The .Plan

From Ben Stein, on the economics of love:

High-quality bonds consistently yield more return than junk, and so it is with high-quality love. As for the returns on bonds, I know that my comment will come as a surprise to people who have been brainwashed into thinking that junk bonds are free money. They aren’t. The data from the maven of bond research, W. Braddock Hickman, shows that junk debt outperforms high quality only in rare situations, because of the default risk.

In love, the data is even clearer. Stay with high-quality human beings. And once you find you that are in a junk relationship, sell immediately. Junk situations can look appealing and seductive, but junk is junk. Be wary of it unless you control the market.

(Or, as I like to tell college students, the absolutely surest way to ruin your life is to have a relationship with someone with many serious problems, and to think that you can change this person.)
–Ben Stein, “Lessons in love, by way of economics”, New York Times, July 13, 2008

A Washington Post reporter explores the motivations behind an award-winning filmmaker’s motivations for creating a documentary about reconciliation in Rwanda.

In the film we meet Rosaria, who pulls up the hem of her dress to reveal mounds of raised scar tissue running down her legs. Hacked and beaten during the genocide, she now lives in a house built for her by Saveri, the man who killed her sister. Another survivor, Chantale, who lost 30 family members, meets John, the stooped gangly man who killed her father. He can’t face her; her eyes are embers. “Remember all your old neighbors,” she says. Yet the next day, Chantale begins working to build a house for another ex-con who confessed his crimes.

For Hinson, it was proof that the “transcendent filters through every aspect of life” and also that the world is really messed up.
–Gabe Oppenheim, “Acts of Reconciliation”, Washington Post, July 5, 2008

The story of the film itself is magical, involving some good timing and a series of providential connections. But the reporter also interweaves into the article a story from her personal life — a story about a fiancee who is immature and hurtful, who embarrasses her and steals several years of her life. I can’t give you the punchline, but here is a teaser:

The story ultimately appealed to Hinson for its reversal of the genre’s cliches. Instead of being a tale of African ruin and our reluctance to help, it was a “tremendously hopeful” picture of people learning to forgive in circumstances, she says, in which we never could. Hinson liked to believe she herself had learned something.

Two weeks after leaving Rwanda, in August 2006, the belief was tested. Her ex-fiance called, 4 1/2 years after their breakup. “I feel kinda crazy,” she recalls him saying. “And I still love you.”

The LORD casts a long shadow over us as the author of our lives and as the editor of our mistakes…

Maureen Dowd, of all people, points us to this gem:

Father Pat Connor, a 79-year-old Catholic priest born in Australia and based in Bordentown, N.J., has spent his celibate life — including nine years as a missionary in India — mulling connubial bliss. His decades of marriage counseling led him to distill some “mostly common sense” advice about how to dodge mates who would maul your happiness.

“Hollywood says you can be deeply in love with someone and then your marriage will work,” the twinkly eyed, white-haired priest says. “But you can be deeply in love with someone to whom you cannot be successfully married.”

For 40 years, he has been giving a lecture — “Whom Not to Marry” — to high school seniors, mostly girls because they’re more interested…

I asked him to summarize his talk:

“Never marry a man who has no friends,” he starts. “This usually means that he will be incapable of the intimacy that marriage demands. I am always amazed at the number of men I have counseled who have no friends. Since, as the Hebrew Scriptures say, ‘Iron shapes iron and friend shapes friend,’ what are his friends like? What do your friends and family members think of him? Sometimes, your friends can’t render an impartial judgment because they are envious that you are beating them in the race to the altar. Envy beclouds judgment.

…

“Finally: Does he possess those character traits that add up to a good human being — the willingness to forgive, praise, be courteous? Or is he inclined to be a fibber, to fits of rage, to be a control freak, to be envious of you, to be secretive?

“After I regale a group with this talk, the despairing cry goes up: ‘But you’ve eliminated everyone!’ Life is unfair.”
–Maureen Dowd, “An Ideal Husband”, New York Times, July 6, 2008

Has it really been a whole year?

Roberts describes the difference:

We don’t always construe as promising the prospect of what we want. Sometimes we construe the probability of fulfillment as poor, while still wanting the outcome very much. If I am “absolutely set on” the picnic and the very reliable weatherwoman announces a 100 percent chance of dark skies and deluge tomorrow, I will be in despair… If I am visited by a fit of maturity, I can cure myself of this despair by resignation. What is resignation? It is a downward adjustment of the concern. Seeing that the prospect of a sunny picnic tomorrow is almost nil, I adjust my desire for the picnic: sure, I would still love to have the picnic, but I can live without it; I’ll plan something else. So now I’m no longer in despair. Resignation, then, is a sort of halfway house between hope and despair. If I completely cease to care about the thing I once hoped for, I neither hope for it nor am resigned with respect to it. If I continue to want it with my whole heart but see my prospects as nil, then I am in despair. To be resigned with respect to something in the future, I must continue to care about it, but in a mitigated way that makes me able to “live with” the poor prospect…

Resignation is a way of tolerating the future, hope a way of welcoming it. Resignation is a healthy option in the case of most of the things we hope for, but it will not be healthy if applied to the most fundamental of our concerns, the one that, according to Christian psychology, is essential to our nature as persons. To dull or downgrade the concern for the eternal kingdom, for a perfect relationship with God and neighbor, is to compromise one’s status as a person, to live a damaged life; it is a sort of spiritual crippling.
–Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Eerdmans, 2007)

Deliciously understated passages like the following make the new Roberts book an occasionally pleasurable read:

It is hard to be friends with an unrepentant cannibal. Even if he is not at the moment eyeing my musculature with a fond view to the tenderloins, still the fact that my tenderloins are the kind of thing on which he feeds threatens to spoil everything. I may not notice that the relationship is spoiled. For one thing, I may be so crass that I accept this mutual cannibalism with equanimity; perhaps I don’t have an inkling what spiritual friendship is. Dog-eat-dog is just the name of the game; what does it matter if after we’ve had some nice meals together, one of ends up in the other’s pot? Only I’d better watch out that if that happens, it’s me who makes a meal of him, and not the other way around. On the other hand, if I am not so crass, I may achieve equanimity by deceiving myself a little about the mutual cannibalism. I say to myself, “I would never eat him, for he is my friend; and I’m sure he wouldn’t eat me, either. It would never come to that. No, I’m sure it wouldn’t”. But the way to avoid all these doubts and troubles is to give up cannibalism.
–Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Eerdmans, 2007)

More research on how choices overwhelm us, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In brief, the researchers from the University of Minnesota had a series of mall shoppers randomized to two groups: one group that was asked to consider some options (about college courses, or consumer products) vs. another group that was asked to actually make some decisions about these options. Afterwards, they had to complete a series of tasks.

Making choices apparently depleted a precious self-resource because subsequent self-regulation was poorer among those who had made choices than it was among those who had not. This pattern was found in the laboratory, classroom, and shopping mall. It was found with assigned choices and spontaneously made choices. It was found with inconsequential and more consequential choices… The present findings suggest that self-regulation, active initiative, and effortful choosing draw on the same psychological resource. Making decisions depletes that resource, thereby weakening the subsequent capacity for self-control and active initiative. The impairment of self-control was shown on a variety of tasks, including physical stamina and pain tolerance, persistence in the face of failure, and quality and quantity of numerical calculations. It also led to greater passivity.
–Kathleen Vohs et al., “Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, April 2008

Through my work on the inpatient ward, I hear so much about the depth of human depravity that there is now very little in the way of interpersonal chaos that I find shocking. I have seen my patients mired in every kind of clay imaginable; occasionally I wonder how they are able to find life bearable. So it should not have come as a surprise the announcement that my pastor is being placed on an indefinite leave of absence for an ‘improper relationship’ with another woman. Yet I can’t help but feel an intense sadness tonight.

I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe the moons were simply never aligned for a life in this city.

Alcohol is such a terrible, terrible drug. It can eviscerate our families, deaden our souls, and reduce our brains to mush. Through the eyes of my patients and my patients’ families, I see so much of the damage it can do to our lives that when I read Philip Yancey’s latest column, for a brief instant I thought to myself, ‘how can he be so insensitive?’

Paul follows Jesus’ logic in the Sermon on the Mount: murder and adultery differ from hatred and lust only by a matter of degree. Indeed, the flagrantly evil person has a peculiar advantage of sorts: an inner gyroscope of conscience that registers a sense of being off course.

I once accepted a speaking engagement among Christians involved in Twelve Step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous. As I talked with the attendees and pondered what to say, I finally decided on the ironic title, “Why I Wish I Was an Alcoholic.” It occurred to me that what recovering alcoholics confess every day—personal failure, and the daily need for grace and help from friends and a Higher Power—represent high hurdles for those of us who take pride in our independence and self-sufficiency…

Unless we accept the grim diagnosis, we will not seek a cure.
–Philip Yancey, “The benefits of brokenness”, Christianity Today, May 27, 2008

But then I realized that that is the gravity of the human condition. The blind spot is so deadly to our souls that an ironic title like “Why I Wish I Was an Alcoholic” could be an appropriate title for a talk given at an AA meeting.

It was a sobering realization.