"In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own."
I
n marriage as in poetry, the given word implies the acceptance of a form that is never entirely of one's own making. When understood seriously enough, a form is a way of accepting and of living with the limits of creaturely life. We live only one life, and die only one death. A marriage cannot include everybody, because the reach of responsibility is short. A poem cannot be about everything, for the reach of attention and insight is short.
There are two aspects to these forms. The first is the way of making or acting or doing, which is to some extent technical. That is to say that definitions - setting of limits - are involved. The names poetry and marriage are given only to certain things, not to anything or to everything. Poetry is made of words; it is expected to keep a certain fidelity to everyday speech and a certain fidelity to music; if it is unspeakable or unmusical, it is not poetry. Marriage is the mutual promise of a man and a woman to live together, to love and help each other, in mutual fidelity, until death. It is understood that these definitions cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance, any more than we can call a rabbit a squirrel because we preferred to see a squirrel. Poetry of the traditionally formed sort, for instance, does not propose that its difficulties should be solved by skipping or forcing a rhyme or by mutilating syntax or by writing prose. Marriage does not invite one to solve one's quarrel with one's wife by marrying a more compliant woman. Certain limits, in short, are prescribed - imposed before the beginning.
Standing by Words by Wendell Berry
"Some parents are writing their college-age kids' resumes. Others are acting as their children's 'representatives,' hounding college career counselors, showing up at job fairs and sometimes going as far as calling employers to ask why their son or daughter didn't get a job.
It's the next phase in helicopter parenting, a term coined for those who have hovered over their children's lives from kindergarten to college."
"The season of colds, which ran all the way through to the end of February, started in November, when the magical, golden enchantment of autumn days (the wine of the seasons, when the year held its breath at the approach of frost and fire) turned into the raw damp of the back end of the year."
Your head begins to fill with arcane academic facts, culled from the U.S. News rankings and the Princeton Review. How does Swarthmore compare to Harvey Mudd for alumni giving and student/faculty ratio? When are the due dates for the online FAFSA form and SAT II Chemistry test? Does Marilyn McGrath-Lewis, the Harvard dean of admissions, prefer coffee or tea at breakfast? All these answers are at your fingertips, ready to be summoned forth at a moment’s notice. Soon, the deluge begins to overwhelm your rational faculties, and you begin to think seriously about things like how various collegiate rear-window stickers will go with your minivan’s color scheme.
Indeed, when the dust settles on the cultural record of the past half century, it will, I believe, be noted with interest that the combined forces of so-called "political correctness" were accompanied not by a reduction, but by a sickening eruption of male aggression, incivility, and misogyny. While historical causation is not always easy to establish, it is past time that consideration be given to the kinds of desperate expression that arise when one's deepest nature is denied.
COVID:2 Collage Four years ago today we all came home for the lock down. Middle school classes conducted by zoom on the deck, college cours...
