The results are in

A couple of days ago, I asked Goat Rope readers to weigh in on a terrible tale of marital betrayal that involved not the usual stuff but rather Netflix.

To briefly recap. Here's the deal. Both husband and wife enjoy watching Mad Men. However, when the female partner was away, the male--it still mortifies me to even relate this--watched it alone and then sent it back. Read the whole post here.

Several people have responded, although they didn't necessarily do so in the comment part of the blog.

One commentor agreed to me that this was a sin that Dante would have cast into the lowest depths of the inferno and did so in imitation of the Tuscan Bard:

"Abandon hope, all ye
who return to Netflix the DVD
before the spousal unit
has had a chance to watch it"

Another reader took the opposite position, saying "Madder than a hatter? Madder than an adder with a stone in its bladder? I think it's OK if the viewing was solo, not with the neighbor gal."

So adamant was this person that when I further argued the perfidy of the case, I received this reply: "So re-order it--I think the cat's got your brain!"

(In fairness, while I don't necessarily disagree with that assessment, I think it's an entirely separate issue.)

Still another respondent, all the way from Italy, took my side--but assumed I was the guilty party! The message read,

"I think you (excuse me 'he') should get the maximum punishment. You are talking SERIOUS marital transgression here!"

(Once again, in my own defense let me state that while I am a wretched sinner capable of many an atrocity, up to and possibly including cannibalism, even I have my standards.)

Last word: this correspondence from a fellow gentleman goat farmer suggests an altogether alternative approach to such issues:

"Save series for viewing with significant other and substitute porn while she's gone...
That way there will be no conflict."

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Have a nice weekend, y'all. I'm glad we sorted that one out.

You be the judge

Image by way of wikipedia.

Far be it from El Cabrero to ever discuss, gossip or blog about the marital woes of my friends, having a surfeit of my own. Recently, however, I learned of an incident so egregious, so heinous that I am not sure forgiveness for it can be found in this or any other world.

It was of an order of magnitude that would seem to tax the very mercy of Our Lord and Our Lady and the boundless compassion of Amida Buddha.

And it had to do not with the sins of the flesh, nor with cruelty or avarice, but rather with Netflix.

Let's suppose that a couple, otherwise happily married up to this point, enjoyed watching a series together. Let's call it Mad Men.

Now imagine that one partner is away and is unavailable for shared family time of watching 1960s males behaving badly.

The honorable thing, worthy of the praise of decent folk everywhere, would be to forgo the pleasure of the show until the beloved's return.

Still, given the frailty of human nature, it might be forgiven if one watched it alone and then watched it again without complaint upon the joyous reunion.

Less praiseworthy but still permissible would be to watch it, keep the disc and encourage the partner to watch it as convenient.

But no. Imagine the sheer perfidy--it makes the angels weep to think on it!--of watching the disc solo and then sending it back in the mail before the beloved even had a chance to watch.

Did Heaven look on this and not send aid?

I'm trying to think of where Dante might have classified this sin in his Inferno. Not with the sins of intemperance, which got off the easiest. Nor with the violent, who occupied the next rung down. As I see, the minute the US Postal Service became involved, this became an act of video betrayal, placing the offender  at risk of lying frozen in the ice beside Caiaphas and near the three headed body of Satan, chewing forever on Judas, Brutus and Cassius.

In fact, one of those three guys might even get a break for the first time in 2000 or so years...

(The fact that the video marital betrayal occurred with a video about marital betrayal only adds a post-modern veneer to a primal iniquity.)

This one is too tough for me to call. What do you think, Gentle Reader? Is redemption possible here?

LINKS? Schminks!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: NINTH CIRCLE OF YOU KNOW WHERE

Conscience and power

Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society is a masterpiece of anti-utopianism. The book, like much of his other work, is an extended polemic against naive and overly optimistic views of human nature and society.

While he doesn't hold to the idea of the "total depravity" of humanity, he takes the idea of sin very seriously. By sin, he doesn't mean disobeying this or that divine rule but rather the self-centeredness which causes people to do harm to others, the creation and even themselves. And if individual humans have sinful tendencies, groups are much more selfish and imperialistic.

He also argued that human motivations are inherently ambiguous and people often do the most harm when they think they are being the most righteous. Oppressors often quite sincerely believe that they are acting for the good of those they oppress--and some of the oppressed might do the same given the chance.

If that's the case, then while we might make this or that social improvement, society will always be an arena of struggle:

there is good reason to believe that the sentiments of benevolence and social goodwill will never be so pure and powerful, and the rational capacity to consider the rights and needs of others in fair competition with our own will never be so fully developed as to create the possibility for the anarchistic millennium...

While democracy represents a great advance over other forms of government, it still doesn't and can't eliminate the element of struggle:

Politics will, to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises.

EASY STREET. Here's economist Dean Baker's latest rant on Wall Street.

ONE TO WATCH. WV Governor Joe Manchin has issued a call for a special session of the legislature to convene today. One item is health care related in the wake of national health care reform. The most contentious issues are those related to education.

CLIMATE. Here's some coverage of the new energy/climate bill that has just been introduced in the US Senate.

ONE SHOT DEAL. There's more scientific evidence that life on earth arose exactly once and that all living things have a single common ancestor.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GRACEFULLY STRUCK, PLUS MINE SAFETY AND WORKERS' RIGHTS

El Cabrero has been on a theological jag this week, with a special focus on the work of the great 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

To recap briefly, Tillich had a way of bringing new meaning to old religious terms that have accumulated a lot of baggage over the centuries (without sacrificing the old meanings). Yesterday's post looked at his ideas of sin and grace as discussed in his sermon "You are accepted" from the book The Shaking of the Foundations.

For him, sin is a state before it is an act. Specifically, it is a state of separation which is the fate of all people. It is something that inevitably happens to us but also something to which we contribute by our own actions. By separation, he meant our alienation or estrangement from other people, from nature, from ourselves, and from the Ground of Being (which many folks call "God").

This would also apply to

the attitude of social groups within nations towards each other,and the attitude of nations themselves towards other nations. The walls of distance, in time and space, have been removed by technical progress; but the walls of estrangement between heart and heart have been incredibly strengthened.

But if sin or separation is a pervasive reality, it isn't the only one. There is also the reality that can sometimes be experienced when separation is overcome. His word for that is grace:

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!" If that happens to us, we experience grace After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.

In the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life. We experience the grace of understanding each other's words. We understand not merely the literal meaning of the words, but also that which lies behind them, even when they are harsh or angry. For even then there is a longing to break through the walls of separation. We experience the grace of being able to accept the life of another, even if it be hostile and harmful to us, for, through grace, we know that it belongs to the same Ground to which we belong, and by which we have been accepted. We experience the grace which is able to overcome the tragic separation of the sexes, of the generations, of the nations, of the races, and even the utter strangeness between man and nature. Sometimes grace appears in all these separations to reunite us with those to whom we belong. For life belong to life.

And in the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to ourselves. We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we. If only more such moments were given to us! For it is such moments that make us love our life, that make us accept ourselves, not in our goodness and self- complacency, but in our certainty of the eternal meaning of our life. We cannot force ourselves to accept ourselves. We cannot compel anyone to accept himself. But sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say "yes" to ourselves, that peace enters into us and makes us whole, that self-hate and self-contempt disappear, and that our self is reunited with itself. Then we can say that grace has come upon us.

Official Goat Rope verdict on Tillich: dude was pretty good. Too bad he didn't know how to break up his paragraphs...

WAY TO GO, JOE! Thanks and congratulations to WV Governor Joe Manchin for signing on to a letter to the U.S. Senate in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. This bill, which passed the House this spring, would allow workers to join unions by signing cards authorizing representation. It would also increase penalties for employers who illegally attempt to punish or intimidate workers trying to organize. The letter is here.

A LITTLE WIN FOR MINE SAFETY. From today's Gazette,

A Boone County man won a $2 million jury verdict in a wrongful termination lawsuit against a Massey Energy Co. subsidiary Thursday.

Rocky Allen Burns, 55, of Madison, sued Independence Coal Co. in May 2006, alleging that his firing in October 2005 was the result of his reporting safety problems at the Justice No. 1 mine to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

There's more here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SIN AND GRACE, FIRE, COAL, AND CATS

Caption: This man suffers from the sin of vanity. He's not very graceful either.

Welcome to Goat Rope. El Cabrero is on a theological tear this week, with a special focus on the great 20th century theologian Paul Tillich. You will also find items about current events here as well. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

Hamlet has still got to be my favorite Shakespeare play. There are so many nuggets to mine in that rich seam. One of my favorites has to do with the theme of sin and grace.

When the troupe of players arrive at Elsinore, Hamlet asks Polonius, who is kind of a dork, to see to their hospitality. Here's the clip:

LORD POLONIUS My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

HAMLET God's bodykins, man, much better: use every man
after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?

In other words, if we all got what we deserved, we'd be in deep doo-doo (that would be the consequence of sin). Grace involves the hope that we might get off a little easier.

The ideas of both sin and grace have built up a lot of baggage over the years and have often been trivialized. Tillich had some interesting ideas about them. This is from his sermon "You are accepted":

There are few words more strange to most of us than "sin" and "grace". They are strange, just because they are so well-known. During the centuries they have received distorting connotations, and have lost so much of their genuine power that we must seriously ask ourselves whether we should use them at all, or whether we should discard them as useless tools. But there is a mysterious fact about the great words of our religious tradition: they cannot be replaced... But there is a way of rediscovering their meaning, the same way that leads us down into the depth of our human existence...

I should like to suggest another word to you, not as a substitute for the word "sin", but as a useful clue in the interpretation of the word "sin", "separation" . Separation is an aspect of the experience of everyone. Perhaps the word "sin" has the same root as the word "asunder". In any case, sin is separation.... And separation is threefold: there is separation among individual lives, separation of a man from himself, and separation of all men from the Ground of Being.... We know that the fate of separation is not merely a natural event like a flash of sudden lightning, but that it is an experience in which we actively participate, in which our whole personality is involved, and that, as fate, it is also guilt.... It is this which is the state of our entire existence, from its very beginning to its very end.... Existence is separation! Before sin is an act, it is a state.

We can say the same things about grace. For sin and grace are bound to each other. We do not even have a knowledge of sin unless we have already experienced the unity of life, which is grace. And conversely, we could not grasp the meaning of grace without having experienced the separation of life, which is sin. Grace is just as difficult to describe as sin... In grace something is overcome; grace occurs in spite of something; grace occurs in spite of separation and estrangement. Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself. Grace is the acceptance of that which is rejected. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful destiny; it changes guilt into confidence and courage. There is something triumphant in the word grace : in spite of the abounding of sin grace abounds much more.

(Note: if you think those paragraphs were long, you should have seen them before I cut them. Good thing he didn't write plays, huh? That would have been a sin.)

FIGHTING FIRE. Here's to the memory of nine South Carolina IAFF union firefighters who died in the line of duty this week.

ON A CHEERIER NOTE, here's a priceless WV cat rescue item fresh from the headlines:

PARKERSBURG, West Virginia (AP) - It took two fire trucks, five firefighters, several animal rescuers and about 250 gallons of water to rescue a kitten that refused to come out of a West Virginia storm sewer drain.

COAL. The Natural Resource Council has recommended increasing funding for coal research and devoting more of it to studying its environmental impact and worker safety, according to this Gazette item by Ken Ward.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED