Three Unrelated Anecdotes

These are three separate occurrences that I have witnessed and taken part in over the last week, all of which struck me very deeply. Nearly everything gives me food for thought, and these were particularly meaty.

1) As I was walking out the door of my apartment, a young woman was coming down the walkway in the opposite direction. Her shirt was very noticeably low cut, and she had on over the top one of those half jacket things that are really just a pair of sleeves held together by a back. She passed me, and as she did so, she looked at me with a very uncomfortable expression, and self consciously adjusted the jacket thing she was wearing in order to cover herself better. This struck me as very odd indeed. I suppose part of it could have been my look. I'm told I have a very stern expression unless I'm actively smiling, and I have a habit of making eye-contact with people that I pass. I don't mean anything by it, but it is a habit that I have developed in the Army, and it is quite useful at times. Some people, however, are a little put off by it, I guess. It might have been that that made her so uncomfortable, but she looked uncomfortable and self-conscious before she even saw me. And why should she move to cover herself so obviously, and as it seemed, automatically? Actually, that wasn't really the question that bothered me so much as the more fundamental question. If she was so uncomfortable with what she was wearing, why was she wearing it? Was she willing to be less modest in one situation, or for one set of people, but fearful of how it would be received by a stranger? That modesty instinct, which John Paul II described as the reaction of a person to the fear of being treated as a thing, what was it doing? What was the subtle interplay between her desire to be vulnerable and open, and her desire to be secure and unnoticed.

Once you start looking for it, you see signs of warfare every which way you look. There were two truths at work in her, I think, both twisted into lies. On the one hand the way she dressed was not appropriate, but at its heart, her desire to be seen and loved is a good and beautiful thing. On the other hand, her instinct to cover herself was entirely appropriate, but only necessary because of sin. Women have more of an instinct for that, than men do I think, so it plagues me no end as to just why they are always the hardest hit by it. Women know instinctively that they should not be treated as a means to an end, as just an object. But there are so many lies at work, and we men haven't told the truth as we ought.

2) I had my nose bloodied twice this week in MMA class. The school that I am attending now that I have evenings free trains very hard and has a very good instructor. Every single class you are guaranteed to get your head rocked a few times, no matter how good you think you are. I have a bruised face, a headache, and my nose hurts, but I like it. It's good training. A lot of people train without actually getting hit and then when they do get hit for the first time, it rocks their world. Other schools discourage hard or medium contact because of fear of injury, or because they're afraid the stress of actually having to defend against punches that bear some resemblance to the real thing might scare away customers. At still other schools it is counter productive because the guys there think with their egos. You tap them sharply one time, and all of a sudden it becomes personal. They're going all out, they're all mad and angry, someone's talking smack, or yelling, or whatever. Immaturity ruins training. The whole point of training hard is to learn to take hits without getting flustered by them. To keep calm emotionally no matter how badly you are being pounded is not easy, but that's what you have to do. It reminded me of why I train there in the first place. Most of the guys who train there are fighters. They have ameteur fight circuits they compete in, they do ring tournaments, cage tournaments, etc. and they keep track of stats and styles, and there are rivalries and a lot of smack talking. I hate all of that. I've fought before in Army tournaments, making it to the finals both times. I've fought in a cage, and gotten punched as hard as the guy could punch me, and I keep getting the "vanity of vanities, it's all vanity" feeling. These guys train because they are type A personalities who want to be the best. They want to be better than other guys. It is all about the competition between them and other people, between them and other teams. They want to prove themselves against someone. I don't. There is nothing type A about me at all. I know there are better fighters than I. I don't care. It isn't about me being better than someone else, it's about me being better tomorrow than I am today, better next week than I am this week. I don't train to pit ego against ego, because I think it's a waste of time. I train for the day when someone's life depends on my strength and skill, or my ability to keep cool under fire, or my ability to take whatever damage I have to without cracking. In essence, I train because I am driven to by the desire to be able to protect people. That's all I want. Ego is a liability. Ego gets people hurt, it causes trouble for innocent people when trouble could have been avoided. It clouds judgement. It makes you take risks that didn't need to be taken.

On the other hand, it puts fire and drive into the training. Unless there was some Ego there, (I want to be strong, I want to build myself up) I wouldn't be as ready to keep fighting when I'm pinned, keep defending when I'm getting punches rained down on my head. I don't want to be seen backing down or giving up, so in the short term the ego has its uses, in service to the task at hand. Ego is not a bad thing, at its heart. It is the drive to be all that God made us to be, and if you think about it, He probably doesn't think we arrogate too much to ourselves as often as He thinks we settle for too little. Guys are willing to settle for being a mere cage fighter, when they could be warriors, protectors.

So when I train I do use that Ego to push me on to train harder. I just try not to regard the people I'm fighting as opponents. They are all training partners until I the day I have to fight for real. Then they are enemies, and then things get really ugly really fast.

3) Since we started our new class schedule, Daily mass has become impractical. I miss it, but I'm simply unable to go. Well, this morning we were supposed to do a jump. The weather call was going to be made last night, and if the call was to cancel it, we would do PT at our regular time instead. Either way, I would not be able to go to mass. However, God literally split the clouds so that they went north and south of Fort Bragg during the night, creating an open window until after they called the jump on, thus cancelling PT. Then He closed the window, brought in the fog and rained on the drop zone, so that when we got out there (we had to get up around 0400, most of us) the jump was cancelled also. With both the jump and PT cancelled, I was free to go to mass.

Sometimes it's nice to know that Jesus wants to see me far more than I want to see Him.

Out of Darkness

Out of darkness, You have brought me forth

O Lord, and set my feet upon a rock of stone

And sealed my heart with fire to be your own

Confirmed my strength, and gave my soul new birth.

A task you gave to me beyond my worth

But gave me to know I would not toil alone

But you would work in me; And so I’ve grown

To stand in you, my roots sunk in good earth.

Oh Lord, you set me free. I wish to serve.

You gave me life, O God, let me give life.

You blessed my heart with love, removed the curse

That plagued my soul, which fully I deserve.

So let me safeguard others in this strife,

And praise you, Lord, in glad, swift, joyous verse.

Sometimes the best thing is just to speak the truth in the very teeth of the lie.

Blogging in a nutshell

And in order to give credit where credit is due, here's the source.

Currently Blood Diamond (Widescreen Edition) By Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connelly, Kagiso Kuypers, Arnold Vosloo see related

Blood Diamond

I watched the movie "Blood Diamond" this weekend. That and "Tears of the Sun" are two of my favorite movies of all time, but I do not reccomend them lightly. Both show, very graphically and realistically, evil and atrocity. I watch them sparingly, since it does me very little real good to see too much of that sort of thing. I take it very seriously. A little bit keeps me honest, and puts some more heart into my training. The real reason I like them is because the characters in them, the soldier of fortune/mercenary in the one and the Navy SEALs in the other, go through a change that means a lot to me. They go from being self centered tough guys, just doing their job, or seeking personal gain at all costs, to caring about other people, eventually enough to fight and even die for them. You might say I like the movies because the men finally learn what it is to be a warrior.

You see, there are some people, men mostly, who for whatever reason are born with an ability to fight and inflict damage on people. It's part inborn, I'm sure, but also part upbringing and training. Nearly every man has that inner urge, to take whatever he wants, by whatever means. Some just have it double. So some gravitate towards violent or high conflict career paths, and miss the greatness of the gift they were given.

The reason I am talking about these movies is that I want to bring together two lines of thinking from recent posts. In this post I posited that there is no fallen or sinful desire possible to humans that is not at its root good and noble. And in this post I questioned whether or not Christians ought to pray for the demise of their enemies as in the psalms. I was going to write sequels to both posts, but other things took precedence, and that plan fell by the wayside. I didn't have any idea what to say anyway, so I would have been spouting sound and fury, nothing more.

Now I want to join the two together, because this idea touches on both. If it is true that men in general and some special men in particular to a higher degree, are born with an innate ability to agress on their fellowmen in order to get what they want, then in order to maintain my position that all desires of the human heart are good, I would have to be able to demonstrate that there is goodness at the heart of even that desire to be aggressive. That this desire exists, I have no doubt. I have seen it, I live it, and there is also the plain medical facts of testosterone and what it does to the male brain, most visibly at puberty, but more fundamentally, to male babies in utero. If you ever get the chance, check that out, it's really fascinating.

I can't say that testosterone is bad, because God created it. So it has a purpose, and it is our use of that purpose that renders it good or bad. It is this that these two movies illustrate. In the movies, the heroes are not all that heroic. They kill and lie to get what they want, to smuggle diamonds in "Blood Diamond" and to accomplish military objectives in "Tears of the Sun." (I do think that one is more evil than the other, but that is not my point here.) The men are powerful men. They are smart, strong, cunning, and fearless, and yet they have taken all of those gifts and turned them inward to serve... What? Danny Archer in "Blood Diamond" (Brilliantly played by Leo DiCaprio) is fairly straightforward about he. He wants his share. Whatever he can carve out for himself, by whatever means. LT. Waters in "Tears of the Sun" (played by Bruce Willis, also an excellent performance) simply follows orders and completes missions. That is all he does, he long since stopped caring. In one of the most revealing lines of the movie he says, "I broke my own rule. I started giving a ----." In both cases, it was not an excess of aggression that made them bad men, but an absence of compassion. They were not too strong, too tough, or too smart. They had detached all of their gifts from the end for which they were created. They had stopped caring about people. Whatever else they cared about, it was a cheat. It is only in finding that deep buried capacity to love, and then offering themselves unstintingly for some other person that they find redemption.

And in this the movies are also pretty accurate, in that they portray very well the character of such men. When they do a thing, they do it all the way. Once the decision is made, they see it through, no matter the cost. All it takes is a nudge in the right direction, and suddenly they become heroes. So I am more hopeful of bad strong men than I am of nice wimpy ones. Goodness is hard work, and the bad men may well be more up to the challenge than the nice guys.

But then the question arises, what role does this aggression play in a Christian's life? Aren't we supposed to be meek and gentle? Well, if we look at Christ, as an image of meekness and gentleness, I'd say a little testosterone might come in handy, if it comes time to go toe to toe with the Pharisees, clear merchants out of a temple, or die on a cross. In fact, I cannot understand how we got our present idea of meekness as some sort of advanced stage of being a doormat. You don't crucify a doormat. There is no need to. Half the men in the Church today would be a waste of time for the enemy to crucify. We have become too harmless.

Even in order to develop that spiritual strength I consider it absolutely necessary for boys to learn to harness and control physical aggression. If you can't do that, you are going to have a hard time with spiritual aggression. But the physical realm is also a real battle of its own. There are real bad men in the world doing real bad things to real people. Sometimes the only way to stop an evil act is by physically resisting the one doing it. Even by killing him, if need be. This is where it ties into my questions about whether or not we can pray for the demise of our enemies. If I believe that I can be morally justified in killing a man to keep him from killing an innocent person, then why would I have a qualm about praying for his demise? Well, actually, it's because prayer is so much more powerful. I don't particularly want him to die. I just want him to stop what he is doing. I don't really care how. If a terrorist has a change of heart and becomes a monk on a desert island, that suits me just fine. If he gets locked up and physically prevented from killing again, that suits me also. If he has to die, well, that's what has to be. The important thing is that he is stopped. The problem with praying for him to die is that there are many better ways for him to be stopped. Why not pray for the better way? Sure, in the actual events, when push comes to shove, you may have no recourse left but to kill him in order to prevent him from committing some particular act, but if you are just praying for terrorists in general, why not pray for a better way out?

The role of the strength of a warrior is to love, and to enable him to serve. It is a calling of complete self-sacrifice (as all callings are, by the way) but we are not to love only our friends, or the victims, or the other good guys. We must love even our enemies. That means that we must treat him as we would want to be treated, so we must ask ourselves, "If I were in his shoes, would I want someone to do that to me?" Would I want someone to pray that for me?

I think I would. If I ever go off the deep end (and there but for the grace of God go I) then I pray someone does whatever it takes to keep me from hurting other people. If I were to become a bad guy, I want some good guy to stop me. If you can do so without hurting me, fine, but if not, kill me. I say this because right now I am in my right mind, and slowly getting more right. I am turning my mind more and more towards God's until hopefully I will desire what He desires. Even at this stage I know that for me to do harm to some innocent person would be worse for everyone, for them and for me, than for me to be killed. The predators do not know that. They are out of their minds. They don't know that when they blow up innocent people they do more harm to themselves than to others. They don't know how sick and wounded they are. They don't know how much they need to be stopped.

Some people take that and use it as an argument for pacifism. Others would take it and use it as an argument for the use of force. I do neither. I simply say that I will never do anything to anyone, or pray anything for anyone that I wouldn't want them to do or pray for me. I am only a sinner, trying to keep my fellow sinners from hurting each other. The innocent take precedence, because they are the ones God has given me to protect. The bad guys come a little bit further down the line, because they have placed themselves there. I, however, will follow the golden rule, and do nothing to them that I wouldn't want done to me, and I will pray for their healing and repentance, as I pray for my own. Who knows, one day they might start praying for me.

First Korean Test

So today, after 7 weeks of studying Korean, I had my first test. It was somewhat miserable. I can speak, write and read in Korean pretty well for 7 weeks, but my listening is horrible. I'm pretty sure it kept me way below the score I might have gotten. At any rate, I now have Korean MP3s playing, and probably will continue thus for the foreseeable future.

Another problem I have is trying to speak in Korean at the same level I speak in English. In English I'm pretty literate. In Korean I have to be content with 1st through 3rd grade grammar.

The highlight of the test, however, was when she asked what color my eyes were. I gravely replied, "절 모리겠어요. 제 눈을 멋 봈어요." "I'm not quite sure, I couldn't see my eyes." I meant to say, "I can't see my eyes," but my tenses get out of whack under stress.

So now, back to things in English.

I was going to write a sequel to my last post, but my brain is too fried.