Get some tissues.  Pixar really is amazing. (H/T)

Hubbard posted this at 8:41 PM EDT on Friday, June 19th, 2009 as Grace

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Quite a bit of what’s celebrated as love resembles Romeo & Juliet: an explosion of passion that burns out or ends with living-happily-ever-after.  A different sort of love comes up in one of my favorite children’s stories, The Velveteen Rabbit:

For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

There seems to be a real story of this, so to speak, in the New York Times (H/T).  Dana Jennings is fighting prostate cancer, and he has become Real:

Right now, I’m not quite what you’d call “a catch.” I wear man-pads for intermittent incontinence, I’m a bazaar of scars, and haven’t had a full erection in seven months. Most nights, I’m in bed by 10. The Lupron hormone shots, which suppress the testosterone that can fuel prostate cancer, have sent my sex drive lower than the stock market, shrunken my testicles, and given me hot flashes so fierce that I sweat outdoors when it’s 20 degrees and snowing.

Even so, Deb has taught me that love is in the details. Humid professions of undying love and tear-stained sonnets are all well and good, but they can’t compete with the earthy love of Deb helping me change and drain my catheter pouches each day when I first came home from the hospital.

Yes, in the details. She measured my urine, peered into places I couldn’t (literally and figuratively), and strategically and liberally applied baby powder, ice and Aquaphor to my raw and aching body. She battled our intractable insurer, networked, tracked down the right doctors — and took thorough notes all the while.

I was wounded. She protected me. She chose to do these things.

Read it all, especially Mr. Jennings’s conclusion.

Hubbard posted this at 10:44 AM EST on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 as Grace, Ladies, Gentlemen, and the Rest of us

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While looking for something else, I stumbled upon this old interview with the late Madeline L’Engle.  My favorite bit:

What are you working on at the moment?
A book about aging: enjoy it, you might as well. And it’s not all bad. I can say what I want, and I don’t get punished for it.

Such as?
Such as I sometimes think God is a s**t—and he wouldn’t be worth it otherwise. He’s much more interesting when he’s a s**t.

So to you, faith is not a comfort?
Good heavens, no. It’s a challenge: I dare you to believe in God. I dare you to think [our existence] wasn’t an accident.

Many people see faith as anti-intellectual.
Then they’re not very bright. It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.

Food for thought, so please read it all.

Hubbard posted this at 9:24 AM EDT on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 as Grace

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In 1984, after serving time for armed robbery, Troy Chapman murdered Scott Chandler.  He’s serving a 60 to 90 year sentence.  Chapman has been busy trying to atone, but his attempts to do so lead to him equating evil with insanity [emphasis added]: Read the rest of this entry »

Hubbard posted this at 11:01 AM EDT on Monday, September 29th, 2008 as Grace, Grumblin Mumblins

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J.K. Rowling gave Harvard’s Commencement address.  My favorite bits:

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

And:

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.

Please read it all.

Hubbard posted this at 5:52 PM EDT on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Grace, The Right Words

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I have, on occasion, gone shopping with various girlfriends.  Once, I wound up consoling one who discovered that she had moved from size 4 to size 6.  I tried (unsuccessfully) to tell her that her boyfriend wouldn’t care about small changes in her waist size.  Men are tolerant like that; it’s other women who get catty over a few pounds.  Why should she care about the insignificant hen pecking ritual so long as the significant other still loved her?

Further proof of my contention about male tolerance comes from a msn.match.com article, where a variety of guys talk about the varied women they love, who resemble Greek goddesses as much as a bassets and whippets resemble labradors.  But if women really wanted to know the power they have over men, perhaps they should dig into Slate’s archives and read Herbert Stein’s Watching the Couples Go By.  (This piece is on my mind today because, if I’m reading him correctly, I ate at this particular restaurant today.)  A sample:

I . . . eat from time to time at an outdoor table in front of a small restaurant on the street leading to the Kennedy Center. . . . I watch the passers-by.

I am not concentrating on the girls. I am concentrating on the married couples. How do I know that those men and women walking two-by-two up to the Kennedy Center are married to each other? Well, 75 percent of all men between the ages of 30 and 75 are married, so if you see a man in that age group walking with a woman to the Kennedy Center—which is not exactly Club Med—it’s a good bet that the two are married, and almost certainly to each other.

I look particularly at the women in those couples. They are not glamorous. There are no Marlene Dietrichs, Marilyn Monroes, or Vivien Leighs among them. (It is a sign of my age that I can’t think of the name of a single living glamorous movie actress.) Some of them are pretty, but many would be considered plain. Since they are on their way to the Kennedy Center, presumably to attend a play, an opera, or a concert, one may assume that they are somewhat above average in cultural literacy. But in other respects one must assume that they are, like most people, average.

But to the man whose hand or arm she is holding, she is not “average.” She is the whole world to him. They may argue occasionally, or even frequently. He may have an eye for the cute intern in his office. But that is superficial. Fundamentally, she is the most valuable thing in his life.

Genesis says, “And the Lord God said: ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him.’ ” And so, “made He a woman.” It doesn’t say that He made a pretty woman, or a witty woman, or an any-kind-of-adjective woman. He made the basic woman.

Why is this basic woman so valuable to the man whose hand or arm she is holding as I see them making their way up to the Kennedy Center?

I’ll let you read the whole thing to find Mr. Stein’s answer.  Watching couples go by is a good way to spend a lunch break. 

Hubbard posted this at 12:34 PM EDT on Friday, June 6th, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Grace

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Ronald Reagan died four years ago today.  He was elected three days before I was born, and the only memory I have of him as president was when the Challenger crashed, he was the man who told us that it would be okay.  My memories of him aren’t much.

Patti Davis, his sometimes estranged daughter, has more memories.  She spent years rebelling against him, but has now outgrown the silliness and has a wonderful assessment of him:

A friend who recently lost her mother said to me, “Death distills everything.” It’s true. I, like many people, live with regrets that will never lessen—the times I lashed out at my father, refused to appreciate him or consider his feelings, his point of view. I envy those who can say after a parent’s death that they don’t have remorse—I just don’t know too many people like that. But regrets can lead you to a profound awareness of what’s important, what’s meaningful. Since I do share my father with America and with the world, how he lived his life—not just as a politician, but as a man—has resonance for all of us.

He believed that words can wound, that even in the harsh, muckraking world of politics, it simply isn’t right to insult another person. He believed that this country’s greatness came from its collective heart, from its history of being a “melting pot” and that the dark passages of our history came when we lost sight of our own heart. He had no tolerance for racism. He was raised in a home where people were never judged by the color of their skin. He was raised in a home where everyone was considered a child of God, and he carried that belief with him throughout his life.

From her lips to the world’s ears.

Hubbard posted this at 8:14 AM EDT on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 as Grace, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past

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Five years ago today, Michael Kelly died (H/T).  He wrote brilliant profiles of Ted Kennedy and David Gergen, but I think, since it’s Friday, we could use something lighter:

There is too much disputation around Christmas anyway. One growing issue is the white vs. colored lights debate. Like all matters of taste, this is also a matter of class. White lights are high-class; colored lights are somewhat less so.

White lights make the statement that one is a refined sort who appreciates that less is more and who celebrates Christmas (and life in general) in such a fashion that one would not be absolutely mortified if Martha Stewart dropped by unexpectedly for tea. Colored lights make the statement that one is the sort of person who believes that Christmas is not Christmas without an electric sled and reindeer on the lawn, an electric Santa on the roof, an electric Frosty by the front gate and an electric Very Special Person in a manger on the porch.

Most of the houses in my neighborhood are white-light houses, and I have to admit they are lovely, but I was raised in a colored-light family, and I am raising Tom and Jack to be colored-light men too. They do not take a lot of convincing on this. Boys are naturally colored-lighters.

Hm.  I feel like stringing up colored lights would beat the heck out of the projects I’m supposed to be doing. 

Hubbard posted this at 9:47 AM EDT on Friday, April 4th, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Grace

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NRO has published some of Buckley’s greatest hits; my favorite:

PLAYBOY: Don’t most dogmas, theological as well as ideological, crumble sooner or later?

BUCKLEY: Most, but not all.

PLAYBOY: How can you be so sure?

BUCKLEY: I know that my Redeemer liveth.

Only a false dogma constricts; because true dogma is the truth, it liberates.  Buckley understood this. 

I’ll have to root around online to find the rest of that Playboy interview.  Not many people go searching for a Playboy looking for the interview (let alone the Buckley interview) but then, I’ve always done things differently.

Hubbard posted this at 2:03 PM EST on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Grace

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Chesterton on dogs:

But there is something deeper in the matter than all that, only the hour is late, and both the dog and I are too drowsy to interpret it. He lies in front of me curled up before the fire, as so many dogs must have lain before so many fires. I sit on one side of that hearth, as so many men must have sat by so many hearths. Somehow this creature has completed my manhood; somehow, I cannot explain why, a man ought to have a dog. A man ought to have six legs; those other four legs are part of him. Our alliance is older than any of the passing and priggish explanations that are offered of either of us; before evolution was, we were. You can find it written in a book that I am a mere survival of a squabble of anthropoid apes; and perhaps I am. I am sure I have no objection. But my dog knows I am a man, and you will not find the meaning of that word written in any book as clearly as it is written in his soul.

It may be written in a book that my dog is canine; and from this it may be deduced that he must hunt with a pack, since all canines hunt with a pack. Hence it may be argued (in the book) that if I have one Aberdeen terrier I ought to have twenty-five Aberdeen terriers. But my dog knows that I do not ask him to hunt with a pack; he knows that I do not care a curse whether he is canine or not so long as he is my dog. That is the real secret of the matter which the superficial evolutionists cannot be got to see. If traceable history be the test, civilization is much older than the savagery of evolution. The civilized dog is older than the wild dog of science. The civilized man is older than the primitive man of science. We feel it in our bones that we are the antiquities, and that the visions of biology are the fancies and the fads. The books do not matter; the night is closing in, and it is too dark to read books. Faintly against the fading firelight can be traced the prehistoric outlines of the man and the dog.

Something a bit lighter for a Friday.

Hubbard posted this at 3:13 PM EST on Friday, February 1st, 2008 as Animal Kingdom Strikes Back, Grace

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I disagree with Ramesh Ponnuru often, but he’s right about New Jersey and the death penalty:

New Jersey is on track to become the first state to abolish the death penalty since the Supreme Court allowed it in 1976.

I think New Jersey legislators did the right thing, in the right way. If the state can protect citizens from a murderer without killing him, that’s what it ought to do. And since New Jersey doesn’t execute people anyway—the last execution was in 1963—having a formal, but practically meaningless, death penalty was an expensive charade.

I’m glad that it was the legislators who voted to abolish the death penalty and not the judges. On an issue where neither the federal nor the state constitution clearly sets a policy, it should be up to the people and their elected representatives to decide. I hope that other states will follow New Jersey’s lead—but not under judicial duress.

From his lips to God’s ears.

Hubbard posted this at 9:47 AM EST on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 as Grace, Philosophy, Politics

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• I try to repress my Scrooge tendencies around Christmas, although this year it’s been tougher than most.  Some recurring health issues (personal but nothing major; for the sake of this blog post, I’ll call them “me troubles,” MT) came back to bother me for much of the past few weeks.  I deal with MT semi-regularly, and I did what I usually do: take some over-the-counter medication and wait to feel better.

• This time around, though, it took longer than the usual day or two for MT to go away.  “I have places to go and people to see and things to do!  This is no time for MT,” I kept thinking.  Nobody likes being sick, of course, but I was in a hurry to get well.  Unfortunately, we can’t make our bodies heal faster.  Perhaps this is why St. Francis of Asissi called his body an ass.

• So I spent much of the past few weeks waiting.  I loathe waiting, but ’tis the season.  I did my best to stay pleasant, but failed miserably.  At one point last week, a co-worker dropped by with a question.  On the phone, I said nothing to her, but glared and she slunk away.  If I knew how to intentionally look so intimidating, then I’d probably glare like that more often to drive people away when feeling anti-social; it’s probably good for everyone around me that I can’t.  That glare appears in trying times; one resolution for next year is to try not to glare like that even when tried; how long will that last, I wonder?  Probably not long enough.

•  It looks like I’m not the only one feeling a bit down right now.  Part of it is the Winter.  Part of it is the enforced cheeriness of Christmas.  Part of it is missing people we care about.  It’ll be my first Christmas without Grandpa O., and even though he was cantankerous and eccentric, he also cared and did what he could to show it.  So much of his last few years were spent waiting in hospitals and dialysis centers; he doesn’t have to wait in such places any more.  Through the years we all will be together—if the fates allow. . .

• The flags in DC are at half-mast today, probably for Pearl Harbor, 1941.  That lead to Grandpa O. and his family losing everything and going to the Jerome, Arkansas, internment camp until the war was over.  That’s a long wait.  He remembered many things: that the food made them sick (putting MT in perspective right now); that when they were let out to go shopping, Southern bus drivers treated the Japanese—interned as potential enemies—better than blacks; that he wouldn’t have finished high school if he hadn’t been sent to Jerome.  He filled his waiting with education.

• The sermon series during Advent is about waiting.  Advent tends to get excised in the Christmas hoopla, rather like the children Want and Ignorance in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  We don’t like waiting any more than we like the creepy figures that the Ghost of Christmas Present showed Scrooge.  But something is lost when we bowdlerize Dickens and expand the Christmas season to labor day.  Waiting prepares us for greater goodness.  In want and ignorance, we try to rush through: get healthy, get rid of troubles, get open the presents.  The fatherly cliche—that something bad is building character—sometimes does contain a nugget of truth.

• More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. —Romans 5:3-5

Hubbard posted this at 12:53 PM EST on Friday, December 7th, 2007 as Grace, I don't know--but it's a Tradition, Ourselves

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Dennis Kucinich on his wife:

Dennis Kucinich wears the look of a man who’s just won the sweepstakes. He says a colleague from the House told him it didn’t matter how he did in the presidential race because he’d already won.

He’d won Elizabeth.

“I responded, ‘Now you know why I think I can be president?’ ” Dennis says. “If I can marry this incredibly brilliant, beautiful woman, I mean, why wouldn’t I think I can be president of the United States?”

His policies might be awful, and the rest of the article shows that he’s more than a little kooky—but his heart’s in the right place. (H/T)

Hubbard posted this at 10:30 AM EST on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 as Audacity of Hype, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Grace

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I’ve often thought that many atheists are motivated less by love of reason than by hatred of God.  The people who simply cannot bring themselves to believe usually don’t write polemics as Richard Hawkins or Christopher Hitchens have.

One of the rare agnostics without a loathing of God, Theodore Dalrymple, just wrote about the new atheists.  A sample:

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.

In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes, no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and then you gather evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen creature (I use the term metaphorically rather than in its religious sense), there is always much to find.

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.

Read the whole thing.

Hubbard posted this at 10:06 AM EDT on Monday, October 29th, 2007 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Grace

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Rod Dreher (H/T) writes about his mixed feelings for pedophile monk:

I am glad it is not given to me to judge him. By one standard, Father Benedict deserves a millstone lashed to his neck for eternity. That’s what I’d have given the old buzzard, but God’s a better Christian than I am. And yet, I’m forced to admit that from Sam Greene’s wicked deeds, my beloved family sprung. I can’t help wondering: no fake icon, no visit to Austin, no meeting my true love.

This mystery throws everything off balance. It offends my sense of order and righteousness to recognize it, but the mere existence of my children is evidence that however miserable and mean and degraded, that dirty old monk, probably in spite of himself, was once an instrument of grace.

Did other good fruit emerge from this poisoned vineyard? Who knows, and who can say whether it counts for anything? But when Sam Greene is judged, there my little family stands, however reluctantly, as silent witnesses for the defense, pleading on his behalf for the same thing every one of us will one day need: mercy.

In such situations, where a bad person has (perhaps inadvertently) done good, I think of Chaucer’s Pardoner from The Canterbury Tales.  The Pardoner is a corrupt figure who preaches against the sins that he cheerfully admits to, and he sells “saints’ relics” that are actually pig bones.  Yet the foul man might well have encouraged many sinners to repent, thereby saving their souls.  Just because it’s a cliche doesn’t make it any less true: God works in mysterious ways.

Hubbard posted this at 5:30 PM EDT on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 as Grace

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