Not all people have the physical courage of Saint Francis, but some do. I’m an Army brat proud of my father’s service to our country and proud of my son Evan who began yesterday pre-Ranger School training at Fort Bragg. I received just now a copy of this email my brother Sean sent to our father. It deserves a wider audience. Hat tip to Sean Royal Ellsworth, West Chester, PA.

Dad,

I want to share this personal, related story. Last month while boarding a plane in Dallas to fly back to Philadelphia I observed a young E-1 Air Force Airman take a seat in coach about three rows in front of me. Many fellow citizens were thanking him for his service and just being generally accommodating to the men in uniform on the flight (you gotta love Texans!). As the flight attendants were preparing for take off I saw two of them approach this young serviceman and could tell they were asking him for something in particular. It was taking some coaxing on their part so my interest grew then I saw an older gentleman stand up in first class as the young airman walked toward the front of the plane in his combat dress unform. These two men exchanged a heartfelt handshake and I then knew that the older man was giving up his first class seat for him. This struck many people in the plane as they observed this and the older gentleman received some high fives as he made his way back toward the back of the plane. Afterward as we walked toward baggage claim in Philly I shook the older man’s hand and thanked him for his excellent act of citizenship and leadership that made such a lasting impression on so many on the flight. He told me he was a young E-1 Airman once and served 22 years in the Air Force and will never forget these young servicemen and women.

Share these stories. Look for these divine appointments in your day as they can make a lasting impression on those around you. Veterans Day is in 35 days. Maybe you are being “called” to do something special this fall for somebody in your neighborhood or community that is serving our country or has a son or daughter serving.  Maybe next time you are in an airport and you see young servicemen in line for some food or something to drink you tell the cashier to put it on your tab.

Aaron and I are fans of the Red Wings and Tigers, so imagine our vexation last Saturday. Both teams were playing on television at the same time. My father is with us. He’s not into hockey. He wanted us to stick with the baseball game in Camden Yards. Aaron and I preferred the first game of the Stanley Cup Finals from Joe Louis Arena. We figured that behind their ace Justin Verlander, the Tigers would end the O’s five-game win streak. They did, 6 – 3.

I enjoy the story my father tells of the time a Latino player stepped into the batter’s box and crossed himself, as ball players are wont to do, and the Yankees’ catcher Yogi Berra tapped the guy’s knee with his mitt and said to him, “Whaddya say we just let God watch this game!”

That story has to do with why I don’t want my children to have values. That and some notes written by a soldier in a foxhole. Let me explain.

During World War I, a young Austrian soldier — an aristocratic Jew who was said to have fought with “reckless bravery” — used his time in a foxhole and in prison to jot down his thoughts on logic and ethics. After the defeat of Germany and Austria, these thoughts were published as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an almost impenetrably complex landmark work on the relationship between language and thought. The soldier’s name was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He published only this single book in his lifetime.

He was an intellectual high-watt bulb, Wittgenstein, especially on the subject of “language games.” We play games, he observed. So do languages. When we reach for words, especially technical words, to apprehend and articulate reality, we do well to note what language game they belong to.

The language of values, like the language of ‘fastballs’ ‘bunts’ and ‘sacrifice flies’, belongs to a game with its own grammar or rules. Whereas values assume a closed system — more about which in a moment — baseball assumes an open one. Baseball’s played in a paradise whose only canopy is the heavens. This is the world a baseball player inhabits and late-night talk show hosts do not. The baseball player thanks God, or the Big Guy Upstairs, for his success. The late show hosts, Leno O’Brien or Letterman, make him the butt of jokes for it. As if God cares, they say. As if God has any interest in a game.

Athletes make easy targets. They want to believe — they believe inveterately — that God cares about what they’re doing and wishes them well, a notion quaint these days. Such a thought is incongruous in a world where our lives entire, not merely our sporting lives, are no longer seriously imagined as beheld by divinity. The reason we doubt God watches baseball is not that we think sport trivial but that we think God is. We lack the moral imagination the ancients had, or John Donne or Jane Austen. Most of us who have fiber-optic TV and 457 channels no longer imagine God watches anything. We are Nietzsche’s “last man.”

It was Nietzsche who made this values language up. He argued that whatever the rules of the game concerning our behavior shall be, they can only be rules we make up or choose for ourselves. A nihilist, he defined reality in terms of negation, negating that particular and strange history of the Jews. No more “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt” and the Ten Commandments and so on. The ancient Hebrew and Christian notion that the grammar of our lives is in league with a particular history involving Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Hannah, and David; the claim that our story is somehow part of the story of Israel and her children; the hope that we inhabit that story and are headed somewhere, all this belonged to another day. That day, Nietzsche said, and his values language assumes, is gone.

This is the language game of values, a language that presupposes God is not watching us any longer because there is no God to do the watching.

If values are what people are supposed to have instead of God — and I’ve just made the case that they are — why would I want my kids to have them? I’d rather they have virtues, especially those with narrative entailments. I’d rather they have the ancient sense that their lives are beheld by divinity, watched and worried after by the God of the Exodus and Mt. Sinai, the Lord who hung the stars in the heavens and raised Jesus from the dead. I want my children to live in a universe that is more like Camden Yards or Comerica Park than Mellon Arena or the venerable Joe. And I want the Wings to win the Cup.

Some pray for gold, others for boundless land.
I pray to delight my fellow citizens
Until my limbs are wrapped in earth — a man
Who praised what deserves praise
And sowed blame for wrong-doers.
But human excellence
Grows like a vine tree
Fed by the green dew
Raised up, among wise men and just,
To the liquid sky.
We have all kinds of needs for those we love —
Most of all in hardships, but joy, too,
Strains to track down eyes that it can trust.

                                            [Pindar. Nemean VIII. 37-44]

All important arguments are old. One of the oldest concerns this question: Is character dependent on conditions? Is human excellence — virtue, areté — dependent, subject to conditions, as the Greek tragedians, Socrates, Aristotle and Pindar believed? Is it “like a vine tree / Fed by the green dew / Raised up among wise men and just, / To the liquid sky”? Or is character independent, impervious to conditions, as believed by Epictetus, Seneca, Spinoza, and Bertrand Russell?

In the gospel lesson we heard yesterday, Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing.” One could say that Jesus takes a side in the argument. That would be accurate, and it would miss the point. For what he claims, actually — it is unnerving, the quiet, unassuming way in which he makes his stupendous claims — is that he is the end of the argument. What matters most isn’t where we are in relation to the question. What matters is where we are in relation to him.

Over the years, the whole idea of truth – much less our ability to know it — has been rendered doubtful by the slow advance of a soft agnosticism that has itself become orthodoxy at so many universities. Not so at Notre Dame. All across this wondrous campus, we pass imagery that sings to us about the hope born of a Jewish woman in a Bethlehem stable. Yet we kid ourselves if we believe these images are self-sustaining.

Without a witness that keeps these signposts alive, our crosses, statues, and stained glass windows will ultimately fade into historical curiosities like the “Christo et ecclesiae” that survives to this day on buildings around Harvard Yard and the seal that still validates every Harvard degree. For most of her life, Notre Dame has served as a symbol of a Catholic community struggling to find acceptance in America — and yearning to make our own contributions to this great experiment in ordered liberty. We identify with those who are poor and downtrodden and on the margins of acceptance because that is where the Gospel points — and because we remember whence came our own parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

If we are honest, however, we must admit that in many ways we — and the university that nurtured us — are now the rich and powerful and privileged ourselves. This is a form of success, and we need not be embarrassed by it. But we must be mindful of the greater responsibilities that come with this success.

For years this university has trumpeted her lay governance. So what does it say about the Notre Dame brand of leadership, that in the midst of a national debate over a decision that speaks to our Catholic identity, a debate in which thousands of people across the country are standing up to declare themselves “yea” or “nay,” our trustees and fellows — the men and women who bear ultimate responsibility for this decision — remain as silent as Trappist monks? At a time when we are told to “engage” and hold “dialogue,” their timidity thunders across this campus. And what will history say of our billions in endowment if the richest Catholic university America has ever known cannot find it within herself to mount a public and spirited defense of the most defenseless among us?

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William McGurn, A Notre Dame Witness for Life, at Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture, April 23, 2009

The strength of Joseph’s manly character was tested when he discovered that his betrothed was pregnant even though he had not yet “known her.” This was a situation that, to put it mildly, would have bruised anyone’s manly honor. As yet, the angel had not reassured Joseph that this was part of God’s plan. A lesser man, seeking only to defend his personal honor, might have demanded that Mary be stoned as an adulteress. Consider that “honor killings” still occur in the Middle East. Instead, the Gospel tells us that Joseph was “unwilling to expose her to shame” and that “he decided to divorce her quietly.” Putting aside his own bruised ego, Joseph acted charitably and without malice. He sought to handle the matter discreetly without further harm or humiliation to Mary.

Joseph’s restraint in this regard provides an important lesson in learning how to manage one’s impulsive rage and to control one’s temper. This is a particularly important lesson for those of us who were inclined in our youth to be “hot-blooded.” A spiritually mature man, like Joseph, is not governed by the tempests of wounded masculine pride. Patience and circumspection may lead us to discover that our initial judgment was wrong. This means standing back from the heat of the moment to listen to God, to our spouse, and to our children, just as Joseph listened to the angel and Mary, rather than succumbing to impulse and “snap judgments.”

Joseph further embodies Christian manliness in his role as protector of the Holy Family. Tradition refers to him as custos Domini (guardian of the Lord). One can point to Joseph as the greatest advocate of adoption, which is often ridiculed today and asserted to be a cause of dysfunctional families. Joseph testifies to the nobility of a self-giving love that transcends blood and genetics.

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Joseph Fornieri in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. Joseph exists for us all as the very icon of the faithful servant of God. No celebrity. No klieg lights. The Most High asked Joseph to do something for him, to protect Mary, to be the guardian father of Jesus. Joseph found the grace to do it. He became a source of joy to the Blessed Mother, to their son, and to the Most High himself.

The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men. The time was ripe.

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From the novel That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis