Gift Hub

To lift myself from despair, poverty and madness....

...I am writing a book on the best practices of highly successful people. I will probably have to self-publish, since the market is glutted. I may not be able to sell the book, but my down and out friends might like a free autographed copy. Now I just have to raise the money to get it published. I wish I knew how. I know! I will ask myself what a successful person would do. They would set goals! I will set goals! My goal is to have $3,000 to self-publish. Now what? First, to raise a significant sum,  I probably needs clothes.... I don't have any. What would a successful person do? Set goals! My goal is a pair of pants. Now what?

Lost and Found

"I love you and always will," that is the best possible use of the plain style. For the faithful husband it is a felt truth and a promise. For the seducer it is an effective means to an end. When a God, or the God, became man, and his message was love, he spoke in parables. You could say that the alternative was premature crucifixion, and that the style was meant as a cloak, or to keep the wrong people from getting saved, as St Mark says, they mustn't, but also because the natural language of moral truth is indirection. "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -- Success in Circuit lies," as Emily Dickinson wrote, as if to herself, alone in her room. Bearing witness: the best models say the moment of truth is best postponed, if only to the end of a stanza.

Weltschmerz

Separate, thinking of ourselves as investors, consumers, managers, owners and achievers, rather as than members of a human community, we experience sadness, anomie, weariness, and despair. To which an entire field of counseling, self-help, and pharmaceuticals are devoted. Deadened or enlivened we then return to play our part in Wealth Bondage, not happy, not fulfilled but motivated to do better.  As living things among living things how can we not be sad as the ecosystems collapse, on a time scale that our children and grandchildren will endure, like a Biblical affliction? For this what cure? Hospice care from the age of 2.

Fundraising and Human Dignity

Preparing to speak to fundraisers for the Society of St. Vincent De Paul, on the importance of cultivating and serving our masters, the rich, I was shocked to find that the Vincentians consider our masters to be the poor. They feel that in serving the poor the giver participates in the divine. It made me think of what is meant, in their faith, by the community of the faithful as "the body of Christ." As blood circulates in the flesh, so faith, hope and charity circulate in the economy of love, grace and gratitude, to keep the spiritual body alive, and each individual organ and cell in it alive. That ancient wisdom, which was once common sense, no less for Aesop than for the prophets,  informs political theory (the body politic, or Leviathan, as Hobbes called it.) The loss of that sense that we are one body, is what makes it so hard to get fundraising, or the theory of fundraising, right.

The Hand says, "We are serving our master the Stomach." The Stomach says, "We are serving our master, the Head. The Heart secretly believes she is all in all. And the Anus feels that his role may be humble, "But without me," he says, "You would all be full of shit." 

What I what I tried to convey to the Vincentian fundraisers is that the holy spirit can move in a moment of simple silence in even the most unpromising venues, with a wealthy donor, no less than a homeless person, in planning a will, no less than at the moment of death.

The Virtue of Torture

Taking the medical analogy seriously. What must it have been like to operate on a patient without anesthetic? To touch the skin with the scalpel, or saw, and feel the whole body stiffen under your hand, to hear the preemptive scream, and to go on and not be distracted. Given the effect of the satiric edge, would a kind person hesitate and draw back? What if it hurts the other? Keep going. If the purpose is to heal what is deformed or corrupt, it will hurt. Surgery was consensual. Public torture was not, at least not for one dismembered.  

Satire today may be as important for the health of the body politic as is judicial torture. Both require a personality type that some may find sadistic or psychopathic. But can we begrudge the professional the pleasures that come with an important social role?

Perhaps in the style of an old New Yorker cartoon

The headsman, in a black tunic, tight leggings, boots, a black leather hood, and his big belly hanging out, lies on the therapist's couch. The caption reads, "I don't know, I just don't love my work that much anymore." Imagine the cartoon, licensed to The Journal of Positive Psychology. It lies open to that page on the table in the therapist's break room in Wealth Bondage, or Gitmo. Imagine the Journal's prose, its bibliography, its peer reviewers..... Somewhere in this is a joke.

On Old School Satire

Another thought - What would bedside manner have meant for a Roman surgeon in 50 BC, when even the most willing patient had to be held down, or strapped to the table? A calm, professional, voice on which the patient might focus while the corrupted part is cut away? If we could recapture that tone, what good might we yet do? The problem is that I enjoy it too much. And it spooks the patient. Remember, this is for your own good......

The Maeutic Method 2015

When women teach men to bear children, they should expect tears.

Self Medicating for Moral Illness

Separate, lonely, full of myself and my own torments, I have tried alcohol, other vices, blogging, Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter. I even tried exercise once, but the only thing that has ever alleviated anxiety is kindness, given and received, in community grounded in service. Addressing fundraisers for The Society St Vincent De Paul, I find I am not alone. The wealthy and the poor are the solution to each other's suffering. For us to live so separate is like the heart scanting blood to the feet, so as to be richer alone. We are one body politic. 

Through Wind and Waves

On providing spiritual direction. Written for a Catholic priest for other priests. Found it helpful, particularly in treating of the temptations to which spiritual directors are vulnerable. In a casino catering to vice, the croupiers must be honest or the enterprise will fail. So too, we in Wealth Bondage who cater to the formation of conscience in Ultra-High-Net-Worth-Families may have to renounce sin and insincerity ourselves if we are to optimize the profitable operation of grace. I would hate to think so.