True freedom

Image from i write to believe.

"Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought."-Blessed John Paul II

From The Well and the Shallows

I love reading G.K. Chesterton. It is common knowledge that he is witty and has a great command of language. But more than those, I admire him for his understanding--his writing is steeped in a deep understanding of what it truly means to be a human being, a child of God, and how to live in a world where people would have you believe otherwise. I want to understand as he does. (And I wish I can write so beautifully, too.) He is a genius.

I'm re-posting an excerpt from an essay of his, which I have already posted way back in 2008. I think that we should constantly (and objectively) seek the Truth, especially now, when the media culture makes pollution/noise just as accessible as the brain/heart food we really need. In the excerpt below, GKC talks about why he despises birth control, and mindset that goes with it:

"...But there is a third reason for my contempt, much deeper and therefore more difficult to express; in which is rooted all my reasons for being anything I am or attempt to be; and above all, for being a Distributist. Perhaps the nearest to a description of it is to say this: that my contempt boils over into bad behaviour when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be 'free' to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word 'free.' By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men. The cinema is a machine for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures; expressing the most vulgar millionaires' notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. The gramophone is a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organisations choose to sell. The wireless is better; but even that is marked by the modern mark of all three; the impotence of the receptive party. The amateur cannot challenge the actor; the householder will find it vain to go and shout into the gramophone; the mob cannot pelt the modern speaker, especially when he is a loud-speaker. It is all a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have.

"Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world."

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Ang ganda, 'no? Before I hibernate again to continue writing my assignments, here's a quote from GKC that perhaps we should take up as a challenge.... Let's prove it untrue! :-)

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

Not heroic at all

I stand by my conviction that there is nothing admirable about Carlos Celdran's rudeness, and that it's highly discouraging to find out that people are saying it's heroism or martyrdom of a sort to do such an uncharitable thing.

Let's put it this way: think of your most favorite hero (one of mine is Sara Crewe!) and tell me if you'd still respect that person if he walked up to you (as you prayed) and screamed in your face, all because he wanted to let you know you were super-duper absolutely positively incredibly and crazily wrong about something. What's so heroic about that?

Sometimes, I turn to books for comfort. Here's a tidbit from A Little Princess:

"When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in--that's stronger."

I ain't saying we should never speak up and air our views, I'm saying we should air them calmly and in a civilized and respectful manner. Write a Letter to the Editor, organize a march, get the word out through various media.... If you love the Filipino people, you'll do us a good turn by not giving the impression that the only way we Filipinos think we can be heard is by making a complete fool of ourselves and getting jailed for it.

Here's a Letter to the Editor of Philippine Star that basically sums up what Celdran did, and what the media shouldn't have done.

Dear Editor:

Today's editorial calling for the repeal of the law penalizing offending religious feelings ("The Philippine Star", October 2, 2010, p. 14) is highly misinformed.

First of all, it is inaccurate to portray Carlos Celdran as a martyr for his free speech rights. He is not being charged for simply expressing his views; hence your fear that "80 percent of the population who through surveys have expressed support for birth control" could be imprisoned for offending religious feelings is unfounded. He is being charged for having scoffed at church authority during the mass and inside a church. Please take the trouble of researching what Article 133 of the Revised Penal Code actually penalizes. The constitution protects Carlos Celdran's right to express his views, no matter how unconventional they may be, but the constitution likewise protects the rights of everyone to worship according to their religious beliefs in peace. While he has the right to express dissenting opinions, he has no right to infringe on other people's right to worship in peace.

Second, the provision penalizing offending religious feelings applies to all religions alike. To repeal the law against offending religious feelings would be to expose all religions -- and not just the Catholic religion -- to contempt. The repeal would mean anyone can burn the Koran inside a mosque during an Islamic service, or make a heated attack on Manalo inside an Iglesia ni Cristo building during their Thursday pagsamba. These scenarios hardly promote mutual understanding among religions. The above mentioned examples are offensive to modern sensibilities; a similar affront on the Catholic religion is no less offensive.

For quite some time, I have been disappointed with your newspaper which, while printing inspirational quotes about God on its footer and daily biblical commentaries, prints a lot of articles and editorials supporting the RH bill. I have tolerated your publication of these articles even if I don't agree with them. But your approval of Carlos Celdran's offensive behavior is no longer a healthy exercise of free speech; it is an affront to what the majority of the population holds sacred. Please consider my subscription to your newspaper cancelled.

Sincerely,
Atty. Cristina A. Montes

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Have a fruitful week everyone!

From A Christmas Carol

"Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, everyone!"

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

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May we always know how to "keep Christmas well" (this season and all year round) like this new Scrooge! Merry Christmas everyone! This is posted a day early because I don't normally go online on Christmas day. :P

Beauty

"The most important thing about beauty is to leave something to the imagination."
Kate Spade

Captain Harding's battle

I heard today they're speeding up debates on the RH Bill, which is supposed to save the country from poverty by cutting away at the population employing what GK Chesterton calls Birth Prevention. They're making a vote tomorrow; I hope they see that enforcing contraceptives on the population is not the answer, but strengthening family values and trashing that over-sexualized media culture that can't get enough of itself.

(Besides, contraceptives are bad for the health; just look at the literature behind every birth-control advertisement published in random women's magazines to see what I mean.)

While the forces clash in congress, here's an excerpt from a Jules Verne adventure to help remind us that, in the end, there's Someone up there who makes many great and good things spring from all our silly human mistakes. Maybe also to remind us that no battle is too big when what you fight for is honest-to-the-bones, good for humanity.

This excerpt is from Verne's little-known novel called The Mysterious Island. In this scene, six castaways under the leadership of Captain Cyrus Harding, an American engineer, prepare for battle against fifty pirates who threaten their colony, Lincoln Island:

The pirates had been alarmed. They knew that Lincoln Island was inhabited. They would land upon it in numbers and well armed. They would respect nothing. Should the settlers fall into their hands, they must expect no mercy!

"Well, we shall know how to die!" said the reporter.
"Let us go in and watch," answered the engineer.
"Have we any chance of escape, captain?" asked the sailor.
"Yes, Pencroft."
"Hum! six against fifty!"
"Yes! six! without counting--"
"Who?" asked Pencroft.
Cyrus did not reply, but pointed upwards.

Write and write

Quick post, since this is a long and busy week and I can't leave my blog stagnant.

Read this in one of those forewords before. It's Stephen King talking about writing. I still think his writing about writing is better than anything else he's ever written. Or maybe because I haven't read Carrie, or whatever best ever thing he's written. (For the record, I have read The Shining, a short story collection called Everything's Eventual, and The Gunslinger.) Peace, Stephen King, you're still cool.

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I am often given the big smiling handshake at parties (which I avoid attending whenever possible) by someone who then, with an air of gleeful conspiracy, will say, 'You know I've always wanted to write.' I used to try to be polite. These days I reply with the same jubilant excitement: 'You know I've always wanted to be a brain surgeon.' They look puzzled. It doesn't matter. There are a lot of puzzled people lately. If you want to write, you write. The only way to learn to write is by writing.
--Stephen King

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Now, back to work.

Even fashion designers notice

...and are turned off by overexposure.


Karl Lagerfeld: "We've seen too much sexually aggressive fashion. Too much is too much. And too much for a long time is worse."

The minx, the moron and the parasite

All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth century girl!" Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly, "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite."

This quote is from The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis. The persona is Screwtape, a devil who has "expertise" in the art of temptation. Throughout the book, Screwtape writes to his nephew Wormwood, who seems to have just graduated and is now assigned to his first "patient". Sometimes Screwtape praises Wormwood for something he did, but most of the time the uncle lectures him on things he could've done better, and gives advice on damage control or how to make a good thing work for the dark side (e.g. see advice given above).


How true is Screwtape's definition of the modern girl? (Let's ignore "twentieth century" for now.) I know a lot of awesome women and certainly they don't fall under that category, you may well think, and to this I must agree. Because today's women as we meet them in real life are sensible!

But look at the media--what kind of girl are they glorifying? Fashion magazines have a certain kind of girl in mind. Hollywood, another. MTV, yet another. And these brands of women get so familiar to us that sometimes we think that they're the norm--they're what women of today are.


And because this brand of woman is what we're all supposedly trying to be, it's no surprise advertisements are going into that direction as well. You can't even commute home without hearing that advertisement on the radio about a guy trying to sell a cold drink to a girl by calling her sexy. A beauty product company keeps coming out with outrageous ads that work along the lines of "your husband will love you again, only if you look young" or "guys will only notice you (or marry you?) if you have pinkish white skin."

How dumb do they think we are?


If you haven't noticed yet, I didn't use pictures of the "typical" woman that the media insists on. You might even say the women here look a bit outdated, even that one on the cover of Esquire. But I just wanted to show that women are so multi-faceted that you can't box them like that--why should she be a minx when she respects herself? why should she be a moron when she can be bright? and why should she be a parasite when she has skills enough to be useful--even during the pre-feminist movement era?

What the media shows us is not always real (and you probably know that). I just hope that more sensibility goes into what goes on out there. Perhaps the solution to that is to not be swayed by what's popular (or what they say is popular), and to stay true to oneself. And then maybe Screwtape or the likes of him won't be able to redefine us so easily.

Where have the princesses gone?

The word "princess" has been used by media (to describe the Hollywood lifestyle?) and marketing giants (to sell!) so often that it's hard to think of it without that tiara-wearing, luxury-overloading, scepter-wielding, pony-riding and pink-overusing parody coming to mind. While there are admirable characteristics about Disney princesses (and even Barbie movie princesses), so much attention is put into emphasizing the prettiness of it all that the better side of the word is left to fester and fall away.

It's time to look for another image of a princess. And I have just the girl! She isn't blonde--she doesn't even think of herself as good-looking--she wears too-small clothing, she has lost all the riches she once had...and yet, she still offers an ear to her friends, makes up stories for lonely and cold nights, thinks about another child's hunger over her own, and meekly submits to the ways of the world while keeping her head high. Do you know who I'm talking about?

Illustration by Odelia Leaf

I finally read Frances Hodgeson Burnett's A Little Princess. You probably know what happened in that story, as it has been retold countless times... but I'd like to give a rehash: Sara Crewe, raised in India and sent to London to study, was a girl who had just about everything a girl ever wanted. Her father Ralph was rich man who liked to lavish her with gifts...she had the most beautiful (ridiculous, as Miss Minchin would say) wardrobe and everything a princess seemed entitled to. But one day, news about Ralph Crewe's death arrived, and along with it the vanishing of all Sara's fortune.

What I admire about Sara is fortitude and character--and what willpower that child had! I can't help sharing some Sara-isms with you! These are little lessons from a princess on how to be a real princess, or at least, someone strong, admirable and compassionate. Might be good to think about when the going gets tough!

On being a princess:
"Whatever comes cannot alter one thing. If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it."

On giving:
"If nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that--warm things, kind things, sweet things--help and comfort and laughter--and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all."

On patience and fortitude:
"When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in--that's stronger. It's a good thing not to answer your enemies."

On trials:
"Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? Perhaps I'm a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials."

On miracles:
"Somehow, something always happens just before things get to the very worst. It is as if Magic did it. If I could only just remember that always. The worse thing never quite comes."

Now I have someone new in my Awesome Fictional People list. ;-)

Weird day

...for Blogger.

¿Que pasa, Blogger?
¿Donde estan mis entradas en mi blog?
¿Porque, porque?

While Blogger is being a traitor, here's a quote I wanna share (which is also in my Twitter if you read the sidebar of this blog). Not only TV, but also computer games and hand held devices take away significant reading time from today's kids. Just the other day I couldn't help saying how expensive a PSP was...and not just in terms of the one time shelling out when you get one from a store--your time drains away too. Imagine the many hours one could spend mesmerized by a video game when instead one could be reading, getting creative, learning an instrument, studying, talking with friends and family, or even sleeping and eating? (Yes, addiction could deprive you of even the basic needs.) So before getting any time consuming entertainment technology consider what you'll be spending in terms of time too. Life's too short.

Oh, and here's the quote (I don't have the name of who said it though):

“TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book.”

When pigs mean more than you and me

"In the dismal abacus of our day, when a pig is born in China, national wealth goes up; when a child is born, it goes down. Almost all fervor for population control traces back to this premise, which reflects a theological confusion as much as an economic one, and it derives from the historical tendency of Western experts to see Asian peoples as mouths and not minds."

William McGurn
"Population and the Wealth of Nations"

Today is a mystery

"The secular man paradoxically kills the unborn and produces test tube babies. He seeks to lengthen the life expectancy but at the same time cuts short the life of the elderly. He cracks his head trying to find a cure for AIDS, but spreads it by doling out condoms. His right hand breaks the family by divorce, yet his left puts together same-sex couples. He cannot afford to have many kids but he lavishes money on pets and animal rights."

Henry Bocala
excerpt from his book, Arise and Walk