Blogger's Block

Despite (or perhaps because of) my recent blog-fade, the last post attracted 3 quite different and interesting comments, albeit over the course of nearly 9 months of silence from me, which represents an exception to the general lack of interest shown most other posts.

While acknowledging that criticisms of my writings are usually well deserved, allow me to offer the following defense:

• Re-read the top line of the aforesaid post. I have never claimed any prophetic charism for myself, but was mostly just repeating a thought from a brother in Christ that struck me, as it still does, as being insightful and prophetic. And a bit scary.
• The immediate and precise details not being realized, it yet remains to be seen whether the main point will come to pass - namely, will Obama break diplomatic ties with Israel, and will this finally call down God's righteous judgment upon America?
• I can't explain why I felt compelled to attempt a 'prophetic' blog post. It was my first and, most likely, last such attempt. Neither can I explain my subsequent writer's block and inabilility to offer further thoughts. Perhaps the two inexplicable phenomena are related.

The final point is currently forefront in my mind. Not that I have been completely silent (see my Books page and my other blog.) I have not yet learned to just humbly shut up (Job 40:4,5). But perhaps my blogging days are coming to an end. "Dogpatch, Ergo sum" was always an Idea blog; perhaps I simply have no further ideas or new thoughts to offer.

No, that's not exactly true. I do have at least one additional thought rattling around inside my skull for some time now. Not sure if I will ever get around to articulating it here. But here's a hint: if I write an article about this thought, I would like it to happen sometime before Father's Day. That gives me - what? - 2 or 3 months to write the article. Or not.

Patriarchy - 2

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.
  - Malachi 4:5,6 [RSV]

This was the reading for morning prayer this past Sunday, the Solemnity of the birth of John the Baptist. The scriptural reference to fathers and their children caught my attention, coming just one week after Fathers' Day. One week, also, after my last post on Patriarchy, which I might synopsize as follows: The best indicator of whether or not a particular human society is civilized is to ask whether or not men know their children, and children know their father.

Uncritical adoption of egalitarian and feminist ideals is feminizing our culture, often preventing fathers from acting like fathers (like men), and then despising them for being irresponsible. The more radical feminists openly deride fatherhood as useless or obsolete. Thus we droop slowly into savagery.

Looks like it's high time for the promised Elijah to come and turn us from our collective stupor.

Patriarchy

Patriarchy, the word and the concept, has gotten bad press in the past few decades. And that's a shame, because patriarchy, a.k.a. fatherhood, is perhaps the key element of civilized society.

The mother-child bond is irrefutably primary, dictated by nature, by biology. In a completely natural (i.e. savage) society, the one stable relationship would be the one between mother and child. As social beings, humans would still congregate and form other, lesser relationships (when I hear "it takes a village to raise a child", I picture a circle of grass huts occupied by women and children, with the men off in the bush), but motherhood is primary.

Fatherhood is a bit more tenuous. It requires two steps that go beyond biology: 1) the bonding of the woman to one man, and 2) the acceptance of that bond by the man, the decision to shoulder responsibility. When the woman thus 'belongs' to the man, he can know that her children belong to him as well. Thus he will be motivated to care for the children whom he now knows as his own. Further, he will be motivated to care for his wife. And, thirdly, other men become his partners in this patriarchal arrangement, rather than sexual rivals. And all that makes civilization possible.

In simple terms, civilization consists of the domestication of men, the protection of women, and the nurturing of children in stable homes. And the early feminists were correct: this structure is patriarchal. Only by putting fathers in charge is it going to happen.

Put another way: Without fathers there would be no families (there would only be 'villages'). Without families, there would be no real civilization.