Bonovox

It seems to me that I have bought into a life that is contrary to nature and reality:

• Instead of working at home in the proximity of, and with my family...........I "commute" to a remote location to work with strangers
• Instead of eating healthy whole foods, grown myself our by a neighbor.......I eat "fast food."  Even when I am home, I eat from a box.....ala "stouffers" and "TV dinners."
• Instead of talking to the person next to me............................I talk to someone else, 1 mile or 100 or more miles away
• Instead of raising my children.........................I give them to someone else to do it for me.
• Instead of visiting family on vacation or discovering Europe with our kids...............we go to Disney World and pretend we are in France at Epcot Center.
• Instead of working by the sweat of my brow (in raising my food)...........I pay to go sweat in a gym.
• Instead of worshipping in unison with the natural cycles God has placed in the world and within myself............I worship according to whatever suits me at the moment.
• Instead of the "way of the cross"......................I seek the way of the "Easy Chair."
• Instead of feeling the wind in my face, and hearing the crunch of leaves under my feet.......I watch television.
• Instead of trusting the wisdom of my family going back to Adam..........I really feel myself superior to them, and feel I can do a better job making it up as I go along.
• Instead of living in community.......................I live in isolation
• Instead of being helped by community, in return for my willingness also to help when I am able......I pay a stranger to help me.
• Instead of trusting God.........I trust technology.
• Instead of governing myself........I allow myself to be governed by the powerful.
• Instead of living "holistically"............I live fragmented.  (work, family, religion, sex, play....)
• Instead of being thankful for, I have nothing that was not given to me..........I am a deluded proud "self made man."
• Instead of caring for my children and their children, by caring for the world I will hand down to them......I care only for the benefit that this world can give me.
• Instead of caring for my soul.............I care for my comfort and pleasure

I am sure there are more ways that I live "artificially."

This week's Time:

Popular videos such as the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby series have attracted millions of parents eager to give their babies an intellectual leg up. But a recent study shows that these products may be doing more harm than good. Experts at the University of Washington reported early in August that for every hour each day that infants watched the kaleidoscope of changing images and music on these DVDs, they understood an average of seven fewer words than babies who did not use such products.

From the commencement address he gave at Bellarmine University:

In all the history of teaching and learning, our own time may be the oddest. We seem to be obsessed with education. Newspapers spend an enormous flow of ink on articles, editorials, and letters about education. Presidents of public universities appear on the op-ed pages, prophesying the death of American civilization as the inevitable result of fiscal caution. Our governmental hallways are hardly passable because of university lobbyists kneeling and pleading for public dollars. One might conclude that we are panic-stricken at the thought of any educational inadequacy measurable in unappropriated funds.

And yet by all this fuss we are promoting a debased commodity paid for by the people, sanctioned by the government, for the benefit of the corporations. For the most part, its purpose is now defined by the great and the would-be-great “research universities.” These gigantic institutions, increasingly formed upon the “industrial model,” no longer make even the pretense of preparing their students for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity. They have repudiated their old obligation to pass on to students at least something of their cultural inheritance. The ideal graduate no longer is to have a mind well-equipped to serve others, or to judge competently the purposes for which it may be used.

Now, according to those institutions of the “cutting edge,” the purpose of education is unabashedly utilitarian. Their interest is almost exclusively centered in the technical courses called, with typical ostentation of corporate jargon, STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The American civilization so ardently promoted by these institutions is to be a civilization entirely determined by technology, and not encumbered by any thought of what is good or worthy or neighborly or humane.

. . .

To urge you toward responsible citizenship is to say that I do not accept either the technological determinism or the conventional greed or the thoughtless individualism of that world. Nor do I accept the global corporate empire and its economic totalitarianism as an irresistible force. I am here to say that if you love your family, your neighbors, your community, and your place, you are going to have to resist. Or I should say instead that you are going to have to join the many others, all over our country and the world, who already are resisting – those who believe, in spite of the obstacles and the odds, that a reasonable measure of self-determination, for persons and communities, is both desirable and necessary

Read the rest....

THIS is so cool.  All you homeschoolers out there, here is your history lesson for today.

Thanks to the Crunchy Con.  (Where I get ALOT of cool stuff....)

The meaning of our life is simple:  to seek union with God and to glorify Him and do His Holy Will.  Yet, we complicate that.  We are pulled by distractions.  The material of the world, which we are supposed to use and master, we end up being mastered by.  We use food, not to give us nutrition, but to serve our gluttony.  We use clothes, not to keep us warm and serve the virtue of modesty, but to exhibit ourselves and get attention.

This rubs off into our relationships.  My children cease to be a means for me to serve God by serving them, but as a means for me to live vicariously through them.  So too my wife.  Too often it is about what she can give to me, and not how I can lay my life down for her.

Families are pulled in so many different directions.  We have a tendency towards overprograming.  Homeschool families are not immune to this.  We withdrew from Gym class, soccer and other "extra-curiculars" because we have been struggling to have whole days at home.  We really cannot have get any "schooling" done without full days at home.  These activities are not bad in them selves, but again it is a question of who is the master and who is the servant.

I have been posting excerpts from St. John Chrysostom on "simplicity," so this issue is not a new one.

As a deacon I think simplicity is an important concept for our parishes.  What are the important things that we should be doing and what are the things that only serve as distractions from the "one thing needful?"

Essentially the God we worship is simple.  He is.  He is the source.  The Trinity seems complicated to many people, but when approached with humility (and simplicity!) we realize that it is the simple, that struggle with the most to understand....time....space.....being.  God is One.  But He is also Three.

Our salvation is simple.  Repent.  Run to God.

Fight fragmentation.  To live "holy" is to live "wholly."

Does this resonate?