“I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.
I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings, by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are all part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters."
Kenneth Clark, Civilisation
"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but was wrong in thinking that we can get them for ourselves, without grace."
Simone Weil
"Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament. He has wished to ‘be himself,’ and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted. To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."
C. S. Lewis
"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all. Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about."
Fulton J. Sheen
What is civility?
Kenneth Clark, would say that civility is to be cultured, aware and appreciative of the higher things in life, and to be a gentleman in the great English tradition, even as John Henry Newman himself observed, that a gentleman "is one who never inflicts pain."
But as Simone Weil points out so well, that mere humanism as an act of choice, of human will, may not be sufficient to stand up against the great objectifying beasts of our modern age.
What is needed to remain standing against the onslaught of greed and power and vanities and hate is grace. 'Faith alone may make a hero, but love makes a saint.'
And Bonhoeffer makes the final connection, that it is really a matter of respect for God.
Civility is a respect and love and consideration for each person, not as the world and the market may value them, but with respect for the Lord, who has ennobled the human condition by accepting for himself as almighty God in the incarnation, and further, made love of neighbor an imperative to life as his disciple.
There are no two ways about it. The words are there and are unequivocal.
"Master, which is the great commandment in the law? And Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."
The markets were embarrassed by the whopper that the wiseguys promoted yesterday about a Fed pivot, again, under the leadership of the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Especially in light of the stronger than expected jobs increase shown by the payroll company ADP.
And so today they plummeted.
But the Non-Farm Payrolls report is still a day or so away, so there is still some life left in this most recent wash and rinse.
And stocks finished the day mostly unchanged. For now.
The Dollar rallied and gold and silver retreated a bit.
Show us who you admire and what you serve, and we will know you for what you are.
For a man cannot serve both God and the world, even if they delude themselves with words like greatness and freedom, and profane ideologies that would make vain and selfish beasts of them, destined in their willful ignorance for everlasting darkness.
And the band played on.
Have a pleasant evening.
