Fencing Bear at Prayer

I'm sorry, this is so great, I just have to share it with you.  In the comments for my last post , PapaFreeak has just paid me an enormous compliment.  He reads my blog, get this, even though, he says, "I find about 75% of what you post to be odious."  ODIOUS!!!!  Isn't that the best thing you've ever heard?!  But wait, there's more: "This [he explains] is why I return: I don't understand why someone with your advantages--intelligence, health, a supportive family, good income from meaningful work in a prestigious job--is so astoundingly petty, envious, and self-pitying.  I think you fascinate me because you provide access to a mentality that is genuinely foreign to me."  Gosh, what can I say?  A FAN!!!!  This is what Elizabeth Gilbert must feel like all the time ! But PapaFreeak only finds "about 75%" of what I post to be "odious".  Which makes me wonder: what 25% could he possibly like? Could it be that, having the "...

"The envious want to be superior, for their self-esteem depends on outranking others in the relevant field of comparison.  Their own identity hangs on excelling others, but only those others who threaten that identity, that is, those close enough to be compared as rivals.  If we reflect on whom we envy, we are likely to discover how we define our identity and where we see that identity as most vulnerable.  Envy generally strikes in areas where another's superiority seems to threaten or lessen our own excellence and where that comparison leaves us feeling inferior in a way close to our identity." --Rebecca Konynyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), p. 49. So, okay, I made a list: " Whom do I envy?  That is, whom do I most want to see destroyed, like Salieri wanted Mozart destroyed? "  I won't share that list with you (no, no, no, no, no, no, no).  (It had ten names on it...

In case you were wondering why it is so hard to have an encouraging conversation on campus: "My own candidate for a large group existing in a state of ressentiment [a persisting state of grudgingness against one's circumstances of life, particularly in comparison with others--FB] would be American academics, especially those in the humanities.  They feel themselves, simultaneously, greatly superior and vastly undervalued, above their countrymen yet isolated from them and insufficiently rewarded and revered by them.  They have about them a perpetually disappointed air: one senses they feel that the world has, somehow, let them down.  Sometimes this will reveal itself in a general sourness; sometimes it takes the form of hopelessly radical political views.  These political views, it does not take long to recognize, usually feature a complex shifting and reorientation of society so that people like themselves will be allowed a justly deserved role of power. "The ...

"It is likely that you will overcome jealousy in proportion to the way you keep both your friends and enemies from being jealous of you.  As long as you are wanting them to be jealous of you, you reveal you are still jealous of them. But if you reach the place that it pains you for them to be jealous of you, it is a good thing. "Like it or not, people will be jealous of you.  'I have nothing that would make them jealous,' you may say.  But they will still be jealous of you.  They will find something.  There is that in you that makes another person envy.  You may not think it, but it is true.  You may have a low opinion of yourself, but there will be something about you--whether your appearance, personality, gifting, job, friends, background, or opportunities--which will make them envious.  You simply cannot make everybody like you. "It is our responsibility, when possible, to avoid the onslaught of jealousy from others.  We should never w...

"Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus."  The lazy ox covets the horse-blankets, the pack-horse would rather plow.   --Horace, Epistulae bk. 1, ep. 14, l. 43 Or, as Lewis and Short put it, s.v. "ephippium": "Each envies the other's condition."

According to R.T. Kendall, Jealousy: The Sin No One Talks About (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2010), in thirteen steps. Step One: Admit it to yourself . This is easy.  I know that I'm envious, jealous even.  It more or less defines my relationship with my siblings, and I have struggled for years with feeling envious of my colleagues and fellow fencers.  I am envious of my sister for being so beautiful , of my brother for his travels and his training in so many languages .  I am envious of my colleagues for the books that they have published and for their promotions to full professor, particularly those who have been promoted (unlike me) before publishing their second book .  You know, if you have been following me all these years on the blog, that I am envious of my fellow fencers , particularly those who have placed higher in tournaments than I have with fewer years of experience on the strip.   So, we're done with this step, right?  Wrong....

You'd think I'd be used to this, exposing my shame to the world.  But this is a big one.  Envy .  Or, if you will, in its more virulent, Satanic form, jealousy .  The gnawing fear you experience when you hear about another's success.  The malicious but oh-so-compelling voice that whispers to you, "You're nothing, you've never been anything but nothing, you will never amount to anything," whenever someone praises someone else in your presence.  The raging green monster that wants to break, destroy, kill, pound into the ground that puny god who dares challenge your status by declaring himself (or herself) better than you. Yes, I've been there.  Many, many times.  With my siblings .  With my colleagues .  With my fellow fencers .  According to Bob Sorge and R.T. Kendall , most everyone has--not, of course, that anyone is usually willing to admit it, oh, no.  Because that would be to admit that we have something to feel jealous ...

You all know the parable ( Matthew 25:14-30 ).  There's this man, see, who was going on a journey, but before he left, he called three of his servants to him and entrusted them with his goods.  "And to one he gave five talents, and to another two, and to another one, to every one according to his proper ability: and immediately he took his journey."  While he was away, the servant to whom he gave five talents used the money in trade and raised five more talents; and the servant to whom he gave two talents did likewise, raising two.  But the third took his one talent and buried it in the earth.  Guess who gets the kudos when the master returns?  Not the one who buried his talent to keep it safe, oh, no!  Rather, the other two who took the lord's money and made more of it.  And so the master took the one talent from the servant who buried it and gave it to the servant who had doubled his five, so that the one who had had five talents now had eleven,...

I could feel the panic rising almost immediately.  I was at a seminar on Saturday with a number of colleagues in my field, and one of them had a book just out that another of my friends was passing around.  It was my colleague's fourth book (I still have only one, plus an edited volume), but although she is some years senior to me, it didn't help.  The demons were already chattering. "Where is your second book?"  "Why have you been so lazy?"  "Look, she's been able to publish two books since your first one came out."  "You're falling behind."  "You've already lost it."  "You're hopeless."  "Give it up." I tried to look calmly at the table of contents and get some sense of what the argument was, but I could barely see straight enough to read the title, never mind absorb anything of what the book was actually about.  All I could see was Another Book When I Still Have Only Published One.  So ...

One hesitates to announce instances of spiritual progress because what, after all, if they aren't? Or what if the very act of announcing them ensures that one will fall yet again back into one's old bad habits? But there is something that I've been thinking about this past week or so that does seem to indicate at least a modicum of improvement in my outlook on life and, therefore, possibly, just possibly in the state of my soul. It has to do with stuff. I've written before about how I have spent years thinking that the thing that I needed in order to feel like I had finally "made it" professionally and socially was a house . Even as I write this, the twinge is still there, and I do have to confess to a lingering sense of envy as I walked my puppy round the mansions in our neighborhood this past Sunday morning. But.... But even as I was looking just now at the photographs of the mansions for sale , what I am noticing more is not so much their size, but ra...

I want a house. No, I don't. Houses are trouble. They have roofs and furnaces and plumbing that all are in constant need of repair. Their property taxes are higher and, if you are lucky enough to live in the suburbs, they have lawns to mow.[1] They're lonely because you don't have anyone walking above you or playing loud music through the walls. Some of them are no bigger than the apartment my family and I live in now, and the ones that are bigger are simply too big, all that useless space.[2] Plus, of course, having a house is just one step closer to utter damnation , because, as you know, most people in the world would kill just to live in an apartment half as nice as the one we have. Who am I to imagine that I deserve a better place to live when most of the world's population lives in cardboard? Okay, so that's a bit hyperbolic (but only just). Actually, I'm not sure whether I want a house. I like our apartment. It has character and style.[3] It...

What can I say? The demons are winning. I've spent the whole week fighting Doubt and Impatience, trying to convince myself to allow myself the time for my project to develop; so what if it takes me ten years to bring this book to completion? I need--or so I have been telling myself--to find a way to follow Master Han's advice (as reported by Joe Hymans) and give myself time to work towards my goal without setting a limit on how long I will work. But now I'm not sure there is ever going to be any book because, or so I learned yesterday when I went to check my email for notice about a UPS delivery I was expecting, a colleague of mine, inspired by an article I published a few years ago, is going to write it before I do. Blind Panic has now taken the field. No, of course, she is not going to write exactly the book I've been planning, but the argument is very much the one that I had wanted to make, and the methodology--reading the psalms through the lens of Marian dev...

It's the next morning and I'm still in hell. Everything that my coaches and friends have told me over the years is a lie. "Patience," they say, "it takes time to learn to fence. You've still only been fencing for a relatively short amount of time; it takes years (six, seven, eight) before everything starts to make sense." And yet, my opponent yesterday (see previous post) has only been fencing for three years and a bit and she was in the semi-finals in a very challenging event. "You need to have confidence in your attacks," they say, and yet, she made almost no attacks and won bout after bout without fire, without pushing, without (apparently; clearly I'm missing something) setting up any of her actions except to be ready for the parry-riposte. "You have to want to win," they say. Well, clearly she did, but so did I, otherwise, why would I be in this hell--again? I cannot tell you the number of times I have felt like I do r...

"It's not about you," my opponent assured me as she yelled with victory after our first pool bout this morning. "Yes, it is," I replied, not feeling terribly sportsbearlike and knowing that I wasn't (sportsbearlike, that is) even as I said it. I wished that I could take back what I said and simply wish her well. The last time she and I had met in a tournament, a year and three months ago, I had beaten her comfortably 15-6 in a D-E for Div III. Over the last year, I had watched her results in the Divs and Vets with interest, for here was someone whom I had clearly known how to fence the first time I met her on the strip but who was consistently thereafter finishing higher than I was in every subsequent event. I was interested to fence her today to see what it was that she had changed so that maybe I could understand how it was that someone whom I considered (oh, the sin of pride) a somewhat weaker fencer than myself could make her way steadily and predic...