An Argument for Singular Love

As I grow older, I'm struck by the number of things I've re-thought. And the number of things I committed to and then re-thought that turned out to be true. Life forces us to experiment with our ideas, and tests them by hard experience. 

I used to argue, with no small measure of my own teenage passion, the prevailing wisdom of my age--that there is only one person out there for each of us, and if that love is missed then all hope is lost. One would after that merely have to settle. This passion, set to flame by every film and every song of my youth, impelled me to look carefully for "The One." Then when I failed to find said person, as do many, I started to heed more mature voices. "Be the person anyone can love, and then you will find true love. And that person could probably be just about anyone." 

Perhaps I should confess that I wish I had been wiser; that I was less foolish in my youth. I was taken in by an ideology that turned out to be wrong, and by a desire to be useful, and by a foolish reaction to the passions of youth, merely because in my impatience there were no immediate results while I was in college. I didn't hold out for a goddess because I no longer believed in goddesses. I exchanged the futile hope of finding and worshipping a Venus of my own for being a nice fellow who could attract someone who could help me finance a mortgage and be a respectable minister in the vaunted Wesleyan Church of America. I was an adult and it was time to start acting like one. 

But I was propelled to this renunciation of foolish youthful fancy by emerging "wisdom," which after 21 years of miserable marriage resulted in divorce and devastation. This experience of course taught me only that love, defined by the romanticism of youth, and then by the mature and sober wisdom of my betters, were both wrong, and so I was probably too much of a fool to even know what I was looking for when it came to love. I had been too muddled by romanticism and pragmatism. The poetry had died, and I could no longer pay the mortgage. And I was alone, doing my part to raise three girls whose lives were now fractured by divorce. 

And then the answer found me. As in my entire life, any understanding of love had to be furnished by forces external to me. I have been quite entirely passive when the best things in my life have happened. My parents showed me how to love others, how to be in a family and sacrifice for the greater good. God loved me in the midst of my rebellion against Him and gave me a life of undeserved blessing. And then, after all this, at the age of 47, I met her. I met "The One!" 

She simply descended miraculously into my broken life and saved me in so many ways. Obviously, I know the dangers of such effusive language. I feel as C.S. Lewis did when he said of his wife Joy that he probably "loved her too much." I think if my love for Amy is excessive, then I can only lay the blame for that at God's feet, because he designed this angelic woman to be as near perfection as any woman can be. Or at the very least, she is a creation so sublimely fitted to me that I can only see her as perfect. 

Can it be that God built this woman for me, and me for her? We are still awed by the circumstances of our meeting and our marrow deep compatibility. We met as strangers in the large city of Austin after I moved here from California. She lived only a few miles from my first little apartment here. Her beliefs, her interests, her strong mind and playful wit, even her love of sports, golf, hiking, knit our passions together seamlessly from the start. We are not the same person. Indeed, our personalities are quite different, but they are differences that bring needed perspective to the same shared life mission and goals and even hobbies. In that sense, we have become truly trusting friends who listen intently to each other, knowing always that the other only seeks to selflessly enhance the experience of the other in this life. We have not fought, and many would see this as a fault, but we simply haven't found an occasion to be angry with each other. How could I ever speak to Lewis' Sarah Smith with anything but reverence (she is a heavenly woman in Lewis' Great Divorce)?

I certainly didn't deserve to meet her. I don't deserve her now. I receive her daily with surprised, delighted, even trembling gratitude. My failings and sins are significant, but God chose not just to give me a second chance at love, but to plunge me into the fathomless depths of incomprehensible love, and to nearly drown me there. And He chose to give me a woman of soaring attributes, suffusing life with laughter, stimulating conversation, meaningful purpose, and blessing and delight and rapturous pleasure and reverie and all! But perhaps beyond all that, He gave me a woman who can see me and love me and help me heal from the wounds of the past, a truly Christian woman whose profound depth is rooted in the boundless grace of God. She is quite literally the most whole of the human beings I've ever known. 

It is a curious trait of singular love that after five years I can no longer even see other women. (She is so bright that I struggle to see anything else at all.) Or perhaps it would be better to say it this way: In seeing other women, I only see dim reflections of the goddess with whom I am privileged to live! I see them as participating in the category of womanhood, the ultimate expression of which is my Amy. If I see a beautiful woman, I see only a copy or shadow of the most beautiful woman. If I see a woman of kindness, selflessness, intelligence, then I only see a lesser expression of my angelic Amy. In other words, I see her everywhere! And yet there is infinite joy in the discovery of this goddess woman, and infinite pleasure in experiencing our truly wonderful marriage. It would be an idol, this marriage, if it wasn't held gratefully in the arms of two people receiving it as God's most lavish and undeserved of all gifts next to the gift of unmerited salvation in Christ. 

In the end, God has taught me that the romantic was far closer to the truth than the pragmatist. I would never have believed it except that daily I experience it. 

Pickle Ball World Championships (Costa Mesa Parks and Recreation Championships)

Costa Mesa, California

During the Ides of March, when fools place bets on College Basketball and there is otherwise a great dearth of meaningful athletic competition to behold on the American sports scene, there is on display some of the great unheralded athletes of our day. 

These gods and goddesses of sport compete for the love of the game, for the purity of sport, without pay or promise of glory.

They wield rackets forged in iron and fire, destined for the conflagration of the ages. They descend upon Costa Mesa with hearts pregnant with honor and courage, virtues the common man only dreams of or views from a distance in pangs of pathetic envy.

Not just anyone makes it to the Pickle Ball World Championships, also knows as the Costa Mesa Parks and Recreation Regional Championships. 

After many days of intense competition in the senior division (the only division); of grunts and the smell of liniment, of neoprene knee braces, of matching almost tennis outfits, of fallen heroes, of the crucible of hot battle, the final two emerged. We would be remiss if we didn't offer our sincerest congratulations to the two teams who fell in glorious Pickle battle to the two triumphant teams. Were it not for a sciatica injury to Bill "The Night Nurse" Juroviski (so nicknamed because of his talent for taking out the crap), things might have looked a lot different. But enough unbearable build up! Let us introduce you to the championship teams, each vying for the coveted Pickle Ball Trophy, which is just a whiffle ball made of bronze with names etched in immortality.

Team 1: Rackets of Fire

Captain Janice "The Executionist" Jones and Marvin "The Machete" Smith

Team 2: The Luftwaffe 

Captain Helga "The Howitzer" Heinrickson and Gunter "The Junk Baller" Ackerman

One would think that with the matching socks and head-bands and knee braces, team Rackets of Fire could perhaps be taken lightly. We asked the members of Luftwaffe what they thought of their competition before the game, and Helga Henrickson said solemnly, "We know we have our work cut out for us, but we feel confident we can hang in there with them. We've faced a lot of adversity lately, what with Gunter's tennis elbow, but that has only made us stronger." 

What ensued in this game for the ages was nothing less than the furious energy of the stalemated athleticism of finely tuned athletes prowling the courts, reflexes like jungle cats. It could only be described as a blur of rackets, like long swords in combat, every move countered by an equally dazzling answer, until all players lie exhausted on the court, having moved a total of twenty feet during the entire two hour long match. 

For all their effort, Rackets of Fire fell to Luftwaffe in a game so close it required two instant replay sessions to grant the winning points to Luftwaffe. Unfortunately for Luftwaffe, they were ultimately disqualified for violating the tournaments doping policy, having each spiked the Ensure with performance enhancers. 

Questions Regarding the Matter of Abortion

1. If I identify as a woman, then can my arguments be heard? Or perhaps imagine the same arguments coming out of a woman’s mouth, because I’ve seen that happen a lot, though those women are probably not real women. But perhaps if those women identify as women, then their arguments, which are the same as mine, might be heard? 

2. Is poverty the cause of abortion, or is abortion offered as a way for already poor people to be relatively less poor? And what about all the middle class abortions? And aren't all young women poor, according to relativistic calculus? And doesn't this assume that the men should continue to have nothing to do with the decision to have the child and raise it? (Insert Dave Chappelle's joke here). Or reword this question: Has abortion created an environment in which men feel a greater responsibility for the consequences of their sexual escapades, or less?

3. If a woman who transitions to a man then marries a man and somehow gets pregnant, but then decides to get an abortion, is that then a man getting an abortion? And if that is true, then abortion rights are not merely a woman’s issue, correct?

4. Why not take men and women out of the entire enterprise of messy reproduction? Harvest eggs and sperm from people and make children in labs to fit various tasks in society. Come to think of it, that is a great book idea.

5. How are we going to keep the population pressures of the human parasite under control without abortion? I have an idea. If Roe is overturned, then the childless generation need not stop. Get more guys addicted to porn and more girls addicted to instagram. Make them afraid of intimacy and increase homosexuality and transgenderism, so that fewer will reproduce in the first place. Teach women to kill (pardon the pun) at the office and postpone having children until they can’t. "Castrate (in various ways) and bid the geldings be fruitful!" C.S. Lewis

6. Of the 60 million plus babies aborted since ‘73, I wonder how many of them would have ended up being LGBTQ? 

7. If I have to adopt to show costly concern for the babies of poor women, what do those promoting abortion as a solution to poverty have to do? How is it that all these “advocates for women” care about them enough to see that their pregnancy ends and then do nothing else for them? They accuse pro-lifers of wanting the poor woman’s poor baby born and that is the extent of their concern, but surely they just want the poor woman’s baby killed and that is the extent of their concern. It seems to me that as far as they're concerned the government can take care of all "those people."

8. If we are going to establish an arbitrary age limit before which it is acceptable to kill a child, I recommend we set the limit at 17. That would be exceedingly convenient for many parents of teens and surely would help towards appropriately engineering society. We can start by aborting all the instagram narcissists. 

9. Isn’t this good news for California, which can better express its identity as the leftist utopia it aspires to be? It can be a worldwide capital for abortion, offering to pay for the abortions of all Americans, giving out abortions like Oprah gives out cars. “You get an abortion… and you get an an abortion… and you get an abortion, you poor Texan!” "And for every fifth abortion you get a Teslaaaaaa!!!" (You can kind-of hear Oprah saying it.)

10. Finally, how many logical fallacies can one group of people repeat? My favorite hits: 

* "You don't have a uterus, so shut the hell up." (ad hominem) What in the name of all that is holy does my gender have to do with my argument?

* "Law does not require you to remain attached to a famous violinist, even if his bodily functions are dependent on you." (false analogy) How on earth is this remotely related to a mother's attachment to her child? It's a stupid analogy and anyone with half a brain knows it. 

* "Cells die all the time." (category mistake) A skin cell that sloughs off is not exactly the same thing as a unique genetic entity that, because it is a separate human person, grows and progresses through differentiation and morphogenesis. 

* "The kid will be poor." (red herring) Yes, and should we kill all kids that will be born into poverty? Or all kids that are born into the middle class that become poor? What is the required income level of the woman to whom a child can acceptably be born? What if she doesn't have dental? 

* "Human and person are not coextensive." (Appeal to authority) On whose authority should we believe this nonsense? This is the same logic as believing that sex and gender are unrelated. 

* "This is about reproductive rights and bodily autonomy and women’s rights." (equivocation) Language games are the specialist of many pseudo-intellectuals. None of these games addresses the real identity of the life within the womb. You don't possess bodily autonomy if you choose to kill a toddler in order to assert your freedom. When exactly does the developing human possess its own bodily autonomy? 

* "If you are not ready to adopt, then don’t comment." Or, "you only care about these kids before they are born." (Ad hominem) Apart from the fact that many Christians do in fact adopt, the problem here is that it again neglects the merits ot the argument and simply casts aspersions on the person asserting it. 

* "This will cause unwanted pregnancy." (False cause) There are at least two or three other causal factors in pregnancy. 

* "They will want to outlaw inter-racial marriage." (Slippery slope) In what sense does allowing the states to consider and regulate the issue of abortion have anything whatever to do with the matter of inter-racial marriage? 

* "What about rape and incest?" (Fallacy of composition) It is true that there are a small number of abortions performed for this reason, but the vast majority are not for this reason. To cast the whole as composed of the exception is a classic fallacy. 

I'm sure there are more logical fallacies, but frankly it is hard to keep up. Just report any argument from the left in favor of abortion and I'lll tell you which fallacy it is. 

I think it is manifestly true that if one is to argue on the merits, the pro-life side is winning, and that is surely the most racist and sexist thing it has ever done, because logic is a white male thing.