Fred Martinez's Monitor

I'm Taking a Vacation from Blogging

I'm taking a vacation from blogging.

I'm excited and full of hope about the nationwide EWTN radio network. Please pray for EWTN because it is the main hope, I see, for turning the USA back to light from the Godless darkness. As a great writer said:

"Life without God is torment."

May God bless you with Hope,

Fred

PS-Below is a book I'm working on.

INTRODUCTION

This essays will touch the two levels of knowing: personal and objective.

Chapter one will be personal. The beginning of chapters two through nine will give episodes in the boys life.

The rest of each chapter will deal with exploration of these episodes. Exploration vehicles will be history, philosophy, literature and science. We will attempt a voyage to discover the meaning of love and life.


Chapter 1

THE BOY

The boy watched the clock. It ticked to the moment he waited for all day. The moment he would play baseball.

School meant only two things to the boy: recess and after school.

He remembered kicking the ball. It hit his female teacher in the head. Next thing he knew he was in class with the teacher walking up to his desk. She wrote a big red F on the top of the his paper. He put a line though the front of the F, which made it look like a A. She turned red in the face. After that the boy got only bad grades.

Figuring if he was dumb a least he would have fun. He daydreamed of making a fantastic catches like Willie Mays. He felt in his blood the bravado of Juan Marichal whose pitching delivery started with his foot kicking above his head. He wanted to be like Willie Mc Covey who kept playing despite terrible knee injuries. Willie Mc would run around the bases even though he could hardly walk.

The ballplayers loved what they did. He wanted to be like them using every bit of talent to
achieve heroics. After school, the boy was happy playing baseball and daydreaming. This was his last year of elementary school.

After a long walk he saw the sign: Fisher Middle School. He didn’t notice the sign. His mind was occupied. He had just walk through the middle of the gangs.

The whites were on one side of the street and on the other side were the Chicanos. For the first time he saw what looked like real race hatred. Inside the school everything was cliqueish. Few of the kids from elementary school went to Fischer. His baseball playing afternoons were over.

The boy became a paperboy and threw his energy into the paper route. He hated school. His only ambition was to get out.

His younger brother and he cut school for a few weeks. They called each others school with “parental excuses” for the other. The boy in his deepest voice said ” Matt Martinez is sick. His not going to make it to school this week.”

One day after feasting on lunch from paper route money, they were caught and forced back.

The next year there were still to gangs, but now they were Chicano and Black. The neighborhood was changing and so was the world.

Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. The neighboring highschool rioted so all the Blacks were let out of Fischer. The world was turning ugly.”

Then Robert Kennedy ran for president. The boy thought “He is such a good man. We hope he’ll make everything right.”

We saw Bobby at Our Lady of Guadalupe church. A lady pinched to see if he was real. He blushed and smiled. He really touched the little people and we touched him back.

The Martinez family stayed awake until Robert won the California primary. The happy boy went to sleep. He woke up to his mother's crying. Bobby was killed. He cried and then dilivered his paper route.

The rest of this essays deal with episodes in the boy's later life. These episodes lead him on a search. The results of that search will make up the chapters of this work.

Chapter 2 Love


The boy and his mother loved the hope Robert Kennedy gave. Both cried. The boy searched for someone or something to love and hope in.


The vast majority of Latinos belong to the Christian culture, which is based on love. The Greek language of the New Testament has three different words for love: agape, philia and eros.

Eros is the love of a person for another person. Its highest form is the attraction of a man for a woman. The symbol of eros is a man and a woman facing each other.

Philia is the love of a group of persons for each other. The city of brotherly love in the East Coast is named after this love. Its highest form is the unity of family members. The symbol of philia is persons side by side.

While eros and philia were widely used before Christ's time, agape was relatively unknown. Agape is love of God man. Its highest form is the God-man giving His life for enemy and friend. The symbol of agape is the cruxifix. Agapes fulfillment is the resurrection.

D H Lawrence touched on eros and philia when he said, “There are, the young women say, no real men to love. And there are, the young men say, no real girls to fall-in love with."1

According to Lawrence, the women’s love tends toward Eros. Her love is direct, face to face. Men’s love tends toward philia. His love falls through something to meet the woman. His love is hand holding hand, side by side.

Lawrence wrote," I believe there has never been an age of greater mistrust between persons than in ours today." 2 In other words, eros was mistrusted and a superficial philia was trusted. This was written when the feminist and socialist state was being established in England.

The feminist denied eros and the state upsurged the philia of the family. The state in Western secular regimes has been at war with the family since this time.

The feminist and the Puritan for different reasons taught their daughters not to love, but to mistrust their personal eros and their father’s philia.

G K Chesterton defended love and children against the sterile Puritan/feminist monster and it’s power mad Frankenstein father- the monopolistic capitalist/socialist state. He was a troubadour who fought for love of a woman and the right of a men to sing and drink beer. His love poetry to his wife are masterpieces and his beer songs are still fun.


1 (Edited By) Cavitch, David, Life Studies-A Thematic Reader. New York: St. Martins Pess, !983 and Lawrence, D H Counterfeit, p.385.

2 Ibid., p. 385.


Ernest Van Den Haag said the medieval troubadour “conceived love a longing, a tension between desire and fulfillment.” 3 In this way he showed the similarity between loveless anxiety and loving faith suspense.

Anxiety is a suspense. It is a suspense with fear about the outcome of relationships. In a way anxiety is a good sign. If one has it, it show they have not gone mad like Marx’s and Nietzsche’s self-actualized supermen Hitler and Stalin who believed they were beyond relationship. If anxiety does not find a relationship with God or another beloved it finally falls into distrust and despair.

Faith is also a suspense, but a suspense with excitement about the outcome of it’s relationship with God the beloved or another beloved. It leads to trust and hope.

But Van Den Haag got it wrong when he said, " the religious too perpetuate longing by placing the beloved altogether out of physical reach." He didn’t understand agape.

Agape is the God-man giving his life and everything human thing he had in total self-giving to friend and enemy. The Catholic faith teaches that Jesus, God and man, gives hypocrite and saint his body, soul and divinity when they receive Holy Communion. Christ gives us his blood body, soul and divinity for the same reason that a husband gives a blood transfusion to a bleeding wife or a friend gives a skin graft to a burned friend. He loves and wants to save our life. Our friends may save our life for a few more decades, but with Jesus we are saved to live forever.

This is not superstition, but biblical and was taught by a disciple of St. John the Apostle as well as by all the early church fathers:

"I am the bread of life. {49} Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. {50} But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. {51} I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." {52} Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" {53} Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. {54} Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. {55} For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. {56} Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. {57} Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. {58} This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever." [JOHN 6:48-58]

"St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of St. John the Apostle and successor of St. Peter as bishop of Antioch, wrote: 'They [the heretics] abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, Flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His goodness, raised up again' (Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 6 [A.D. 107])."
[http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:kG3RaCtMDm0J:www.envoymagazine.com/backissues/1.2/nutsandbolts.html+whoever+eats+my+my+flesh&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1&ie=UTF-8]

The Eucharist and all sacraments tells us that Christ isn’t "out of physical reach." Each sacraments contains something material and something spiritual.


3 Life Studies, Van Den Haag, Ernest, Love or Marriage?, p. 392.


[to be continued maybe]

posted by Fred Martinez @ 8:28 PM