Social warfare demands fresh perspectives

A pair of colliding galaxy clusters about 2.8 billion light years from Earth. Credit: NASA

We need a way of clearing our eyes and mind of the clutter of these turbulent times, says a connoisseur of the riches of the creative world, American Maria Popova. 

Popova would agree that every era in history has its trials and tribulations but from time to time there are peak moments where something deeply transformative occurs, or where the struggle for change foments turbulence that shakes the foundations of a nation, a society or a group of both. This is one those times when the members of many societies feel threatened by those wanting to impose a "new world order" on them.

The turbulence of the present time observed in WEIRD societies in particular, is caused by the rise of a new style of thought that disavows the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that makes possible the fraternity of a healthy society and the balanced functioning of democracy. The acronym stands for Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic.

Instead, there is a rigid adherence to a thin ideology, that for the time being, has altered politics, economics, religion and literature. What we know as Wokeism is all very disturbing because its underpinning ideology, termed Critical Theory, arose as a Marxist-inspired movement among German academics in the 1920s but which soon moved its centre of study to the United States. (See here and here).

Popova has been producing over many years an online newsletter called The Marginalian, formerly Brain Pickings. Having survived a difficult year personally, and being an observer of the anguish in the wider society, she offered her enthusiastic readers some reflections on how to survive when the world around them is in deep trouble.

Most Western citizens would perceive the trouble in their societies as being provoked by the elitist Critical Theory movement, which is a scourge for society not because of the criticism of social structures and the identification of oppression, but because of the manner of promoting social change. Liberty, fraternity and equality are being undermined by the moral deregulation of society on the one hand, but on the other, the imposition of a set of moral invigilators, high on sanctimony in that a distorted world view is at odds with a sense of the nobility of the ordinary person. 

With academia influencing education leaders, and denizens of the media, especially of the mainstream media, the corporate sector quickly fell in step.

Popova, who migrated from Bulgaria, writes in the aftermath of her year confronting multiple difficulties:

Through it all, I have found solace in taking a more telescopic view — not merely on the short human timescale of my own life, looking back on having lived through a Communist dictatorship and having seen poems composed and scientific advances made under such tyrannical circumstances, but on far vaster scales of space and time.

For perspective of how minor and temporary our troubles are in the larger scheme of things, Popova contemplates the Voyager mission NASA launched in 1977 "with the scientific objective of photographing the planets of the outer solar system, which furnished the very first portrait of our cosmic neighborhood". She continues:

Human eyes had never before been laid on the arresting aquamarine of Uranus, on Neptune’s stunning deep-blue orb, on the splendid fury of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot — a storm more than threefold the size of our entire planet, raging for three hundred years, the very existence of which dwarfs every earthly trouble.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a raging storm three and a half times the size of Earth captured in 1979, by Voyager 1. Photo: NASA/JPL

As well as exploration, Voyager had "another, more romantic mission", says Popova:

Aboard it was the Golden Record — a time-capsule of the human spirit encrypted in binary code on a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc, containing greetings in the fifty-four most populist human languages and one from the humpback whales, 117 images of life on Earth, and a representative selection of our planet’s sounds, from an erupting volcano to a kiss to Bach — and [a] Bulgarian folk song.

Bulgaria is an old country — fourteen centuries old, five of which were spent under Ottoman yoke. This song, sung by generations of shepherdesses, encodes in its stunning vocal harmonies both the suffering and the hope with which people lived daily during those five centuries. You need not speak Bulgarian in order to receive its message, its essence, its poetic truth beyond the factual details of history, in the very marrow of your being.

To capture the environment from which such a song erupts, Popova attaches this photo of a Bulgarian sunflower field:

Popova comments: 

Carl Sagan, who envisioned the Golden Record, had precisely that in mind — he saw the music selection as something that would say about us what no words or figures could ever say, for the stated objective of the Golden Record was to convey our essence as a civilization to some other civilization — one that surmounts the enormous improbabilities of finding this tiny spacecraft adrift amid the cosmic infinitude, of having the necessary technology to decode its message and the necessary consciousness to comprehend it.

But the record’s unstated objective, which I see as the far more important one, was to mirror what is best of humanity back to itself in the middle of the Cold War, at a time when we seemed to have forgotten who we are to each other and what it means to share this fragile, symphonic planet.

When the Voyager completed its exploratory mission and took the last photograph — of Neptune — NASA commanded that the cameras be shut off to conserve energy. But Carl Sagan had the idea of turning the spacecraft around and taking one final photograph — of Earth. Objections were raised — from so great a distance and at so low a resolution, the resulting image would have absolutely no scientific value. But Sagan saw the larger poetic worth — he took the request all the way up to NASA’s administrator and charmed his way into permission.

The "Pale Blue Dot" is a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. Photo enhanced: NASA/Caltech

And so, on Valentine’s Day of 1990, just after Bulgaria’s Communist regime was finally defeated after nearly half a century of reign, the Voyager took the now-iconic image of Earth known as the “Pale Blue Dot” — a grainy pixel, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” as Sagan so poetically put it when he immortalized the photograph in his beautiful “Pale Blue Dot” monologue from Cosmos — that great masterwork of perspective, a timeless reminder that “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was… every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician” lived out their lives on this pale blue dot. And every political conflict, every war we’ve ever fought, we have waged over a fraction of this grainy pixel barely perceptible against the cosmic backdrop of endless lonesome space.

Popova has a fitting way to conclude her article, "In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times":

In the cosmic blink of our present existence, as we stand on this increasingly fragmented pixel, it is worth keeping the Voyager in mind as we find our capacity for perspective constricted by the stranglehold of our cultural moment. [...]

I don’t think it is possible to contribute to the present moment in any meaningful way while being wholly engulfed by it. It is only by stepping out of it, by taking a telescopic perspective, that we can then dip back in and do the work which our time asks of us.

I can only add that my wish is that those who are so enamoured of the Christian principles of justice, respect for the poor, weak and marginalised—as in the history of Christian care of the sick, of widows and orphans—should respect the whole body of Christian teaching and act in the spirit of love and empathy, not only for those suffering but also for those who are seen to be the antagonists. My plea is that advocates of the application of Critical Theory social activism absorb Popova's cosmic perspective in the spirit of communion that Martin Luther King displayed instead of thrusting Marxist diktats on a society they no longer understand.

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Pay inequality highlights broken world of work

But with a will, there's a way to limit gross inequality. Graphic: Reuters

We don't have to be slaves to our job. Working pay and benefits are something that we have the power to change, even though that power has to be gained in a struggle of wills between self-interested managers and investors, and those who actually produce the desired outcomes. In this struggle the government also has an important role.

The matter to remember is that working people are agents of their own destiny, as history bears testimony. US economist Dora Costa notes:

The length of the work day fell sharply between the 1880s, when the typical worker labored 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and 1920, when his counterpart worked an 8-hour day, 6 days a week. By 1940 the typical work schedule was 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

“That I should be so lucky!” might be an employee’s response to such figures, but overall reductions in work time came with increases in vacations, holidays, sick days, personal leave, and earlier retirement. Making this possible has been increases in productivity and the political adoption of regulations that limit working hours. 

A data-crunching organisation comments:

As the economists Diane Coyle and Leonard Nakamura explain, the study of working hours is crucial not only to measure macroeconomic productivity, but also to measure economic well-being beyond economic output. A more holistic framework for measuring ‘progress’ needs to consider changes in how people are allowed to allocate their time over multiple activities, among which paid work is only one.

The insight that employees are to a large extent agents of their own destiny with regards their working life is important to appreciate as more than 3000 employees of 70 British businesses begin a trial of a four-day work week. 

Second, the results are just out of the massive CEO versus employee pay gap in the United States. In the set of companies examined, the gap grew last year to 670 to 1, compared with 604 to 1 the previous year.

In my post last month,Economy of Communion - people before riches, I showed how business leaders are increasingly following their consciences and structuring their operations to benefit their employees more equitably, but also to recognise the needs of their community. 

This is done by rejecting Milton Friedman's principle that a business had a responsibility only to its owners, that is, the investors, an idea popular with managers, who tap into that source of selective wealth-building through share-related remuneration. 

However, with the multitude of resignations besetting companies and the appeal of home working for many people, it is clear that businesses have to look afresh at how to shape their business practices to show respect for the human, personal, family needs of employees, going beyond the myopic focus on output. Output, yes, but as always, in all areas of life, balance is key to success. So we mustn't forget the need to "sharpen the saw".

The gig economy is also a growing factor in the lives of many families. Thorough scrutiny of this sector needs to occur to ensure that the workers are not exploited, the many generating wealth for the few.   

So let's use the statistics just out from the US Institute of Policy Studies to see how gross inequality is occurring in the world's biggest economy. 

As the Guardian reports, the institute ...

... found the wage gap between chief executives and workers at some of the US companies with the lowest-paid staff grew even wider last year, with CEOs making an average of $10.6m, while the median worker received $23,968.

[T]he average gap between CEO and median worker pay jumped to 670-to-1 (meaning the average CEO received $670 in compensation for every $1 the worker received). The ratio was up from 604-to-1 in 2020. Forty-nine firms had ratios above 1,000-to-1.

At more than a third of the companies surveyed, IPS found that median worker pay did not keep pace with inflation.

This news report has illuminating information about how the gap continues to widen:

The report, titled Executive Excess, comes amid a wave of unionization efforts among low wage workers and growing scrutiny of the huge share buyback programs many corporations have been using to inflate their share prices. US companies announced plans to buy back more than $300bn of their own shares in the first quarter of the year and Goldman Sachs has estimated that buybacks could top $1 trillion in 2022.

Share-related remuneration makes up the largest portion of senior executive compensation and as buybacks generally boost a company’s share price, they also boost executive pay. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called buybacks “nothing but paper manipulation” designed to increase executive pay.

The report found that two-thirds of low-wage corporations that cut worker pay in 2021 also spent billions inflating CEO pay through stock buybacks.

The biggest buyback firm was home improvement chain Lowe’s, which spent $13bn on share repurchases. That money could have given each of its 325,000 employees a $40,000 raise, according to IPS. Instead, median pay at the company fell 7.6% to $22,697.

Americans are concerned about what is going on, perhaps another cause of public alienation from traditionally respected institutions:

“CEOs’ pandemic greed grab has sparked outrage among Americans across the political spectrum,” said report lead author Sarah Anderson, director of the IPS Global Economy Project. She cited one recent poll that showed that 87% of Americans see the growing gap between CEO and worker pay as a problem for the country. 

Political action and resurrecting unions are key to answering the wealth grab the IPS report highlights.

But action in other directions is also necessary. To give more attention to the well-being of employees  as a counter-balance to the drive for output and therefore profit is also essential as the evidence mounts of  the loss of a sense of solidarity within society. 

This gives us reason to look more closely at innovations such as the four-day work week, where personal well-being is central to its operation. To cite one completed trial:

In 2018, New Zealand estate planners Perpetual Guardian entered their 240 staff into a four-day-work week trial, resulting in 78% of them saying they were able to better manage their work-life balance. 

As for the British trial just starting:

More than 3,000 workers across 70 companies are starting a four-day week today, on full pay, in the world's biggest pilot scheme, as the nation struggles with more job vacancies than staff available. 

The programme is being coordinated by campaign group 4 Day Week Global, think tank Autonomy and academics at Oxford, Cambridge and Boston College in the US. 

There are a range of businesses and charities taking part, including the Royal Society of Biology, hipster London brewery Pressure Drop, Southampton computer game developer Yo Telecom, a Manchester medical devices firm, and a fish and chip shop in Norfolk. 

Staff will be given 100 per cent pay for 80 per cent of their time — but they have made a commitment to produce 100 per cent of their usual output.

The team of researchers involved in the new pilot will study each company and assess the impact on staff, including stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel.

They will also look gender equality, with the four-day week thought to benefit women, who make up a higher proportion of part-time and flexible-hours staff.  

The wider view of what employing people is all about comes through in comments by organisers of the trial:

Joe O'Connor, the chief executive of 4 Day Week Global, said the [United Kingdom] is at the crest of a wave of global momentum behind the four-day week.  

'As we emerge from the pandemic, more and more companies are recognising that the new frontier for competition is quality of life, and that reduced-hour, output-focused working is the vehicle to give them a competitive edge.   

'The impact of the "great resignation" is now proving that workers from a diverse range of industries can produce better outcomes while working shorter and smarter.' 

It's not just small businesses that can cope with the organisational demands of a four-day work week:

In August 2019, Microsoft Japan implemented a four-day week giving their 2,300 employees five Fridays off in a row.

The company said productivity jumped 40 per cent, meetings were more efficient, and workers - who were also happier - took less time off.

Nine out of ten employees at the company said they preferred the shorter working week and other benefits, including a 23 per cent reduction in weekly electricity use, and a 59 per cent decrease in the number of pages printed by employees, which were also welcomed by employers.

This kind of empathetic arrangement of employees' working week stands in contrast with the stance taken by the Chinese tech entrepreneur Jack Ma, who at least advocated if not imposed on his employees that they have a 9-9-6 routine. That meant a 9am to 9pm daily attendance, six days a week, a total of 72 hours a week.

According to Wikipedia, "A number of Mainland Chinese internet companies have adopted this system as their official work schedule. Critics argue that the 9-9-6 working hour system is a violation of Chinese Labour Law and have called it "modern slavery". It added that "9-9-6 was deemed illegal by China's Supreme People's Court on 27 August 2021".  

The court spoke out based on the court action employees took against their companies:

 “We are seeing a strong trend towards encouraging people to use the court system to go after tech companies. We think civil litigation will increase,” said Kendra Schaefer, head of digital research at consultancy Trivium China.

Collective action in support of the common good is needed to provide a balance those enjoying power derived from wealth and political influence.  

💢 See a White Paper on the four-day work week here 

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Woke — wreaking harm on the oppressed

Noelle Mering...wokeism is a thin ideology that harms rather than heals. Photo: Source

"Wokeness is a movement for justice but when you really understand what the internal logic of the movement is, I find it to be alarming," says author and Washington D.C. think tank member Noelle Mering. "It is fundamentally something that weakens people far more than it helps, and particularly the people it claims to want to help."

Mering lays bare the intellectual structure of the movement in her book out last year Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology. In a video on the topic, she says that while the term "woke" refers to being alert and attuned to the layers of oppression in society surrounding the hot issues of today—race, sex, and gender—the underlying idea has a long history.

 "It is really a reformulation of old ideas and old roads that various countries have gone down," nodding to the various experiments in Communist countries based on the materialist and coercive stance of Marxism.

It's more than just a political movement, it's actually a spiritual movement before anything else. So the history of the movement is really important to understand.

You can [find] it in the Garden of Eden with a snake cajoling the first woman to be that she wants - you can be as gods. But if we want [...] a starting point in more modern times most people point to Karl Marx. [However], it's important also to understand who Marx was influenced by, and this is a philosopher named Hegel.

Hegel is important to understand because he started the engine of the modern progressive movement which he called the dialectic. [This ...] was just this idea that history is a movement of progression towards a utopian end and that progress through history comes through the engine of revolution, which is built around an idea manifesting itself in the [...] political state in particular.

"Then that [moment of progress] will have contradictions and those contradictions have to be worked out and worked through. You get a new state and then that state has its own contradictions. You keep cycling and synthesizing in history until you reach utopia. Marx was captivated by this new thing in philosophy called the dialectic. 

But he was a strict materialist whereas Hegel was thinking that this is a rational movement. Marx said no, there is nothing beyond the material, the material world is all that is. So there is this dialectic, this engine throughout time reaching a utopia but it's a utopia built purely on economic terms with every person being defined as either an oppressor or an oppressed, working class proletariat or ruling class, and that this is where the revolution would happen and that the revolution was inevitable. 

Then came post-modernism, which basically identified language as being an avenue for power and, therefore, we [are] able to manipulate words. In manipulating our language we can manipulate the interior life of a community because once we no longer can communicate clearly and understand that our words are connected to reality, then they become tools that we can wound each other with or that we can just destabilize our community with them.

Then intersectionality came and further [turned] attention on 'oppressive identity'. With this, we really had the birth of identity politics. [This] was late 80s early 90s and it crystallized [as a] movement. 

The presuppositions are all built on Hegel, Marx, Freudianism and the Frankfurt School [of philosophers]."

For Freud, reality lies off stage or out of consciousness and that each person was on a continuum of sanity and madness.  As for the Frankfurt School, Britannica.com states:

The members of the Frankfurt School tried to develop a theory of society that was based on Marxism and Hegelian philosophy but which also utilized the insights of psychoanalysis, sociology, existential philosophy, and other disciplines. They used basic Marxist concepts to analyze the social relations within capitalist economic systems. This approach, which became known as “critical theory,” yielded influential critiques of large corporations and monopolies, the role of technology, the industrialization of culture, and the decline of the individual within capitalist society.

Mering continues: 

This is what we see now. This is Marx's march through history, the progression into a future utopia that is constantly supposed to be working itself out in time with rejection of everything that came before. It is the culmination of all of those presuppositions until now.

Marx said that the greatest obstacles to revolution are the faith [in God] and the family. Why this is, I think, is because the faith gives people a context for their suffering rather than marinate in the inequality or the cross of our life.

We're actually told to embrace that cross, that we can find real meaning and real nobility in suffering. No revolution is born out of people suffering well in dire circumstances. A revolution is born out of people who are enraged by their circumstances and feel inadequate and helpless to transcend them.

So once you are weakened to the point where you feel that you have no power, no possibility, then the only answer left logically is to fight the system, destroy the system, [...] and hope that some new utopia will come from that.

I think the average student at a college, university, or even your nice woke Aunt Susan or your neighbor, they are not steeped in Hegel; they don't consider themselves Marxists, and this is part of where the confusion lies.

[Wokeism] is ostensibly a movement just for justice, and who doesn't want justice? It's a movement to fight racism... Every person of good will, every normal reasonable person wants to fight racism.

All of these are deeply Christian claims. Christians are supposed to be people of justice, supposed to be people fighting against injustice. The fact, the reality that most people would not consider themselves Marxist but have adopted so many of the conclusions of this movement is just a sign of how pervasive and how ubiquitous the movement has become.

It's the water in which we swim, it's the air that we breathe, it's in our movies, it's in the way we frame narratives, it's in media, it's in politics, it's in the academy - rampantly so - and so all of these things coalesce to create a default way of thinking, a filter upon which we see the world without even realizing that we're necessarily looking through a filter at it all.

In some ways it's a sort of spinoff the C.S. Lewis book, The Screwtape Letters,  where [there is] that famous line that the greatest power of the devil is that he can convince you he doesn't exist and, therefore, you're at his mercy, beholden to his power in a way that you might not have been had you been able to identify what was happening.

The woke movement is similar to that with regard to its presuppositions, and that the greatest power this ideological filter has over us is that we don't realize that we're looking through a filter at all. We just think that this is the way that you see reality.

A lot of Catholics and Christians feel that Christ would have fought side by side with people for racial justice or he would have fought against lecherous men, and for women who want to feel that they have true dignity and aren't instruments of someone else's pleasure.

Those are true Christian precepts and Christ would have been on the side of justice in those matters, but the thing that this ideology does is... it's a truly deformed ideology in that it takes partial truths and totalizes them and in that totalization it presents something that is a lie because it creates the [view that] the only way to look at the world is through this lens of power and domination.

It defines a human person differently than what the Christian vision of what a human person is. The Christian vision of the human person is that we're defined on universals. We're rational animals just based on Aristotelian logic, but also through revelation we know that we are called to be sons and daughters of a loving Father; that we are defined in relationship to God; we're defined by love itself, love himself.

Defined by the hatred of man and society 

The woke could define a person very differently and incompatibly, so for the woke, the person is not defined by the love of God but by the hatred of man or hatred of society.

For example, to be a woman is not just to be a woman in any sort of  traditional sense. There's a bodily meaning there, and there's certain spiritual symbolism.

But to be a woman for the woke is to be fundamentally fighting the oppression that's at the core of your being. For example, in 2017 there was the first women's march and there was a group of pro-life feminists who were co-sponsoring the march. But when the organizers got wind that they were pro-life they said, "Oh, well, you can march with us but you cannot have any official affiliation with us."[The pro-life women] were confused and they said, "But we support the dignity of women. We want to fight for similar goals. We overlap in certain areas, and this is not just a pro-abortion march, it's a pro-women's march..."

But the thing we have to understand about the ideology is that it's not about supporting the person in the oppressed group, it's about supporting the person in the pressure group who supports the ideology. So it's really empowering the ideology not empowering the human being. So it's not enough to be a woman, you have to be an ideological woman, you have to be a politicized woman.

We hear the same thing echoed with Nicole Hannah Jones, the author of the [New York Times'] "1619 project" who famously said, "We all know there's a difference between being racially black and being politically black". That [means] it's simply not enough to be a black person you have to be supporting our agenda in order to be considered.

So it's not actually about diversity it's about uniformity of thought, but with different people, representatives of different groups, embracing and affirming that uniformity.

One important thing we need to pay attention to is the way in which words can sound innocuous to our ears because most people translate them into something reasonable, but for the movement it's far more radical.

A good example of that is the word "equity", which sounds like something that's oriented around justice and equality. But equity for the movement means equity of outcome, that all outcomes should be equal, despite effort, despite merit, despite any other factor that might weigh in on disparate outcomes.

So, according to the ideology, if you see that there is an inequitable outcome you can attribute it to only one thing, either racism or sexism or some other type of social oppression.

What this does is it eliminates the possibility of any sort of measure, any sort of metric. So, for example, [in] the new woke math, they'll say two plus two can equal five if it equals five in someone's lived experience. 

It seems like it can't be a serious proposition but the ideological reason for that is that all standards have to be eradicated, even the ones that are as undeniable as a simple mathematic equation that every person understands.

The reason is because we have to attribute all outcomes, all of our successes, all of our failures to systemic forces outside of ourselves. Our failures are not ours to own and learn from, our successes are not ours to claim and grow with.

There's a truth to that because people do have disadvantages and people do have advantages over others. But there's no state power or force that can equalize all those things. This is the human situation.

Our successes do not originate completely in us. Obviously anything good that comes out of us is first and foremost attributable to God, and it's just our cooperation with him that brings any good in the world from us.

So there's a truth that they're speaking to, but rather than using it to point to the love of God and the power of God, rather it is only an indication of the evil of society.

The fact that some people might merit something that others don't is attributed to the systemic forces and the systemic forces have to be eradicated.

Other people have spoken on this, notably Jordan Peterson, [on this view that] all of humankind, in any society, is going to end up with some sort of hierarchical structure.

Every Marxist country that has tried to establish a society based on those principles ends up becoming tyrannical and that's inevitable based on the presuppositions.

But if you're going to end up in some sort of hierarchical system no matter what, the most fair way to establish that is through merit. I know it's easy to make merit into a cartoon where people say "Oh just pull your yourselves up by the bootstraps", without any recognition that people do start life in situations that they need help.

They're vulnerable, they're at risk, there are incredible hardships, and we can't just give them a good pep talk and say get on your way.

We really need to have solidarity [with people] as Catholics. But the problem is that if you read any biography of any person who was born into incredibly difficult circumstances and somehow was able to transcend those circumstances, what it was it that made the difference, it was someone in their life telling them to control what was within their control, to take responsibility, to not marinate in the injustices that they're born into but rather to see what they can do that can pull themselves out.

You see this in the biography of Ben Carson [eminent surgeon, presidential candidate, Afro-American]. His grandmother used to recite a poem to him called "Mr Nobody", and it was something along the lines of—when something's gone wrong and you've got no one to blame, you can blame Mr Nobody.

The point of this lesson was just that blame is going to get you nowhere [when] you've been dealt a hard hand. But that mindset [of blame] is going to exacerbate your circumstances and we would never tell someone that in any type of other situation. 

Mering points out that in leadership, if you're mentoring someone,  you would never tell someone to point their finger at everyone else in when something goes wrong.

You want the person who's going to say, "The buck stops with me. I'm going to take some initiative and I'm going to grow and I'm going to change. I'm going to see what I can do to make things better and be positive."

But for some reason we've decided that we can tell a whole generation that the way they move through life is the exact opposite way to that which is going to lead to their actual flourishing in life.

Is dialogue possible? 

Knowing how to engage with someone who is woke can be challenging because in some ways the movement is not oriented around dialogue. It's sort of oriented around intimidation.

There's a lot of manipulation that happens with language and I think it's important to know when it's not going to be a fruitful conversation and you want to just say, "I love you. Let's not go down this road."

So there's a certain amount of prudence that comes into the equation: Is this a person that I can actually have a dialogue with, and if it's not then it can only create more division and more tension to try to do something that this combination of people are up for.

But there will be other people who are more open to having a real conversation with whom we might feel that this is something worthwhile to talk about.

I talk to parents a lot who are saying, "My kids came home and they are woke now, and they're challenging me".

It's important to know that this is, in some ways, a phase. It might not be something they adopt lifelong.

There are real woke ideologues out there who have fully embraced the movement but there's also a lot of people who are just parroting a script they've been handed. It hasn't really penetrated into their soul and that's when we have to realize that there is a deeper human longing that people have.

It's a longing that won't be satisfied by a thin ideology that has to be propped up by coercion, by silencing, by fear and by manipulation. It's a longing that can only be fulfilled by the fullness of truth, a willingness to embrace the truth no matter where it leads you: scientific truth, philosophical truth, theological truth, and most of all, the truth of who we are in relationship to a loving God and loving Father.

What the human heart longs for, and it's something that cannot be fulfilled by ideology... and we have to feel confidence in the fact that every human person is longing for the exact same thing.

Every revolutionary wants to target the father, and there's something deeply spiritual happening, because when we think of authority now, right authority or or even fatherhood, the role of the father our minds immediately go to is tyrannical domination.

It's been such an effective demonization of the image of a father ,but if you talk to someone they know what a good father should be, they know, even if they didn't experience it, that a good father is not there to control them but actually to empower them to lead their lives independently.

They know a good father is gentle, but also strong. We have so corrupted the image of the father in a way to corrupt our understanding of who God is because God is the father, and he's not a father because he's like a human father. Human fathers are more fatherly in so far as they're more like him.

Women become vulnerable 

Fatherhood really is a window into who God is, so the revolutionaries were correct in that by targeting the father you really dismantle society from the inside out.

They wrote about men needing to become licentious, to become slaves to their desires. That was part of our "liberation". However, our true liberation is through combating groups outside of ourselves, but our liberation is also through combating our own internal desire or instinct, to repress our desires.

[For revolutionaries] our liberation was in part of our embracing every desire, particularly ones that were transgressive [of moral boundaries], and this was a real target with regards men.

What happens once a man's moral authority is eroded is that women become vulnerable because there is a way in which men are called to be providers and protectors, and once women become vulnerable they tend to become calloused. The sexual revolution targeted them and it encouraged them to engage in all sorts of relationships and in activities that women really have to callous themselves to engage in.

It's hardened a lot of women because they have felt used and have felt they weren't cared for. The deeper part of what's happening is that the revolution manipulated this societal pathology.

It encouraged men to become licentious, to become weak,  and then it pointed to the abuse, the inevitable abuse, and disruption that happened between men and women, and said, "You see, this is further evidence that we need to smash the patriarchy. Men are bad, so let's condemn men as a whole as being bad." 

It's suggesting that the cure is the exact thing that caused the problem, that [going further in] rejecting true masculinity is the way that we're going to get out of this whole thing of having eradicated what real masculinity is.

Saint Thomas Aquinas says that to be emasculated is to be a slave to pleasure to the point where you're no longer willing to suffer to be a real man. There is some connection between suffering and the true masculinity that society needs and families need.

We're going to have to fight this movement on multiple levels and it's already happening far more than we often realize. There are people building up new institutions, there are more and more parents seeing through this, and we see on our school boards there's a resistance happening that's very grassroots and hopeful.

There's a thinness to the ideology that is becoming transparent now people are seeing it affect their kids in such bad ways.

It seems fundamentally like a justice movement that's actually more unjust than it is just.

But we have to fundamentally see this as a spiritual battle and and fight it on that level. This is a spiritual battle and we have to be arming ourselves for that fight.

The first thing I usually suggest to people is to [...] get some clarity about what is happening because there's a shape-shifting of how the movement presents itself, and there's a manipulation of language that happens that can be really confusing.

The movement really tries to operate on that sort of confusion and capitalize on it and exploit it with those good Christian precepts [of justice, care for the weak and minorities] and then supplanting them with a bunch of ideology that you have to accept.

So the more clarity that we have then the more we will feel confident in resisting it and not falling for these types of tricks.

Fundamentally, we have to have courage. It's a movement that can't be resisted on the fringes. One person resisting or two people or a handful of people —that's a fringe group. But galvanizing whole coalitions of people to resist it, that's something to contend with and that's the way we find it within companies and within counties and even within our country as a whole.

That type of clarity can imbue us with a sort of courage that can really give us the confidence to simply and plainly call out a lie. The greatest threat to a lie is some people, someone, simply and plainly saying the truth.

It feels like it's Goliath at the moment, but Goliath can be brought to his knees far more easily than we might think, and that thought can give us a lot of hope in this fight.

Ω Noelle Mering is a fellow at the Washington D.C. based think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She is the author of the book,  Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology (2021)  She is an editor for the website Theology of Home and a coauthor of the books Theology of Home and Theology of Home II .  She writes on culture, politics, and religion. Mering has an MA in philosophy and is a wife and mother of six children in Southern California. 

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published. 

Why Lia Thomas can't re-invent reality

Lia Thomas, who wants a place in the Olympic women's team

A few days ago the New York Times published an article by Michael Powell, "a national reporter covering issues around free speech and expression, and stories capturing intellectual and campus debate", on the impact on women's sports of Lia Thomas, a swimmer who identifies as a woman, and who been allowed to compete against biological females.  

Powell has done us a valuable service by bringing together voices who are largely ignored by the mainstream media, including the NY Times, on how men who have transitioned can affect the lives, including the sporting lives, of women. However, credit where it is due, as in Powell's article. 

The issue is contentious because of the different perspectives — the scientific reality of biology versus the wish to fulfil what has come to be taken as a  personal right based on hopes and dreams, largely by men who identify as women. The Times article reports the opposing stances:

Sebastian Coe, the Olympic champion runner and head of World Athletics, which governs international track, speaks of biological difference as inescapable. “Gender,” he said recently, “cannot trump biology.”

The American Civil Liberties Union offers a counterpoint. “It’s not a women’s sport if it doesn’t include ALL women athletes,” the group tweeted. “Lia Thomas belongs on the Penn swimming and diving team.”

The ACLU has had an illustrious history of activism in pursuit of human rights, but it has become just one more example of an organisation being captured by proponents of the transgender ideology that ignores scientific evidence and, in doing so, thrusts women's rights into the background. It has become so extreme in its stance that it has had to declare that it still upholds free speech. See this article by David Cole, ACLU national legal director. And see this NY Times article on its attempts to limit free speech

The British equivalent, the Stonewall organisation, once much respected as being in the vanguard of gay rights activism, has likewise been captured by trans ideologists, and has been disowned by one of its founders after it was mocked after statements by one of its principal officers that there is no such thing as a woman.

The key matter that points to the danger of taking an absolute view of self-invention that Lia Thomas embraces, as seen in the interview with ABC News earlier this month, is what she told Sports Illustrated: “I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team.” She wants to compete in the Olympics on the women's team.

Credit...

This where the NY Times article is valuable—it highlights the views of  others affected by the transgender absolutism. We come to understand why Thomas should not expect other people to comply with her wish to identify as a woman when it is a male body, and a male's achievement's, that they see.

For example, "Martina Navratilova, the retired tennis legend, a champion of liberal and lesbian causes [...] Navratilova argues that transgender female athletes possess insurmountable biological advantages." The Times quotes her as saying:

“I played against taller women, I played against stronger women, and I beat them all. But if I faced the male equivalent of Lia in tennis, that’s biology. I would have had no shot. And I would have been livid.”

As to the reasons why males who transition to a woman's identity should not expect to be accepted in girls' or women's sport without complaint, the Times reports: 

Michael J. Joyner, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., studies the physiology of male and female athletes. He sees in competitive swimming a petri dish. It is a century old, and the sexes follow similar practice and nutrition regimens.

Since prepubescent girls grow faster than boys, they have a competitive advantage early on. Puberty washes away that advantage. “You see the divergence immediately as the testosterone surges into the boys,” Dr. Joyner said. “There are dramatic differences in performances.”

The records for elite adult male swimmers are on average 10 percent to 12 percent faster than the records of elite female swimmers, an advantage that has held for decades.

Little mystery attends to this. Beginning in the womb, men are bathed in testosterone and puberty accelerates that. Men on average have broader shoulders, bigger hands and longer torsos, and greater lung and heart capacity. Muscles are denser.

“There are social aspects to sport, but physiology and biology underpin it,” Dr. Joyner noted. “Testosterone is the 800-pound gorilla.”

When a male athlete transitions to female, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which governs college sports, requires a year of hormone-suppressing therapy to bring down testosterone levels. The N.C.A.A. put this in place to diminish the inherent biological advantage held by those born male.

Ms. Thomas followed this regimen.

But peer reviewed studies show that even after testosterone suppression, top trans women retain a substantial edge when racing against top biological women.

For example, Thomas ranked 65th in the men’s 500-yard freestyle but when performing as a woman, Thomas won the title.

“Lia Thomas is the manifestation of the scientific evidence,” said Dr. Ross Tucker, a sports physiologist who consults on world athletics. “The reduction in testosterone did not remove her biological advantage.”

It's worth noting his corroboration of Dr Joyner's findings. Elsewhere, he says it's a "travesty" that women are expected to bow to the demands of  athletes who, after treatment, retain enough of the male physiology to outperform women. 

"But I'm now a woman!" won't hack it. The Times continues:

Most scientists, however, view performance differences between elite male and female athletes as near immutable. The Israeli physicist Ira S. Hammerman in 2010 examined 82 events across six sports and found women’s world record times were 10 percent slower than those of men’s records.

“Activists conflate sex and gender in a way that is really confusing,” noted Dr. Carole Hooven, lecturer and co-director of undergraduate studies in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. She wrote the book T: The Story of Testosterone. “There is a large performance gap between healthy normal populations of males and females, and that is driven by testosterone.”

The sprinter Allyson Felix won the most world championship medals in history. Her lifetime best in the 400 meters was 49.26 seconds; in 2018, 275 high school boys ran faster.

Renée Richards was a pioneer among transgender athletes. An ophthalmologist and accomplished amateur tennis player — she played in the U.S. Open and ranked 13th in the men’s 35-and-over division — she transitioned in 1975 at age 41. She joined the women’s pro tennis tour at age 43, ancient in athletic terms. Ms. Richards then made it to the doubles final at Wimbledon and ranked 19th in the world before retiring at 47. Ms. Richards then made it to the doubles final at Wimbledon and ranked 19th in the world before retiring at 47.

Ms. Richards has said she no longer believes it is fair for transgender women to compete at the elite level.

“I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me,” she said in an interview. “I’ve reconsidered my opinion.” 

Joanna Harper, a competitive transgender female runner and Ph.D. student studying elite transgender athletic performance at Loughborough University in Britain, agreed that testosterone gives transgender female athletes some advantage.

But she spoke of inexorable emotional and psychological pressures on transgender athletes.

“Is it so horrible,” she said, “if a handful of us are more successful than they were in men’s sports?”

Reka Gyorgy, a 2016 Olympian and a swimmer at Virginia Tech, offered a response of sort. She placed 17th in the preliminaries for the 500-yard freestyle in the N.C.A.A. championships — a slot short of making the finals. She wrote an open letter, affirming her respect for Ms. Thomas’s work ethic.

She was less forgiving of the N.C.A.A.

“This was my last college meet ever and I feel frustrated,” she wrote. “It feels like that final spot was taken away from me because of the N.C.A.A.’s decision to let someone who is not a biological female compete.”

That decision prevented her from qualifying for All-America honors.

Powell talked to families of female swimmers. They emphasised "that transgender people should have the same right to housing, jobs, marriage and happiness as any American".

But they talked of the thousands of hours the young women put into their sport. From early childhood, they swam hundreds of laps daily, nursing injuries and watching nutrition. Why, having reached the pinnacle, should they race against a swimmer who retains many biological advantages of a male athlete?

It potentially places biology and gender identity on the same footing in sport. Dr. Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a Duke University law professor and former top track runner, supports legal protections for transgender people but foresees havoc in the arena of sports. The legal rationale for keeping women’s sports sex-segregated would fall away. “We are bringing a male body into a female sport,” Dr. Coleman said. “Once you cross that line, there’s no more rationale for women’s sport.” 

Of course, some who have absorbed transgender ideology advocate for no sex segregation in sport, saying athletes should learn to live with the "discomfort” such a change would prompt. The Times continues:

This strikes some feminists and scientists as a walk into strange territory. Kathleen Stock, a British philosopher whose work is often grounded in her feminist and lesbian identity, has carved out positions on transgender rights that have made her a lightning rod. She has written “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism,” and argues against the insistence that one’s gender identity is all. That is to miss, she said, the profound importance of the lived experience of being born a biological female.

“We are caught up in this fever dream,” she said in an interview. “How could it be that a social construct and not the material reality of being a woman is guiding our thoughts and our physical performance?

“I find it incredible that we have to point this out.”

In all, a valuable piece of reporting from Michael Powell. 

To close, I want to offer a powerful statement from Rod Dreher, a writer who is a saddened observer of the cultural strife the Western world finds itself in because of the misguided directions committed to by the social, intellectual and political elites, continuing into the present. He writes:   

The metaphysical aspect of all this, though — the trans stuff, I mean — is that the culture in which we swim is teaching us to despise the givenness of our bodies, and to think that we can change Nature with a sufficient application of technology, law, and cultural command (including persecuting dissenters). You think this stuff is only about happy-clappy affirmation? Think about what you are affirming: the erasure of masculinity and femininity as biological facts. And we wonder why so many young people in our culture are so psychologically distressed. They are born into an unreal world, and told by the gatekeepers of this culture that they must deny among the most fundamental truths that we can know: the facts of our maleness and femaleness.

💢 The battle over trans ideology in schools

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Pursuit of happiness clouded by unreality

Clouded reality of modern times. Graphic by Zaksheuskaya

Author and social commentator Rod Dreher is prepping his next book by studying the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. Dreher points out that "in McGilchrist's 2009 book The Master And His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World [we see] in modern times [...] a sharp increase in schizophrenia, anorexia, autism, borderline personality disorder, and other diseases associated with under-function of the brain’s right hemisphere, and over-function of the left hemisphere". 

This over-reliance on the left hemisphere is important in understanding why there is so much distress in technologically advanced societies. Dreher highlights the following section of McGilchrist's book ("hypo" means "under", "beneath", "down"), saying that McGilchrist writes that we find modern people are increasingly distressed by... 

   
Philosopher Mary Midgeley wrote an admiring review of McGilchrist's book in the Guardian in 2010. She said of it:

This is a very remarkable book. It is not (as some reviewers seem to think) just one more glorification of feeling at the expense of thought. Rather, it points out the complexity, the divided nature of thought itself and asks about its connection with the structure of the brain.

McGilchrist, who is both an experienced psychiatrist and a shrewd philosopher, looks at the relation between our two brain-hemispheres in a new light, not just as an interesting neurological problem but as a crucial shaping factor in our culture. 

[...] it is always Right’s business to envisage what is going on as a whole, while Left provides precision on particular issues. Moreover, it is Right that is responsible for surveying the whole scene and channelling incoming data, so it is more directly in touch with the world. This means that Right usually knows what Left is doing, but Left may know nothing about concerns outside its own enclave and may even refuse to admit their existence. 

Further:

McGilchrist’s suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato’s time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path. 

 Dreher notes:

The book goes on to talk about how we have created a culture that conditions us to accept alienation, decontextualization, disembodiment, and fragmentation, because that is how the left hemisphere construes the world.

That this is causing distress generally is apparent from the statements of practitioners in mental health care, such as David Rettew, M.D., a child and adolescent psychiatrist and medical director of Lane County Behavioral Health in Eugene, Oregon. He writes:

A number of mental health clinics across the country, including ours, have recently seen an influx of adolescents who are presenting with self-diagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder and claiming that within themselves there are a number of different personalities that emerge at different times. Much of this seems to be driven by a small number of influential people on TikTok who have posted very popular videos in which they describe their DID in great detail.

Rettew says it's appropriate to "worry that simple dismissals of these adolescents as simply [my stress - BS] acting out the latest 'fad' miss an opportunity to work with significant mental health challenges, even if their expression is being shaped through social media".

Here, from TikTok, is one such adolescent who says her other personality wants the pronouns of paint/paintself.

Dreher:

It seems to me that this would be an example of the kind of thing one would expect in a culture that rewards this kind of insanity. Similarly with the transgender fad, it is impossible to believe that gender dysphoria, a real psychological condition that was observed in a vanishingly small number of people until a short time ago, is in the current moment not a symptom of advanced cultural breakdown along the lines Dr. McGilchrist discusses in The Master and His Emissary. 

This thread of discovery continues in greater detail in McGilchrist's 2021 book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World:

Indeed, if you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it — and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; and reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.

A reviewer of this text - two volumes long - states that McGilchrist is leading a "revolution" in regaining an understanding of who we are as human beings because we have "become enslaved by an account of ‘things’ dominated by the brain’s left hemisphere, blinding us to an awe-inspiring reality that is all around us".   

To add to the awareness of our precarious situation under the waves of scientism, for the wont of a better term, that have been sweeping over us, I want to provide McGilchrist's own words, by means of screenshots of the Kindle version of The Matter With Things as provided in Dreher's blog here.

McGilchrist writes in The Matter of Things about the lost path to personal peace:

 

We have the cultural elite to thank for much of this mess through its acceptance of styles of thought that make each person the sovereign of what they accept as reality, and its rigid adherence to ideologies that are based more on what is fashionable than on what is logically compelling. These elements, and the moral weakness at the heart of each person, combine to exclude a greater reality, which extends from human experience, to the nature of the world that we inhabit, and ultimately, to the God who created us with the purpose of developing communion not conflict, and from that, deriving a meaning that enables us to live our life to the fullest.

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Suffering: Why does God allow it?

As I am writing this I am also observing an online conversation between two women about their health problems. One talks about coping with a gastric complaint which involves "poop" difficulties; the other about the arthritis that she has suffered from since a teenager, at one time in her early twenties causing her to be bedridden for a whole year, but now that she is in her fifties, preventing her from doing the craft work that she takes delight in when she is able.

Pain and embarrassment, poverty and disability, often multiple burdens at once, are the lot of many people, while others escape relatively scot-free. Why does God seem to impose suffering on people when he is supposed to be a loving creator?

The two women above have come to terms with their predicament, placing their lives in God's hands, accepting that God has a plan for them that takes them along the rough terrain that is a life worth living.

A copy of Francis of Assisi's crucifix icon

A man, Robert Spitzer, who long battled fading eyesight and who went completely blind aged 57, shares his personal explanation of why God allows suffering:

For many years, when my eyes would take another turn for the worse, I would go through yet another bout of frustration and anxiety—frustration, because I made the fatal error of comparing my diminished abilities with what I was once able to do—and anxiety, because I was not certain whether the new level of disability would end my productivity or people’s respect for my capacity to “deliver.” 

Let me say for the moment, that this initial negative reaction to suffering was really about perspective (how I viewed suffering and challenge), and not so much the suffering or the challenge itself. I was not able to help myself: when the next level of disability came, I looked at it from a self-centric point of view. It seemed that the shocking development of “one more dreaded decrease in eyesight” caused me, despite my faith, to turn into myself. 

Spitzer, with a typical American zero sum mindset, says he could not accept on a human level that there were benefits to what was happening to himself:

I am not a stoic. That is, I am not prone to seeing suffering as a way of cultivating strength, courage, self-discipline, self-sufficiency, invulnerability, and autonomy.

Some of this supposed value in suffering mentioned above runs contrary to my empathetic and interpersonal nature. Therefore I view them as negatives and not benefits. 

The other stoic characteristics—strength, self-discipline, and courage—can be positive, but they are not ends in themselves. They are only means to greater ends, such as contribution to others and the common good.

 However, suffering can have supernatural benefits:

[...] It taught me that the sooner I get over it by putting myself into the hands of God (i.e. looking for the opportunity in suffering that will come through His guidance), the better off I am.  

If I did not have faith in a loving God, and hope in eternal life with him, I don’t think I would have this positive outlook on suffering—and I certainly would not be able to view it as an opportunity. 

He expands on that point:

I can see positive value in suffering through the lens of love which may be initially defined as a “recognition of the unique goodness of individuals, inducing a sense of empathy and unity with them, and making it just as easy, if not easier, to do the good for them as to do the good for myself.”

Inasmuch as suffering can lead to greater humility, compassion, and empathy, it can also free us to contribute to others and the common good without counting the cost, advancing the purpose of love.

[See also Spitzer's article Why would a loving God allow suffering? ]

In an interview, Spitzer clarifies what he means by the opportunities that arise through suffering: 

“First, it taught me humility. I’m not an arrogant type but I can definitely think I’m smart. But when you bash into a few pillars in an airport, that’s a lesson in humility,” he said.

“Nobody is self-sufficient. For a long time, I was a very independent thinker. I thought, ‘I can do this myself.’ Now I can’t do it myself. Blindness helps form a communion of people around you to help get things done. It’s a labor of love and that was a blindness discovery.”

And finally, “The best thing about blindness is that you’re just going to have to trust God. He’s going to help you and take care of you in tough situations.”

For many of us, trusting God requires a new mentality. We could say that it's fine for Spitzer who is a Jesuit priest, a holder of a PhD, and a former president of Gonzaga University in Washington State, but it's hard for ordinary people.

A young woman, Sonja Corbitt, takes up the matter of the difficulty of grasping the meaning of suffering:

When God first began teaching me about suffering, I was a young non-Catholic, and found the whole subject completely depressing. As a rule, most non-Catholics have no theology of suffering. I, personally, had no handle on the glory of suffering, and using those two words in the same sentence seemed, well, stupid, honestly. I wanted the Gospel to be health and wealth and prosperity.

My analytical mind works at extremes, and I began frantically planning for the worst case scenario, imagining the innumerable excruciating ways one could be “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20).

Since I was a Bible geek, it was Revelation 2:8-10 that God used to confront me with my fear, as the church in Smyrna [in modern-day Turkey] was also in danger of the fear of suffering. Jesus personally encourages them in the midst of severe persecution and poverty.

Their works had made them spiritually rich, he said, yet they were about to suffer additional testing by Satan as a result. He adds, “Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” In other words, “You’re doing great! Now do it until it kills you and I’ll reward you!”

These remarks seemed very flippant to me, and were the cause of my fear. Jesus appeared completely oblivious to, or at least unaffected by, their total humiliation and degradation, and I secretly felt I shared Smyrna’s experience. 

An unexpected outcome when suffering is appreciated with the eyes of faith:

It seemed to me as though God did not really care that we suffer; rather, it was simply expected, and that hurt me, as I experienced some things in my childhood that were still very painful. I expressed this hurt to the Lord, and he answered me with an extraordinary thought. 

The thought is that anointing with oil had significance in the Hebrews' civic and religious life, with myrrh being the most prominent kind of oil, even being linked with the name "Smyrna". However:

Myrrh was expensive, fragrant, and bitter, as it was a symbol of suffering and death[...]

Jesus, too, would be particularly set aside and anointed with this oil, as prophetically designated by the title “The Christ” or “The Anointed One.”

Jesus does not diminish, in any way, what we endure. Our suffering is so precious, he collects and preserves our tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8). He is steeped in suffering and identifies with it as the ultimate Suffering Servant*.

I have been set apart and called to service by virtue of my anointing at confirmation. What I was invited to accept, and ultimately to embrace, is that, like the Holy Trinity I worship, I must also be awash in the anointing oil of suffering.

The Church in Smyrna knew that there is often no earthly glory in obedience. It is only for the poor in spirit. But victory, peace, and reward await, in Christ: “I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). 

Spitzer has a message for us all, as we struggle with the reality of suffering made present most graphically in the aftermath of the latest massacre of children in the United States:

[T]here can be no suffering that is completely tragic. Tragedy may exist for a while, but in the hands of God, it will eventually be turned into love, and that love will last for all eternity. Even incredible tragedies, like the death of a child, are not ultimately and completely tragic, they are only partially and temporally tragic, for the temporary loss and grief that parents would feel in such circumstances is already compensated in the life of the child by God bestowing unconditional love upon him or her in His heavenly kingdom.

Yes, God feels the grief of the loving parents who miss their beloved, and He will feel that grief for as long as the parents experience it; but God simultaneously bestows unconditional and eternal love and fulfillment on the child whose loss is the cause of that grief.

Therefore, in the Christian view, suffering is complex. It includes the genuine experience of deep grief at premature loss. It also includes an experience of faith or hope that God is already bestowing unconditional love upon this child. It also includes an experience of trust that one will be reunited with that child in the eternity of God’s unconditional love; and it also includes an experience of “peace beyond all understanding” (from the Holy Spirit) intimating that everything is going to be all right.

We carry this mixture of thoughts and emotions forward day by day, with the knowledge that God has a plan to make our suffering fruitful—if we allow ourselves to comply with what God is directing us to become. It is hard to suffer and to hope and trust at the same time, "yet it is a path to the transformation of suffering into love", as Spitzer puts it. He also cites Paul's bold words from his Letter to the Romans:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And He who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:18-27)

I hope this helps you, if in a time of need. Leave a comment, where you can challenge these ideas or ask for a prayer. Ultimately, our understanding of suffering will not be complete until we are with God in heaven and can look back at our life on earth and see the truth about events that caused us physical or emotional pain. All will be made clear when our eyes are unclouded.

* See Isaiah's Servant poems: 42:1-9; 49:1-6; 50:4-11; 52:13-53:12.

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