Saturday, February 20, 2016

Beyond the shallow fanaticism of feminism

In a strange paradox , most thinking men can see the problem of misprojection, but many women can't , Both GB Shaw ( A hero of many feminists) and GK Chesterton had to duck and weave to avoid the careless lobs of unhappy women who,  seeing well the fractured frustrations of their parents, blame only the other party ---half the story.

Thankfully our forebears have fought this fight before us and won through. How,  you may well ask, when all in so many families can seem hopeless.
Our fortebears won  on the wonders of the deeper  case-- being more thorough and more scientific for a start   . Not by seeing and directing , monitoring and wrecking   but by resurrecting the old subject and stories of grace and forgiveness for all.

I pray you all revisit the strong men and women of Shakespeare. Let noone say no more that the Victorian age was full of fainting and fawning maids .The Queen( Merchant of Venice ) ,who in her own right, , has supreme power , calls for only an equal share in the life of a weak man and proves herself in that role to be much more than worthy of the partnership in the defence of both right ,love and mercy. The deep paradox of the servant heart is demonstrated there .
How can I deny the wonder of this night , that I should choose to watch ,for the first time ever , dear Portia follow her father' s wishes and trust her fate to faith-to not just any man, but a man with a passion to work hard at love . Its not by chance that I watched "The Merchant of Venice "tonight . He might be dumb BUT he managed to chose lead--- not gold and all that glitters ( and distracts) .
This punchy romance ends with the weak men being twisted around the fingers of the women - these are strong wise women and their partners in men and women are made stronger by the fight and the long wait for grace to appear .

LikeReply55 minsEdited
 I TRUST  That Many of you women will know/ do know  the blessing of having a true friend of the same sex to help you through the ravages of war , loneliness and neglect
.Nerissa(Susan Jameson) is that person in the play and don't those two girls have fun, finally ending the play on a woman's only high note -of having put one huge one over the boys . Get this --even the beautiful queen doesn't get much of a choice out of all the suitors in the world - eh girls ! Between a rock and a hard place there is a mere man and.. much grace, should you go looking 4 it.

Friends on the journey -- Portia and Nerissa

If you ever doubt that God is with you on the journey, stop and look around you . Do you have at least one friend - is that not enough ?
And if not enough for this moment,  look at those in the gallery before you . The moving pictures of people long dead or only really alive on film . Men and women who gave their lives and words to make the fantasy real for this present moment , Such are the gospels , the men and women of Israel, (Women of Israel- a great book of that name)
Such is the work of Shakespeare and Chesterton and Dickens and .......study Portia and Nerissa in the Merchant of V  Susan jameson plays the powerful friend beautifully

enice

Waiting for Love

We are given drivers like testosterone and adrenalin  to make us come alive , Our job is not as the simpletons suggest , to give into them but to deal wit them . To do as many do in our age and say" do what your feel like ' is not only to condemn young people to a life of no tension but much trouble as they get tossed and drowned in  sea of determinism .

Ours is a stupid age - when we we have everything we want but know not what we want . Tis not for having no eyes to see or ears to hear but a failure to hear the cry of wonder and grace from the gospels .

Men and women have to often wait long for grace but as its God's gift it will come  . Love is foremost patient . Study patient love even in Shakespeare and in Queen Portia and her waiting Maid Nerissa.

Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Takes one to know one - when the fight gets personal

Don't you hate it when a discussion turns personal . It happens even in the best regulated families, including my own... where I sometimes start  it . 
Confession time. 
What do you do when it happens to you? - well IMO there is not much you can do when it happens to you because there is often too much anger in the room. Adrenalin takes over and real sins get confused with real risks. ( such as physical violence ) Anger itself is not necessarily a sin and can be the adrenalin means to force resolution - if we let it.
The wonderful thing is we can and should learn to deal with it - and the dealing with it is best done later,, though not as long as in the play mentioned below . The good book says "do it "and "do it" before the day ends . Its that simple and it works ! "Do what ?"you might be sayin -- watch the play!

The really wonderful thing is that we can learn to deal with terribly scary things like anger and learn to love again; to find a way forward and not be overcome by fear in family and political life .

The positive side of focusing on what is sin is and why its serious and subtle stuff

 It used to be taught ( 8th commandment ) that attacking the person rather than the argument was wrong . Our defamation laws and many principals build on that one principle were held in clear focus until recently .
Like so many important d
istinctions in accusation law - its somewhat lost to the poorly educated in our community .i have to bite my tongue too cause I break the law too . so iIts easy to get confused / self defensive - esp when you are angry . You may not even admit to yourself you are angry .Esp if you think its always a sin , To see anger as always a sin is to be superficial .  To see anger as always a sin is to sit on 
To see anger as always a sin is to be superficial .  something you probably need to deal with openly . To see anger as always a sin is  to join the bubbling under the surface  majority in maintaining a superficial goodness when a bomb is about to explode  .  
Its acceptable then under OUR law to attack the sin but NOT the sinner . It is equally WRONG under OUR LAW to give the permanent status of sinner to anyone, as many of us still believe strongly in hoping for a change of attitude.

This positive attitude to problem solving should be a point of celebration for us as it has been for our forefathers for thousands of years. .Many lazy thinking moderns are too keen to lock people up forever -- we would all be in there if they had their way 




Even 
 you yourself are not real mad at this moment ( which is likely) let  suggest you get into practice for dealing with the next moment you are by watching Shakespeare's brilliant testimony  in "A Winters Tale " ( currently a big hit in London ) Just what the good Doctor ordered.



One of Shakespeare's last plays
 -A Winters Tale (a hit in London right now) makes this point extremely well.


Note that the trigger for the Kings sin is fear and not only that - unfounded fear --The real problem is his problem, not the person he accuses !
There is a lot of fear, projection and unworkable reconciliation effort around -

If we are going to target someone, we are often best to consider the old aussie accusation /question " takes one to know one": and really move on.  

Wednesday, February 03, 2016

Why do young people get so easily tricked ? , The TV sells them rubbish and they buy it

Success in Marriage .
Lots of marriages fail
Is the answer to live with someone before you buy in ?" Rules of Engagement" TV series  seems to test the water on this .My generation thought you didn't need rules -- you just got 'married " Strangely the program is good in name only like so much TV - talks but does not deliver . No rules , no engagements but lots of testing and little discussion of consequences ( like "walk of shame" )You get to see what happens but ad infintum and with no real understanding to lift the situation

I feel for young people because their parents don't even know why their faith in marriage and happiness didn't work . The sixth commandment says how it works and so does experience .  Is marriage the problem or their understanding of it the problem ?Infidelity breaks it for one .
Does shacking up with someone help you decide? Not if baby boomers experience is evidence - many tried -few succeeded in that . If you are going to share house share it with lots of people and not your bed .  Extra people in marriage will threaten  the sense of security in both parties whether its before  the event or after.
To make a good decision in marriage you need to practice observation NOT participation cause the person  you choose will be for life .You are  studying to make the BEST decision of your life ---takes time wisdom and self control.You don't learn that in the pressure cooker .

Its also not a new idea . It happened to Boomers  . Many got married because they thought happiness was automatically connected to the institution .Clearly it is NOT.
With so many marriage failures around them young people are still not so sure how to proceed  - fair enough. but
Is the answer to live with someone before you buy in ? How can anyone be clear when marriage is still the objective for most but known infidelity is the way to kill it . The baby is in their somewhere,and commitment to one person and self restraint are absolutely necessary. You don't learn restraint shacking up with someone.
While it is nothing new , shacking up together is still seen as the new and better way ---as they say ?
 That too has been well tried by baby boomers and the rate of failure and damage there is very high .Don't just watch the TV,  watch real people.
Anyway here it comes again from one young person . you be the judge.


Me

Thanks for sharing young ones but I would not recommend the practice esp if the ten good reasons you give are the best you can find - IMO you shouldn't even live with someone alone if you can't work that out from observing ( participants cannot be obje
ctive). Groups ( shared house ) are better than one to one . 
No one in favor of the idea seems to want to talk about "the walk of shame" that many women feel when they don't wait for commitment. The TV talks about it all the time but NEVER resolves it . It entertains ,but never really explains.
These are small things too because, if God is real, he either meant for you to show restraint or not - far more imp than your 10 ?
Stats are the terribly dumb toys of reactionaries and many of my now old school mates live in expectation of an insight when they have missed most,; because of their growing cynicism about how things work ( stats prove nothing much)-- you can spend you life just "testing the water "and they have ,
MI Stats give little insight to you personally , Don't try to evolve your life -, Take the true biblical frame as a given and prove it is the road to a confident well tested proactive lifestyle choice that your parents, gp ggp etc etc took .

LikeReply10 hrsEdited


Write a comment...