The Rusted Musket

Suppose your job is student loans, you’re employed at a small fry lending institution, or perhaps a larger lender like Great Lakes. Either way, you’d better start looking for a new job because tucked into the Health care bill was another bill installing the Federal Government’s Department of Education as sole originator and collector of student loans; a 100 billion dollar business annually, making it one of our largest banks! Ironically, until last week the government run Direct Loan programs role, upon creation, was as a second fiddle of sorts to private lenders like the Federal Family Education Loan Program, or, FFELP, which had been in existence since 1966. Now, through legislative fiat, the second fiddle is big fiddle, just one more thing the private sector couldn’t be trusted with.

In all fairness, the Direct Loan people say we’ll be saving money by cutting out middle men, ie. the banks, and streamlining the whole receiving and paying affair, making the system more convenient. But does convenience make what was done here right? The way I’m seeing it, government now collects the interest monies private lenders used to. Even better, the Government can loan money at lower rates than the private sector but still choose to run their rates at private sector levels. Can you say profit margin! Can you say advantage! Those cheeky fellows!

Actually, that sounds like a pretty dirty trick played by the Gov on the private sector now doesn’t it?

Image Credit: whitehouse.gov

Check out this hilarious video from The Onion:

U.S. Condemned For Pre-Emptive Use Of Hillary Clinton Against Pakistan

I came across this post a while ago and haven’t gotten a chance to write about this yet… I find it a little strange that the US military has a budget of hundreds of billions and they can’t even create a decent firewall for their combat drones… This worries me because these drones are going to get bigger and more powerful, so its probably only a matter of time before one gets “hacked” and turned on us… Its like Battlestar Galactica, they created the cylons (for those who haven’t seen the show, cylons are bipedal sentient machines) as a work force, I’m sure at first they seemed very benign, but in the end humanity is decimated by their creations.

We ought to be very careful going forward…

Last night, the largest legislative bill in my life was passed and I need to say something, anything. If I’m not mistaken, that’s also how we chased the need for health care reform this season; as something, anything. We’ve become the fools Plato refered to that prefer verbal diarrhea of the mouth and political diarrhea of the legislation. We prefer the fool who speaks because he has to say something over the wise man who speaks because he has something to say.

Sure, greater amounts of candy in the Easter basket, or a health care overhaul that gives the gift of health care to all feels great. I fear though it feels great the same way maxing out your credit card feels great.  In all seriousness, does anyone really think the same government who couldn’t keep Medicare financially afloat for more than forty years, with people who paid into it for decades and decades, is now going to not only keep Medicare afloat, but another, larger program, a program including thirty million people who haven’t paid into it?

I wonder what national health care bankruptcy will look like? Well, we’ve already got the example of Medicare, forty years, maybe less, and regrettably, we’ll probably know…

Photo Credit: AP

If eternity does indeed hang in the balance, why be occupied with anything other than the exclusive occupation of eternity, why fiddle while Rome burns? In other words; is there any reason to bother with things such as enjoying the outdoors, reading a book, or finding love whilst the tether gets ever shorter towards eternity? As one pursues the first question, another, somewhat similar, if not more deeply perplexing question arises; why is it, that when I came to faith the Lord didn’t just replace my secular methods with sacred ones?

Here are my thoughts on the matter, crudely and insufficiently laid out.

It must be recognized, to be exclusively anything is tough, nay impossible, and probably unforgivable, especially concerning things not spiritual. Lewis, in his lecture “Learning in War-Time,” remarks with surprise at how his life, post conversion, inevitably consisted of “doing most of the same things one had been doing before” ¹ He shares a story similar in surprise concerning his march towards the front line trenches of WW1. He fully expected, upon arrival, to be totally engulfed in an all consuming aura of war. Instead, the closer the trenches, the less he found himself talking and thinking about the campaign and the allied cause. Other unrelated, non war-exclusive thoughts came to mind. For you can’t “suspend your whole intellectual and aesthetic life” fully. Thus, even the desire to be exclusively sacred, even though desirable, is not going to happen.

What we come to find is the reason why St. Paul extols Christians to keep their job skills honed, and assumes they’ll be attending wedding parties. Because, as sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, they’ll never be able to completely disintegrate the secular/fallen human life into sacred holy life. Lewis equates the new sacred life as something that won’t wipe the slate clean of the “merely human life which we were leading,” but acts rather as a “new organization that exploits, to its own supernatural ends,” the old. Thus, the Christian becomes familiar with, “Whatever ye eat or drink or whatsover ye do, do all to the glory of God.” ²  This of course, needs to be squared away with the knowledge that there are some human pursuits, perhaps all, in a particular case, that try as you might, cannot be bent towards the glory of God. These need to be surrendered for His sake, and yours. For example, in my marriage relationship I can’t expect harmony if I indulge in activities that deliberately push my love away.

Conversion changes us, blows us apart, but in our life there still remains the original framework of humanity. Therefor, the new task at hand is not to ditch all supposed secular acts, rather, to commit even our most mundane of toils and normal of pursuits to the glory of God.

The next few months I will endeavor to reproduce thoughts pulled from C.S. Lewis’s excellent collection of essays entitled The Weight of Glory. The origin of the posts, it should be noted, are not rooted in solitary eureka moments of private study, but in the conversational overflow of a few like minded gentlemen gathering for coffee and CSL every other Monday morning. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything as cooperative in nature, it has proved refreshing. Because of this, I would encourage anyone who hasn’t read a book with others to try it; much good comes from gathering and sharing. I’d also like to tip my hat to those Gentlemen of Like Mind, you have helped connect the dots and complete my thoughts!

Now let us begin.

Nostalgia is my euphoria; memories, a series of romanticized events. Music, books, and knick knacks a sort of beauty that wakes up longing deep within my chest. In Weight Lewis compares everything that lights the bonfire of longing within our hearts to “the scent of a flower we have not found.” In essence, the fulfillment of our longing must not be mistakenly found in what we feel are adequate images of beauty because they “will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.” (1) To stop at the medium is to only smell a flower but care not what it looks like, to set our satisfaction level at images parading on Plato’s mythical cave wall, to mistake the missing identity as the real identity!

Sehnsucht is a German word describing the human hearts “inconsolable longing” for “we know not what.” Lewis reminds us that this sehnsucht, our sehnsucht, can only find completion in God’s love shown through Christ Jesus. All else, the nostalgia, the delights, and yes, the scent of flowers point to this…

(1) C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 1949), 30.