A Father’s Words

Words of reassurance, offered or withheld, are monumental in a child’s growth. Words of encouragement, or exhortation, or patient teaching, are the same. When a child has grown up under the devastation of unremitting harshness (and sometimes not so unwitting), or the devastation of neglect, the one thing a father may not say is that it “was not that big a deal.” Of course it was a big deal. The child is (hopefully) going to be praying the Lord’s Prayer for the rest of his life. What will naturally, readily, come to mind whenever he starts, whenever he says, “Our father…”? What does that mean to him in his bones, and who taught it to him?

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

The Problem With “Progressives”

The battle line between good and evil runs through every human heart, said Solzhenitsyn. Those who attempt to bleach the world of sin are sinners themselves, and the more ambitious they are, the more swaddled up in pride and ignorance they become. People who want to bring heaven up on earth have turned the earth into hell and made rivers run red with blood, because the first thing they must do is the something they cannot do, which is to cure themselves. If we are to be healed, we must walk the way of the Cross. the progressive cannot diagnose his own disease. But that does not mean that he rejects the way of the Cross entirely. He makes everyone else walk it. It is the rule of what the Catholic anthropologist René Girard tabs as the default position of mankind. Do not give up your lusts. Do not sacrifice yourself. Sacrifice the other. Other people must be to blame.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

Barbarians or Idiots

Whatever is good about democracy rests upon a simple assumption. It is that ordinary people are capable of managing their ordinary affairs, as individuals, as families, as members of a neighbourhood or a parish, as local businesses, and as citizens of a village or town. If they are not permitted to do so, they have been reduced to what the Greeks called barbarism. If they are unwilling to do so, they have reduced themselves to what the Greeks called idiocy.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

The Dignity of Unpaid Work

But where does it say that the dignity of work depends upon being paid for it? If that were the case, then a whore selling her wares on a seedy street corner would claim greater dignity than my grandmother could who stretched a poor income to clothe and feed and in innumerable unnamed ways to bless my parents and their fourteen siblings between them. That makes no sense.

Anthony Esolein in Out of the Ashes

What is life for?

What is life for? Why do we work? If Christians cannot remember the answers, then we are lost indeed. Work is not something you are supposed to balance against the claims of your family. Unless you are one of those few whose talents are required in a broad way for the common good of multitudes, if you are not working in the first instance for your family, then something is severely out of order. We live in comforts that the richest aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child to too, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.

Anthony Esolen – Out of the Ashes

A Mass of Contradictions

Consider what a mass of contradictions we are. If a woman arranges flowers for a living, she earns our congratulations even if she doesn’t do anything else either because she doesn’t know how or because she is too busy at her flower shop. If a woman cooks fine Italian meals for a living – if her gnocchi, with their wonderful hundreds of calories, are famous all over town – we sing her praises, even if when she gets home she is spent. if a woman plays the violin for an orchestra or gives singing lessons, she can hope to find her name in the newspaper, even if she buys fast food for herself and her family on the way home from the music hall. But if a woman, because she is well versed in all of the household arts, can do all these things and in fact does them for the people she loves and for those whom she welcomes into her home (and she is not afraid of guests, because her home is always just a whisk or two away from hospitality), we shake our heads and say that she has wasted her talents. Not developed them, notice, and put them to use.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

Parent-Controlled Childhood

The truth is…yesterday’s parent-controlled childhood protected children not only from sex, from work, and from adult decisions but also from the dominance of peers and from the market, with all its pressures to achieve, its push for status, its false lures, its passing fads. – Kay Hymowitz in Ready or Not – Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future – and Ours

Think about the impact and control your child’s peers are having on them. How are they being shaped by them? As parents our role is to shape our children, and part of that is controlling how they are shaped and who shapes them. Hannah Arendt is quoted by Hymowitz as pointing out that the authority of a group is stronger and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person. We would do well to recognise this and protect our children.

Fathers and Blessing

When there is a fundamental estrangement between fathers and children, the results of that unhappy mess will be that God will come and strike the land with a curse. In short, when fathers are blessed, the land is blessed. When fathers are cursed, the land is cursed.

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger