The future is possible for those with a 'nose for reality'

Pope Francis at St Peter's Square on Easter Monday.   Antoine Mekary | ALETEIA 

 Where can young people get a vision of the future that does not lead to despair? What is the source of hope? From what can true joy spring for those with their life ahead of them?

The war in Ukraine is everyday fratricidal conflict writ large, as societies contend with divisions and inequalities that secular leaders are largely unwilling to seek solutions to or witless as to how to implement them, with their position in the social elite always at the forefront of their considerations.

However, the young have been offered a light to guide them to future horizons, as Pope Francis offered words to inspire, and reasons to hope when addressing about 80,000 young Italians who gathered in the square in front of St Peter's Basilica on the day after Resurrection Sunday. 

“The clouds that darken our time are still dense,” Francis told them. A useful report on the event continues to quote him as saying:

 “In addition to the pandemic, Europe is experiencing a terrible war, while injustices and violence continue in many regions of the earth that destroy mankind and the planet,” he said, noting that it is often young people who pay the highest price, as they lose their hope and dreams for the future.

He then referred to the Gospel passage in which Peter and John along with a handful of others, after Jesus’ resurrection, go out for an unsuccessful night of fishing. In the morning, Jesus appears and tells them to try again, and when the disciples obey, their nets are full of fish.

 “Sometimes life puts us to the test, makes us touch our frailties, makes us feel naked, helpless, alone…We must not be ashamed to say: ‘I’m afraid of the dark!’ We are all afraid of the dark. Fears must be said, fears must be expressed in order to be able to drive them away.”

“When the fears, which are in darkness, go into the light, the truth bursts out,” he said, insisting that the important thing about moments of crisis is not the crisis itself, but “how I manage this crisis”.

Staying isolated and closed off from others doesn’t help, but talking to and confiding in others does, he said.

Francis soon put his prepared speech aside to be able to speak more freely. The report of the event states: 

[He] urged youth to maintain their enthusiasm for life and their “nose” for reality, saying adults over the years tend to lose their sight, their hearing, and their “nose” for life.

“You have ‘the nose.’ Don’t lose this, please! You have the nose for reality, and it’s a great thing,” the pope said, voicing hope that young people would have “the nose of John” in the Gospel, who was the youngest but the first to recognize Jesus after the night of fishing, as well as “the courage of Peter,” who was the oldest, but the first to jump in and swim to the shore where Jesus was standing.

           [Do] not to be “ashamed of your outbursts of generosity”.

“The nose will lead you to generosity. Throw yourself into life,” he said, adding, “don’t be afraid of life, please! Be afraid of death, the death of the soul, the death of the future, the closure of the heart, be afraid of these things. But of life, no. Life is beautiful.”

Life, the pope said, “is for living and giving to others, not to close it in on itself”.

“It is important that you move forward,” he said. “The fears? Illuminate them, say them. Discouragement? Win it with courage, with someone to give you a hand. And the nose for life: don’t lose it, because it’s a beautiful thing.”

During his time with the young people, Pope Francis listened to testimonies from them about their lives, and the larger event included music, including a performance from top Italian rapper Blanco, and activities featuring other artists, leaders in their field.

The time of prayer, fun and sharing showed the enthusiasm of young people is a rich resource for any society wishing to cooperate with God in his plan that we have life, and have it to the full.

Some of the young people at St Peter's Square on Easter Monday    Antoine Mekary | ALETEIA

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What Christians can affirm as good and true

R R Reno, the powerhouse editor of First Things

Christians see that many forces within WEIRD society are driving it off-track - have even already ensured it end up in the wreck category! Therefore, the pressure is great to warn, to educate, to lead any members of the ideologically fashionable elite who are still open to reality, to science and to an escape from self-imposed suffering, to return to the way of life that is narrow in form but generous in outcome.

This matter is addressed in the latest annual report of the Protestant-Catholic magazine First Things, published in New York and a prominent example of quality writing on the human condition. In the report, the editor, R R Reno, explains what he and his staff have in their hearts:

Dear First Things readers,

It’s often easy to see what we oppose. We’re against woke tyranny. We reject the culture of death. We parry the unmerited claims that strong religious voices in public life run counter to liberal principles and America’s constitutional traditions. We are against tiresome claims about “the arc of history” and their threadbare second cousin, the outdated theological program of “relevance”. I could go on. There’s a great deal of ruin in the contemporary West, and we’re right to oppose bad ideas and destructive trends. But if we define ourselves only by what we oppose, we risk losing sight of what we are for.

The salt of the gospel gains its savor from what it affirms, not what it opposes. The same holds for the salt of natural truths, which ask us to say “yes” in addition to “no”. Opposition to abortion arises from an affirmation of the sanctity of life. Rejection of same-sex marriage is rooted in our “yes” to the biblical vision of the natural and spiritual fruitfulness of the union of a man and a woman.

In 2021, the First Things editorial staff met on a number of occasions to talk about what we affirm—and how to bring those affirmations to life in our pages. Here’s a snapshot.

We affirm beauty in art, intelligence in literature, and wisdom in tradition, publishing essays and reviews that bring before readers images, books, and activities worthy of their admiration: Gary Saul Morson on The Brothers Karamazov, Algis Valiunas on Charles Dickens, Bruno Chaouat on the sweet nostalgia of Chateaubriand, and Elizabeth Corey on Kim’s Diner and books for children. Our gaze is not uncritical, but our aim is to refine our love with critical judgment, not to dampen its yes-saying ardor.

We affirm moral truths. It is not sufficient to condemn abortion, euthanasia, and other grievous evils. We need a vision of human law guided by natural law and legislation that aims to promote the common good. These are contested notions, and rightly so. When we publish John Finnis or Hadley Arkes, we know that their arguments invite counter-arguments. But if we are to move beyond what we are against, then a substantive vision needs to be ventured, a “yes” needs to be proposed.

We affirm the tranquility of order, especially between the sexes. This is especially difficult to translate into a concrete proposal for society, given that so much has been disrupted by the sexual revolution. All the more reason, therefore, to applaud Scott Yenor and Mary Harrington, whose articles last year (“Sexual CounterRevolution” and “Reactionary Feminism”) may not be the last word on what kind of culture we want to build for our children and grandchildren, but they are at least a first word.

And we affirm God’s benevolent and life-giving power. It’s not just that we believe modern conceits of autonomy are misguided and often destructive. When those conceits about autonomy infect theology, they impede our obedience to God, which is the royal road to true freedom. Whether Patricia Snow’s memoirs of conversion or Carl R. Trueman’s theological trumpet blasts, First Things exists to champion the triumphant “yes” of God’s love, which evokes from us the “yes” of faith.

“Againstism”. That’s what I call the no-saying temptation that is satisfied with opposition. This temptation shirks responsibility for leadership. I pledge to you that I will resist this temptation. First Things is published so that we can assume our roles as leaders, an imperative if we’re to bring sanity (and perhaps a smidgen of sanctity) to our confused, disordered, and increasingly tense and anxious societies. And to be leaders, we must build upon the very best of our inheritance— artistic, political, moral, and theological—to venture a vision for a better future.

Sincerely,

R. R. Reno

Dip into First Things here to enjoy the freshness that can be found in good writing, and rich perspectives rarely found in mainstream media, or other media as well for that matter. This publication, in print and online, can rightly claim the status of  America's most influential journal of religion and public life. 

The next step is to enable the positivity that Christian living embodies, given the new life witnessed at Easter, to thrive in our minds and hearts so that we can share this gift with those burdened by the bleakness this age casts upon us.

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'Prayer is the greatest freedom of all'

Father Giles Conacher, a Benedictine monk in Scotland for 47 years, reflects in a brief BBC video on what freedom means to him and how to achieve it:

I think that freedom everywhere, anywhere, is love. Letting yourself be loved, which is always risky. And loving, which is maybe even riskier.

Prayer, I suppose, is the greatest freedom of all, because it's a relationship, it's a gift of God. It's very mysterious, I think. It's a gift and you just accept what comes.

Silence is an enabling thing. It frees you for listening, for availability, for avoiding imposing yourself.

How often in speech are we trying to do someone down or demonstrate our superiority or all of that? So, silence frees you from those things. 

Most monks do all sorts of things. So you take your turn washing up, peeling the spuds, cooking the lunch, driving the car. Many little jobs. Just like a family. 

Habere est haberi, which means, "What you possess, possesses you". The less you've got, the more freedom you have. And that’s a freedom which is quite hard to acquire in some ways because letting go of things is detachment.

It's difficult but it's essential for freedom because as our lives go on, you have to let go of things. Maybe your memory, maybe your sight, maybe your hearing, maybe mobility. You've got to let them go.

Because one day, you have to let go of your life, the ultimate impoverishment. But that’s the only way to get to the freedom of eternal life. 

It will be tough at times, everybody's life is tough at times. But as they say, the retirement benefits are out of this world. 

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Good Friday - the servant of God suffering for us

Look, my servant will prosper, will grow great, will rise to great heights.

As many people were aghast at him

- he was so inhumanly disfigured that he no longer looked like a man - 

so many nations will be astonished and kings will stay tight-lipped before him,

seeing what had never been told them, learning what they had not heard before.

Who has given credence to what we have heard? 

And who has seen in it a revelation of Yahweh's arm?

Like a sapling he grew up before him, like a root in arid ground. 

He had no form or charm to attract us, no beauty to win our hearts; 

he was despised, the lowest of men, a man of sorrows, 

familiar with suffering, one from whom, as it were, we averted our gaze, 

despised, for whom we had no regard. 

Yet ours were the sufferings he was bearing, ours the sorrows he was carrying, 

while we thought of him as someone being punished and struck with affliction by God; 

whereas he was being wounded for our rebellions, crushed because of our guilt; 

the punishment reconciling us fell on him, and we have been healed by his bruises. 

We had all gone astray like sheep, each taking his own way, 

and Yahweh brought the acts of rebellion of all of us to bear on him.

Ill-treated and afflicted, he never opened his mouth, like a lamb led to the slaughter-house, 

like a sheep dumb before its shearers he never opened his mouth. 

Forcibly, after sentence, he was taken. 

Which of his contemporaries was concerned at his having been cut off from the land of the living, 

at his having been struck dead for his people's rebellion? 

He was given a grave with the wicked, and his tomb is with the rich, 

although he had done no violence, had spoken no deceit. 

It was Yahweh's good pleasure to crush him with pain; 

if he gives his life as a sin offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his life, 

and through him Yahweh's good pleasure will be done. 

After the ordeal he has endured, he will see the light and be content. 

By his knowledge, the upright one, my servant will justify many by taking their guilt on himself. 

Hence I shall give him a portion with the many, and he will share the booty with the mighty, 

for having exposed himself to death and for being counted as one of the rebellious, 

whereas he was bearing the sin of many and interceding for the rebellious.

Isaiah 52:13-53-12 New Jerusalem Bible

Personal advice from a trans survivor

Teens are ready victims of cultural forces. Stock photo Anna Shvets (Pexels)

The Washington Post, to its credit, has let a man who identifies as a woman state why troubled young people are not able to comprehend the life-long consequences their urgent decisions will have. Corinna Cohn gets the chance, rare in US mainstream media, which tend to hoe the line set by the elite and its latest fashionable ideology, to tell about the impact now that life as a 50 year old approaches.

Cohn says that at 19 he was too young to make the decision that "committed me to a lifetime set apart from my peers". As a young man he had been attracted to men and thought that by becoming a woman he would be  "more successful in finding love". 

"In high school, when I experienced crushes on my male classmates, I believed that the only way those feelings could be requited was if I altered my body."

This is the kind of confusion Cohn wants to prevent and is alarmed at the "strong cultural forces" that are pushing children to make such definitive decisions without the support of parents. Cohn writes:

As a teenager, I was repelled by the thought of having biological children, but in my vision of the adult future, I imagined marrying a man and adopting a child. It was easy to sacrifice my ability to reproduce in pursuit of fulfilling my dream. Years later, I was surprised by the pangs I felt as my friends and younger sister started families of their own.

The sacrifices I made seemed irrelevant to the teenager I was: someone with gender dysphoria, yes, but also anxiety and depression. The most severe cause of dread came from my own body. I was not prepared for puberty, nor for the strong sexual drive typical for my age and sex.

Surgery unshackled me from my body’s urges, but the destruction of my gonads introduced a different type of bondage. From the day of my surgery, I became a medical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life. I must choose between the risks of taking exogenous estrogen, which include venous thromboembolism and stroke, or the risks of taking nothing, which includes degeneration of bone health. In either case, my risk of dementia is higher, a side effect of eschewing testosterone.

Dangers of affirmation

Cohn's message to society is this: 

I chose an irreversible change before I’d even begun to understand my sexuality. 

Therefore, affirmation can be insidious:

Where were my parents in all this? They were aware of what I was doing, but by that point, I had pushed them out of my life. I didn’t need parents questioning me or establishing realistic expectations — especially when I found all I needed online. In the early 1990s, something called Internet Relay Chat, a rudimentary online forum, allowed me to meet like-minded strangers who offered an inexhaustible source of validation and acceptance. [Emphasis added]

I shudder to think of how distorting today’s social media is for confused teenagers. I’m also alarmed by how readily authority figures facilitate transition. I had to persuade two therapists, an endocrinologist and a surgeon to give me what I wanted. None of them were under crushing professional pressure, as they now would be, to “affirm” my choice.

Most of all, slow down 

What advice would I pass on to young people seeking transition? Learning to fit in your body is a common struggle. Fad diets, body-shaping clothing and cosmetic surgery are all signs that countless millions of people at some point have a hard time accepting their own reflection. The prospect of sex can be intimidating. But sex is essential in healthy relationships. Give it a chance before permanently altering your body.

Most of all, slow down. You may yet decide to make the change. But if you explore the world by inhabiting your body as it is, perhaps you’ll find that you love it more than you thought possible.

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The bright spark of resurrection

American astronomer Rebecca Elson died of cancer in 1999 when she was 39. As well as her science, Elson wrote poetry, "never losing her keen awareness that we are matter capable of wonder" (Source). In fact, the one book of poems she left us is titled A Responsibility to Awe.

Listen as Patti Smith reads one of Elson's works and enjoy the aninimation:

The Universe in Verse | Part 4: Let There Always Be Light from Maria Popova on Vimeo.

The poem for your deliberation on the "beguiling beauty" of creation that overwhelms the scientist: 

LET THERE ALWAYS BE LIGHT (SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER)

by Rebecca Elson

For this we go out dark nights, searching

For the dimmest stars,

For signs of unseen things:

 

To weigh us down.

To stop the universe

From rushing on and on

Into its own beyond

Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,

Its last star going out.

 

Whatever they turn out to be,

Let there be swarms of them,

Enough for immortality,

Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

 

Let there be enough to bring it back

From its own edges,

To bring us all so close we ignite

The bright spark of resurrection.

Kids poorly served by trans 'science'

Andrew Sullivan has been a leader in intellectual circles in the United States and was the principal proponent of same-sex marriage before it took off as a mainstream issue. He is a homosexual and is a victim of the HIV epidemic. He writes often about the experience of the gay community and has increasingly expressed concern that the ideology of transgenderism, which has been readily absorbed by Western elites, is bent on doing harm to gay people and all young people.

In his latest weekly column on his Substack The Weekly Dish newsletter (behind a paywall), Sullivan presses the question of who is looking out for kids since American schools are generally surreptitiously rolling out instruction in critical queer and gender theory in the kindergarten through primary school years. When children reflect the confusion that critical queer theory necessarily generates, the schools keep it all secret from parents, and this at the crucial time of puberty. 

When Sullivan examines some of the reading texts in use at public schools he finds a definite pattern throughout all the materials:

The words “boy” and “girl” are never used to refer to biological sex; and they are never used as a binary. You can be neither, both or something else. And this is taught to all kids.

[...] these words, “boy” and “girl,” used by most people to refer to someone’s sex, are re-made in a child’s mind to refer only to gender. “I’m not a girl. I’m a boy in my heart and brain.” When Calvin’s parents accept him, we get the mantra: “We love you if you are a boy or a girl or both or neither.” Sex is gone; gender is everything; gender can be anything, even non-human. In this [Human Rights Campaign]-recommended book, the baby “can’t decide what to be. Boy or girl? Bird or fish?” Yes: fish.

Before long, as you peruse the material, you see a consistent message being sent to children: that being a boy or a girl has nothing to do with your body; and that you can “become” either, both or “something else entirely”.

That is why Sullivan starts his column by stating, "Getting a grip on reality is not so easy these days..." because in the "approved" texts:

“Sex” [...] becomes a “pronoun assigned at birth.” Yes, you read that right. Biological sex is merely “what the doctors or midwives said when you were born.” It’s a word without meaning. And you will note that in the “snowperson” lesson, the human body has no part to play at all.  

Parents are beginning to hear their kids talk about “women with penises,” as more teenage girls suddenly announce they’re transitioning, and the White House doubles down on affirming puberty blockers for children, even as European countries begin to realize they overstepped. (In the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and France, medical authorities are sounding the alarm. But the Biden administration regards these drugs as essential.)

The key argument that Sullivan supports with evidence in this column is this:

It seems to me that any books that teach kids to be compassionate and accepting, and aware of different ways of being human, are a positive thing. I don’t doubt the good intentions behind them. Having some materials for a genuinely trans child is a good thing. But teaching all public school kids under the age of eight that their body has no reference to their sex is a huge development — and news to most American parents. And encouraging toddlers to pick pronouns like “ze” and “tree” is not exactly what parents send their kids to public school for. 

Implications of gender theory

He graphically exposes the horrendous implications of this kind of critical queer and gender theory:

These teaching materials aim to be inclusive of the tiny minority of trans children — but they do this by essentially universalizing the very rare experience of being transgender, and suggesting that everyone’s gender is completely independent of biological sex, and trumps it in any conflict. The only way to help trans kids feel better about themselves, this argument goes, is to tell the lie that their experience is everybody’s experience. We are all varieties of trans people now, choosing our sex and performing our gender.

But, of course, we’re not all varieties of trans; the overwhelming majority of humans, including gay humans, experience sex and gender as completely compatible — when they think about them at all. And our species is sexually dimorphic. When pushed to defend the idea that humans are not a binary sexual species, critical theorists lean on the “univariate fallacy.” That argues that any single exception to a rule completely demolishes the rule. If there are any exceptions to every human being male or female, even if they are a tiny percentage of the whole, then there is no sex binary.

But that’s bizarre. That a small percentage of people are attracted to the same sex, for example, does not invalidate the rule that humans are overwhelmingly heterosexual — and if this were not the case, humans wouldn’t exist at all. Gay people are the exception that proves the heterosexual rule. The much smaller number of trans people, likewise, does not disprove that the overwhelming majority of people are completely at ease with their biological sex. It actually proves it, by showing the terrible psychic cost of being otherwise. (Trans kids and adults deal with huge mental health challenges, and commit suicide at staggering rates.) Intersex and [Differences in sex development] people are not a separate species, or some kind of third sex, no more than people with Down Syndrome are anything but fully human. They are a variation in the sex binary. 

Activist trans groups like HRC or the ACLU may thereby be unwittingly putting gay children at risk, misleading them about their sex and their bodies, putting ideas in their head that in the current heated atmosphere could easily lead to irreversible life-long decisions before puberty. And none of this is necessary. It is perfectly possible to look out for the very few genuinely trans children, without revolutionizing everything we know about the human body and biology. It’s possible to be welcoming to gay kids without insinuating that their real problem could be being “in the wrong body”.

The revelations that Disney productions have been feeding children over many years with the mindset that reality does not matter, that you can be anything you feel, tells us how woke degeneracy can have a severe impact on whole generations. This would be part of the explanation as to why there has been, in many WEIRD countries, an eruption in the number of children expressing confusion about sexual identity, girls especially.  

The capture of social elites by ideological pressure groups linked to transgenderism, always under the guise of Christian "human rights", continues as academia bows to what is fashionable (usuing the term "acceptable") and "morally superior".

Scientific paper distorts the facts

Investigatory journalist and author Jesse Singal has just produced in-depth scrutiny of another case of the stupid deceit that this gender ideology engenders in those wishing to stay professionally virtuous.

This is Singal's finding, stated as a headline: Researchers Found Puberty Blockers And Hormones Didn’t Improve Trans Kids’ Mental Health At Their Clinic. Then They Published A Study Claiming The Opposite.

The authors are mostly based at the University of Washington–Seattle or Seattle Children’s Hospital. The publication of their article was backed by a PR campaign by the university, leading to national interest in the findings. Singal writes:

All the publicity materials the university released tell a very straightforward, exciting story: The kids in this study who accessed puberty blockers or hormones (henceforth GAM, for “gender-affirming medicine”) had better mental health outcomes at the end of the study than they did at its beginning. 

He adds:

It isn’t just the publicity materials; the paper itself tells a similar story, at least a few times.

However, - and it's a big however - Singal discovers that the dramatic findings claimed are nonsense:

What’s surprising, in light of all these quotes, is that the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false. [My emphasis]

The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems.

If there were improvement, the researchers would have touted it in a clear, specific way by explaining exactly how much the kids on GAM improved. After all, this is exactly what they were looking into — they list their study’s “Question” as “Is gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary (TNB) youths associated with changes in depression, anxiety, and suicidality?” But they don’t claim this anywhere — not specifically. They reference “improvements” twice (see above) but offer no statistical demonstration anywhere in the paper or the supplemental material.

I wanted to double-check this to be sure, so I reached out to one of the study authors. They wanted to stay on background, but they confirmed to me that there was no improvement over time among the kids who went on hormones or blockers.

That’s why I think the University of Washington–Seattle, JAMA Network Open, and the authors of this study are simply misrepresenting it.  

The researchers used a model that allowed for certain conditions relating to their research, but Singal finds that this cannot be the reason for the claimed findings. He finds the authors, so caught up in the ideological hot-house that this issue has become, pushed their findings to the limit and beyond:

It’s frequently argued that if kids don’t have access to this medicine, they will be at a high risk of killing themselves. I don’t know what this claim could possibly mean if it doesn’t mean that upon starting blockers or hormones, a trans kid with elevated levels of depression or suicidal ideation will experience relief. These researchers, firmly enmeshed in this debate, found that kids who went on these medications did not experience relief — and yet they don’t mention this worrisome fact anywhere in their paper.

Singal offers a thorough methodological critique of the research and calls in an research expert to check his areas of disagreement with the authors. 

His evidence builds to confirm that "the science has become completely intertwined with the politics". He fears that research efforts are now part of a race to prove just how wrong politicians are in introducing legislation that would limit the use of medical treatments for young sexually confused children, and that researchers may want to produce evidence showing the treatments work to win kudos from issue activists as well as professional colleagues.

A serious tone given the implications of failure can be discerned in Singal's conclusion: 

[W]e should maintain vigilance and call out half-baked science when it comes to the literature on youth gender medicine. Adolescent mental health and suicide research, in particular, is a vitally crucial area of science, and we should hold it to high standards. If we can’t agree that it’s wrong and potentially harmful to distort research on these subjects, what can we agree on?

In short, we must stick with reality, whether it's the common sense of the sex binary that sustains much of the natural world that Andrew Sullivan is defending, or the findings of scientific practitioners, where evidence is discovered that enables us to know reality, rather than having the character of our existence obfuscated in an ultimately useless effort to distort reality for civilisation-changing political or ideological ends.  

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