An analogy. The child-like person might be like a figure skater. Figure skating is innocent of goals, pucks, and sticks. The childish, immature person is the beginner hockey-player. Consider the scene from "The Mighty Ducks" where the kids start by clumsily whacking the puck around. Michael J Fox illustrates their immaturity by replacing the puck with a raw egg, which predictably breaks. By learning how to play hockey with an egg, learning how to gently coax it instead of annihilating it, the Ducks learn maturity.

For Jesus, maturity is necessary and good. "Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves" (Matt 10:16). But it becomes obsolete in heaven. The saints in heaven are figure skaters. The saints on earth are professional hockey players. But while on earth, we taste heaven when we put the stick, the puck, and the padding away.