Tag: death

Fall’s Eve

I, like many, consider September 1 the start of Autumn. In fact, I advance all seasons by 21 days. And most of the time the earth is flat. I thought you might want to know.

What lawyers are doing lately

If it ever appears that projects are being bogged down in legalese, I would posit that it is not because too many lawyers are involved but rather than an appropriate number of lawyers is trying to, and I am choosing my words carefully here, stop stupid shit being done. They are not always successful but at least they try.

So if it ever appears that infrastructure in America doesn’t get built any more and that nothing ever gets done, it is because the doers of this country have, for the most part, become obsessed with doing stupid shit.

Which is to say, I would be ecstatic if any of my children wanted to pursue a career in law; and I would strongly consider disowning them if they went into finance.

Miloš Miljković

Status versus contract redux

Steve Robinson, who always leaves me wanting more so rarely does he blog or podcast, has fostered 50 boys over the years, housed his dying father-in-law, housed his dying parents, and now is housing his daughter’s family of three. Somewhere along the way, the coin dropped:

We have all embraced the idea that a multi-generational home is not a financial “last resort”, a rescue operation, a pit stop to self-sufficiency, or an end game for losers. It is how families normally (should) exist. A multi-generational household is a world-wide cultural norm, a given, not an embarrassing alternative lifestyle choice, pragmatic financial arrangement (nor even an admirable “noble sacrifice”) that says to the world “we cannot afford to sustain our nuclear, self-sufficient family or pay our medical bills”. In short, we all understand that living together as adults with kids is “normal”… even when it is difficult. None of us see ourselves as the recipients of some mercy, condescension, assistance, or being given a “loan” that will come due in some future emotional hostage taking family battle.

This is very not-America-in-2026. There may be a Chud in the basement, but nobody’s happy about it.

I don’t think living with my son’s family will ever be a financial necessity for my wife and me. And my late father-in-law made it his grim mission never to be dependent on his children as his mother was dependent on him after his father’s premature death. I’ve re-written this rest of this paragraph repeatedly; suffice that he succeeded in never becoming a financial burden.

But here’s the thing: I’ll take that burden 9 days out of 10 over the statist individualism of Sweden:

Swedes have come to prize relationships entered into freely rather than maintained by material necessity. Public child care helps women avoid financial dependence on husbands, state old-age homes liberate children from obligations to ageing parents, and so on. (Even marriage is a bit suspect: in France or Germany households are the basic unit of taxation, but in Sweden all adults file independently.) American parents sending their offspring to college must submit proof of their incomes for the youngsters to qualify for scholarships. In contrast, young Swedes are assumed to be on their own: the income of their parents is irrelevant. Their independence is a gift of the state, expensive as it is to sustain.

It’s reprise of what we used to talk about as “status versus contract.” Life without status-based obligations to other people sounds pretty terrible to me.

On this blog’s trajectory

While writing the preceding item, I thought that I must have written something or a few things around October-November 2014, when my wife and I each lost our surviving parent within two weeks and 5 hours of each other. Indeed I did, and I like what I wrote. I think it’s kind of timeless..

Nonsectarian Prayer

I had forgotten that the perfect nonsectarian prayer for public meeting was written many decades ago by one of our greatest writers:

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well-Lighted Place

(I prefer no prayer to “nonsectarian” prayer, and that’s a preference of many decades’ duration.)

Legal news, one click down from SCOTUS

The Institute for Justice publishes a weekly collection of pithy case summaries from U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal:

…

New Hampshire parents (and a grandparent) are barred from school property after wearing pink wristbands at high school soccer game in protest of a trans player on the visiting team. First Circuit: Seems like a First Amendment problem.

…

During an oversight visit to a federal immigration facility, N.J. congresswoman has a confrontation with federal officials. She’s later charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer. She claims immunity under the Speech and Debate Clause and alleges vindictive prosecution. Third Circuit: She loses on two of the counts against her and we remand on the third. Dissent: Sure seems like she’s being treated worse than Jan. 6 defendants.

…

Allegation: Woman peacefully protests fatal police shooting by grilling hot dogs and hamburgers outside Lafayette, La. mayor’s house. She is arrested for obstructing the roadway, which she wasn’t, and strip searched at jail. Unlawful retaliation for speech? Unconstitutional arrest without probable cause? Fifth Circuit: Qualified immunity. Dissent: Qualified immunity is made up and wrong, and also it doesn’t apply here.

…

Student visiting Michigan court as part of a vocational program falls asleep while judge is giving career advice. Yikes! The judge has her locked up for several hours and then puts her on fake trial. She sues. Judge: The “trial” may have been fake, but I am a real judge entitled to real judicial immunity. Sixth Circuit: We’ll give you points for chutzpah, but not immunity.

…

Is possessing virtual, AI-generated child sexual abuse material in the privacy of the home protected by the First Amendment? Seventh Circuit: Under binding precedent, yeah, it seems to be protected. Two-judge concurrence: Perhaps SCOTUS should give a fresh look-see to its early-aughts precedent on this subject.

…

Arkansas sex offender serves most of his 30-year-sentence, is granted parole, and seeks to live on property owned by family trust. Yikes! His parole officer fabricates a nonexistent daycare nearby and bars him from living there—a situation that other officials, apprised of the lie, do not remedy. A due-process violation? Eighth Circuit: There is no constitutional right to early release, so no.

Short Circuits excerpts for August 28. You can subscribe for free.

I’m a big first amendment guy, but virtual, AI-generated child sexual abuse material, even in the privacy of the home, strikes me as beyond the constitutional pale. I do remember Thomas Becket’s passionate admonition against punishing merely dangerous Richard Rich, but possessing kiddie porn is more than dangerous.

Celibacy, Chastity, Abstinence

Kevin Williamson, after a great accounting of Why Everybody Hates Capitalism, distinguishes three things that too often are treated as synonymous:

Celibacy, properly understood, does not refer to a state of sexual abstinence per se—it refers to the state of being unmarried or the state of having sworn off marriage, with the understanding that Christian morality requires sexual abstinence as a consequence of the unmarried state. Chastity, in the Christian moral vocabulary, does not refer exclusively to sexual abstinence, either, but to keeping sex in its place: Catholic doctrine speaks of chaste marriage, meaning one in which the dual unitive (we Catholics love our jargon) and procreative functions of sex are properly integrated into the marital relationship. Chastity may mean abstinence in one context and forbid practicing abstinence in another. Abstinence, of course, is the word for what often is meant by celibacy: abstaining.

Maybe some day he’ll get around to “immaculate conception,” too (which I didn’t capitalize because Orthodoxy holds no such doctrine, but I nevertheless know what it means).

Power to pick up and leave

British political commentator David Goodhart argues that globalization has created two types of people—the anywheres and the somewheres. The anywheres enjoy the benefits of the new networked world. They move comfortably through cyberspace and around the physical world. Their identity is the identity of the global network. The ability to move around networks freely is the new marker of power. Power is the ability to live in multiple places at once. To have the power to pick up and leave. The sense of meaning traditionally found in “place” is replaced with the freedom found in the app.

Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence

Shorts

  • I can’t figure out what made her so loveable. I think it was the sincerity of her artificiality—that she put herself together in the most artificial way possible, but believed in it like a kid believing that a cap pinned to his shoulders could make him fly. When she talked and sang, she was completely direct and honest, even into old age. The rhinestones were heavy, she told a family member, so she wanted to rest on a fluffy bed of cotton in the casket. She was one of a kind. (Frederica Mathewes-Green)
  • Under the circumstances, handing Darline Graham a Senate seat is tantamount to handing Trump himself a Senate seat. It’s akin to Caligula installing his horse in the chamber, this time with the people’s consent. Which, as others have noted, makes last night’s result feel like a logical outcome for the modern GOP. (Nick Catoggio)
  • The actual power of an undergrad Red Guard scrutinizing a candidate for some small-time faculty position he is ultimately thankful he did not get is nothing compared to the power of an unelected tech boyar and his greasy shock-troops dismantling the federal government. (Justin Smith-Ruiu)
  • Vote Republican. Vote red otherwise we’re all dead. … Your support of the Democrat party makes me seriously question how much I’m going to talk to you in the future. I don’t talk to democrats. They’re filth. Period. (Alleged remark of a clergyman grooming an emotionally fragile teenage girl) in the late twenty-teens.
  • How firm. How furious. How fleeting. (Frank Bruni’s description of one current Republican candidates reaction to January 6. I won’t name the candidate because it fits about 90% of the GOP.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Sunday, 3/16/25

God making the world

As Peter Geach puts it, for Aquinas the claim that God made the world “is more like ‘the minstrel made music’ than ‘the blacksmith made a shoe’”; that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event. While the shoe might continue to exist even if the blacksmith dies, the music necessarily stops when the minstrel stops playing, and the world would necessarily go out of existence if God stopped creating it.

Edward Feser, Aquinas

Sitting with the dead

Walking backwards into our own graves, so filled with denial because we lived not really once thinking that such a thing could one day happen to us. We miss the needed consciousness that sitting with a dead body will sober and sanctify us into. We haven’t been done a favour by having the end of life ushered out of sight.

Part of getting made into a human is the final part. Getting un-made. That preparing for death is not the same as what was before it. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It’s not my time is not the appropriate mantra of a grown up. One day, any day, it will be my time, is better.

Martin Shaw, On Death

“American Christianity”

After playing whataboutism with the Manicheanism of the Seven Mountain Mandate and shrill progressives like Anne Applebaum, R.R. Reno sums up:

A friend recently argued that “evangelicalism” is a spent label. It gained currency during the postwar era, but cultural changes, not just in American society at large, but within conservative Protestant churches have made the term impossible to define. Better, he said, to speak of “American Christianity,” the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, and populist form of Bible-only Christianity that has its roots in the Second Great Awakening and was supercharged by the Pentecostal revivals of the twentieth century.

American Christianity has always been deeply embedded in and responsive to the social realities that shape the lives of non-elite Americans. We’re in a populist moment in our politics, because these non-elite Americans have decided to use their votes to fight back. The same thing is happening in our home-grown American Christianity. I may dismiss the reasoning behind the New Apostolic Reformation (not least because it is anti-theological) and rue its blustering political biblicism. But I won’t criticize the activist spirit. Why should the great American tradition of reformist zeal be the sole possession of secular progressives?

R.R. Reno

I tend to agree with the uselessness of the “evangelical” label, though I’m not ready to cede “American Christianity” to the sectarians.

I think I’ve tacitly undertaken to undermine the the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, populist and anti-intellectual aspects in which, for lack of a better term, American evangelicalism specializes — in hopes that evangelicals who love Christ more than political power will wise up and come take a look at Orthodoxy.

How to work up a crusade

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of a good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your behavior “righteous indignation”—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley via R.R. Reno. Surely this concept is behind Mafia Don’s campaign promise “I am your retribution.”

I’ve known for decades that there’s something corrupt about an economy based on competitive acquisitiveness and the promise of endless growth. The politics of retribution is no less corrupt.

I’m using “corrupt” in the third adjectival sense.

God sees the heart

There was once a monk who lived on Mount Athos, in Karyes. He was drinking and getting drunk every day, scandalizing the pilgrims. After a while he died and this relieved some of the believers who went and told elder Paisios they were pleased that finally this huge problem was resolved.

Father Paisios replied that he knew about the monk’s death, because he saw a whole battalion of angels who came to pick up his soul.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Relgio-Political wisdom

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is In The Air, 1/13/2021

There’s more than thinking to life

Contemporary western Christianity trained us how to think and what to think; whereas Christ himself, as did Lao Tzu before Him, taught us how not to need to think.

Christ the Eternal Tao

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Sunday, 10/13/24

Tomorrow, we will bury my youngest brother, who died Tuesday. So it has been a busy and stressful week.

Jonathan’s life on earth was, by upper-middle class, first world standards, unusually afflicted, and he was not afraid of death. We, his surviving brothers, all practicing Christians of varying traditions (our parents did well), see God’s gracious hand in this in many ways.

If you do such things, pray for God’s servant, Jonathan, who has “fallen asleep” in hope of resurrection, though in his tradition he would have called it something else.

Here’s what I have for you today.

Christians did not worry that absence of the pagans from their services constituted a lost opportunity. Their worship was not evangelistic; it was not “seeker sensitive.” Their intent in worshiping was to glorify God rather than to attract outsiders. And since they believed that authentic worship formed the worshipers, they believed that in the course of time the behavior of those so formed would attract outsiders.

Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church

In 1184, bishops who previously might have been content to let sleeping heretics lie had been instructed actively to sniff them out. Then, in 1215, at the great Lateran Council presided over by Innocent III, sanctions explicitly targeting heresy had provided the Church with an entire machinery of persecution.

Tom Holland, Dominion

For what it’s worth, I seem to recall a trustworthy source affirm that there was never any sort of inquisition in the Eastern (Orthodox) Church, and I know I have heard of none.

Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’

Tom Holland, Dominion

Protestants made the sixteenth century an era of unprecedented emphasis on doctrine. In their divergent ways, all Protestants thought that the most fundamental problem with the Roman church was its mistaken truth claims, that is, its false doctrines. As we saw in the previous chapter, they offered their respective corrections based on scripture, variously supplemented by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the exercise of reason. Because Lutherans and Reformed Protestants were supported rather than suppressed by political authorities, theirs were the particular Protestant truth claims institutionalized in cities, territories, and countries whose leaders rejected Rome.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Revelations in Death’s Wake

My father-in-law and my mother died two weeks to the day apart. I was present both times when, in civil terms, they “breathed their last” but more importantly, if invisibly, their souls separated from their bodies.

We bury my mother today.

I haven’t been avoiding this topic. I haven’t written about it mostly because I don’t really have my thoughts collected. (Yeah, I know that hasn’t always stopped me.) Although this blog has been something of a Journal, I’ve not shared all that many of my “most personal” thoughts and experiences. There are just too many interesting things in the world that aren’t me or my feelings.

But here’s one that surprised me. These deaths have left huge holes in our family’s schedule of the last few years. The Saturday after my mother’s death, we arose and said, basically, “What now?” Saturday morning meant I visited my mother in nursing home, which I did once each week. But she wasn’t there (and the funeral home didn’t need drop-by visitors). Every morning meant my wife visited her father, as did every afternoon and, increasingly, evenings and in the middle of the night if he awoke delusional from a TIA. But he wasn’t there, either.

So we’re disoriented. That’s a surprise. The extent of the disorientation is a bigger surprise, maybe coming from the double-whammy of two such deaths so quickly. We need re-oriented. I want to avoid self indulgence, but to much stiff upper lip can lead to madness, methinks.

Second, I hate modern, efficiency obsession. My father-in-law pre-arranged cremation, and as he was living far from his very few remaining family, there was no visitation and, as of yet, no memorial service of any sort.

It was all very efficient, dammit.

Say what ill you will of the modern funeral industry, but it gives at least a little chance to grieve. My father-in-law didn’t think of that, or didn’t think anyone would grieve him, or something. And for much of my daily life, I’m surrounded by people who intend to do much the same thing to their families. “I don’t need my body any more. Haul it out with the trash and incinerate it.”

My mother’s soul, with all due respect, was not “freed” from her body. It was wrested from her body by the great enemy, death, and will be reunited with it in the great and glorious Resurrection from the dead at our Lord’s second coming. Christians don’t believe in “the immortality of the soul” simpliciter; we believe in the Resurrection of the body. Insofar as modern Christians have come to think and act otherwise, they are sub-Christian. You can look it up in the Creed if you’d care to.

Third, I’m happy that mother’s death wasn’t over-medicalized. I’m a right-to-lifer to the core, but that doesn’t mean torturing people to keep them alive. Mother issued a no code request nine years before her death. Resuscitation efforts on her were unthinkable, with her rheumatoid arthritis and brittle bones. It is appointed unto man once to die.

Yeah, there was oxygen and an air mattress and the electrical whir to keep them working. There also was morphine to keep her from hyperventilating and Ativan to reduce her anxiety, which had become chronic. But no monitors, no medical people in the room at death. When I thought my mother had died, I went and felt for a pulse, wrist and neck. I didn’t call for a nurse immediately. I said goodbye, commended her to the Lord, and then got a nurse to make it official.

Then I stayed with the body until the funeral home came, and as they lifted her onto the gurney.

Fourth, I couldn’t pay my mother’s body as much respect as I’d have liked. Rod Dreher writes of the sudden death of a youngish man in their little mission parish. They were ready for the eventual death of someone, and they handled it in the Orthodox manner.

It’s kind of creepy to turn our loved ones over to professionals who will needlessly replace their blood with formaldehyde, primp them, make them up, and try to make them look alive lest we be reminded too powerfully of the last enemy. And although my father-in-law chose it, I find cremation creepier still. But we Orthodox are living in a land of liberal western Christianity, and there’s a point where resistance is, if not futile, a bit over-the-top obsessive.

Fifth, I no longer have the illusion that I can’t be that old because my mother and father-in-law are living. It’s now official: I’m next. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

That’s about all I’m ready to share yet. If I figure death out, you’ll be the first to know.

UPDATE: One afterthought. It was surprising how unsuitable were all the standard “verses” the funeral home had to offer. “God hath not promised skies always blue ….” Nah. “I have loved you with an everlasting love ….” Beautiful, and true, but out of context. God spoke that through the prophet to Israel, not to individuals. And so on.

Then they commented that they could do anything I wanted. I picked Romans 8:38-39:

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

SECOND UPDATE: David Mills, coincidentally, feels somewhat toward cremation as I do.

* * * * *

“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Tuesday, 7/29/14

  1. Fight for your right to Soma
  2. Sic volo, sic jubeo
  3. A sign of hope – very long term
  4. Daily Signal-to-Noise ratio awfully low
  5. ISIS and the Tomb of Jonah
  6. NPR Blows one (on a topic they just can’t get)
  7. Death as a matter of Christian integrity
  8. We are precious in His sight

Continue reading “Tuesday, 7/29/14” →

Fidelity

I attended a Wake Thursday, only we don’t call them that any more.

In the coffin was a 32-year-old man-boy. In line as one approached mother and step-father, were scrapbook pictures of his younger versions, beaming with delight at 4th of July sparklers and other such simple pleasures. He “enjoyed listening to music, watching movies, and sharing his contagious joy. He fought the good fight and is awaiting his crown of glory.” Continue reading “Fidelity” →