QUOTE: Whale Through a Net

SOURCE:  Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (pp. 36-37). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:  Law vs. Faith, culture, society, religion, restraint, self-government, freedom,

In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked:

We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams understood that liberty under the Constitution could only work if the people were virtuous, restraining their passions and directing them toward the good—as defined, presumably, by Adams’s rationalistic religious belief. Fortunately, having gone through the First Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, America was strongly Evangelical, and citizens had a strong shared idea of the Good and a shared definition of virtue. Unfortunately, this would not last.

QUOTE: Failure to Listen

SOURCE:  Ailes, Roger. You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (p. 55). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:  Empathy, Love, Neighbor,

As psychologist Carl Rogers wrote, “Man’s inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively, skillfully, and with understanding to another person.”

Communicate or Die

SOURCE:  Ailes, Roger. You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (pp. 6-7). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:  Fellowship, koinonia, community, social, society,

Captain Eugene “Red” McDaniel was a Navy pilot shot down in North Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war for six years. In his book Scars and Stripes, he describes the desperate need of prisoners to communicate with one another to maintain morale. He says POWs tended to die much sooner if they couldn’t communicate. On many occasions, Captain McDaniel endured torture rather than give up his attempts to stay in touch with other prisoners, especially when he was in solitary confinement. Prisoners risked death to work out a complicated communications system where they would write under plates, cough, sing, tap on walls, laugh, scratch, or flap laundry a certain number of times to transmit a letter of the alphabet.

Captain McDaniel writes, “One thing I knew, I had to have communications with my own people here in this camp. There were people like myself who wanted to live through this, if at all possible. Communication with each other was what the North Vietnamese captors took the greatest pains to prevent. They knew, as well as I and the others did, that a man could stand more pain if he is linked with others of his own kind in that suffering. The lone, isolated being becomes weak, vulnerable. I knew I had to make contact, no matter what the cost.”1 For those brave men, it was communicate or die.

When we think of survival, we usually list food, shelter, and clothing as the essentials. I believe communications belongs in that grouping. Babies have died in hospitals because of lack of attention, caring, and handling.

Words and Music

SOURCE:  Ailes, Roger. You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (p. 45). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

KEYWORDS:  Spirit vs. Law, Faith vs. Religion, passion, inspiration 

Mark Twain was a renowned speaker in his day as well as a famous writer. One morning as he was dressing, he found a button missing from his shirt. Annoyed, he took another shirt. But it was also short a button. Exasperated, he took a third shirt from his bureau. It, too, lacked a button.

Twain flew into a rage, swearing like a stevedore. When he was through, he was startled to see his wife standing at the door, fuming in her own way at his intemperance. Carefully, slowly, and without a trace of emotion, she repeated every obscene word just uttered by her husband.

That took several minutes. When she was through, she stood impassive and silent, hoping her display would shame Twain. Instead, with a twinkle in his eye, he puffed on his cigar and said, “My dear, you have the words, but you don’t have the music.”

Response to the Great Flood of 2016

SOURCE:  Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (p. 19). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

KEYWORDS:  Kingdom of God, neighbor, love, Edmund Burke, Service, Mission

Growing up in south Louisiana, whenever a hurricane was coming, somebody would take out the cast-iron kettle, make a big pot of gumbo, and after battening down the hatches, invite the neighbors over to eat, tell stories, make merry, and ride out the storm together. This spirit ruled the response to the Great Flood of 2016. Even as the waters rose, little platoons all over south Louisiana rushed out to rescue the trapped, shelter the homeless, feed the hungry (with mountains of jambalaya, mostly), and comfort the broken and broken-hearted.

This was not a response ordered from on high. It emerged spontaneously, out of the love local people had for their neighbor, and the sense of responsibility they had to care for those left poor and naked by the flood. Men and women of virtue—the Cajun Navy, church folks, and others—did not wait to be told what to do. They recognized the seriousness of the crisis, and they moved.