The Country Gentleman

October 5, 2016 By Jason Craig 7 Comments

The Hero Always Comes Home

We should be reluctant to divide things that are not divided. Or, if we are to divide things, we do so in a way that allows for them to be reunited so as to be more fruitful. God, for example, “divides” Eve from the side of Adam, but then brings them together into beautiful fruitfulness. This is the pattern of creation itself – God “divides” the light and dark, land and sea, and so on so as to bring them all together into the beauty and order of creation.

Those that study the great hero stories from around the world recognize that the dividing and reuniting of men from their loves is the driving narrative behind the legends. Odysseus, for example, goes forth to battle, but he goes forth from his home, and the whole point of his journeys and trials after the war is to return home. The direction from the hero takes a temporary leave from the home, but he leaves it for the sake of it, for what is behind, and then does all he does to fight his way back there.

Joseph Campbell in his famous work Hero With a Thousand Faces summarizes this heroic journey into three parts – departure, initiation, and return. A man departs from home, endures the trial, and then comes back. We can look at the Hero, Jesus Christ, and recognize that it is not just that He leaves heaven to come to earth, but that He endures the cross for the sake of His “home”, and then returns to that home. That “home” of heaven is very familial in nature – the Bible refers to it as a wedding feast and salvation itself as an “inheritance” from the Father.

Heroes Wanted

Today there are two very problematic tendencies among men that show we will never be the heroes that are memorialized in our legends. First, we are scared of

marriage in the first place. We depart from boyhood, often with a spirit of “floating” or “going with the flow”, but without the true endurance of a challenge. But worse is that fact that we depart from boyhood, but never “return” to the home in marriage.

The second tendency is to idealize work and our identities associated with careers to the neglect of the family. Now, men have to work. Work is good. God made work. But the endurance that it entails is always for the family. If you get more happiness and satisfaction from work than you do from home, then your heart has failed to “return” after each day, and you could be described as leaving work to endure the family so as to return to work the next day – a reversal of the hero’s journey. The end being pursued in this case is not family, but the self. It does not matter if it earns a lifestyle for your family that they get to enjoy, if your heart is divided from them without a full return, then you are not a hero.

Returning Home

The theologian Josef Pieper warned us of the world of “total work”, which he outlines in Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Clearly today we live in that world. We think, identify, and measure ourselves based on work, productivity, and career, not the health and wellbeing of household, which was the traditional measure of a man’s success. Education is not an act good in itself, but pursued only to earn more money. Pieper takes up the Aristotelian idea that we work so as to have leisure, but today we only rest so as to take up our work again. A great way to fight this is to learn to rest and revel in the life of our family, not just use the home as a place to rest in between workdays.

Yes, it is more complicated since we are no longer agrarians and a globalized and industrialized economy simply does divide us more from home. But we can, despite having to leave each day, redouble our efforts to set our hearts on what we leave behind, so that when we return we give the best and deepest parts of our hearts to our wives and children. G.K. Chesterton said that the good soldier does not hate what is before him, but loves what is behind him.

The good news here is that we were made to be fathers. Our happiness will be lasting and blessed if our hearts are oriented toward the love of family. In a society where frantic yet unhappy activity seems to plague every moment, and where the very truths of nature and faith are attacked daily, the Catholic man in this exile will shine as truly happy, because he loves his family. This is why our weapons are not primarily in words or even deeds, but in the abundance and acceptance of life and home.

Fatherhood itself is the Lord’s gift, the fruitful womb is a reward that comes from him.

Crown of thy youth, children are like arrows in a warrior’s hand.

Happy, whose quiver is well filled with these; their cause will not be set aside when they plead against their enemies at the gate. – Psalm 127:3-5

—

Jason Craig works and writes from a small farm in rural North Carolina with his wife Katie and their five kids. Jason is the Executive Director of Fraternus, a mentoring program for young men, and holds a masters degree from the Augustine Institute. He is known to staunchly defend his family’s claim to have invented bourbon.

September 2, 2016 By Jason Craig 7 Comments

Ite! The Necessity of Discipline

This post is part of a series.

I hated discipline in high school. I did not like to do homework. I did not like to get up early. It seemed like the only reason to be disciplined was to get good grades, then get into a good college, then get a good job, then get a lot of money, then get a big house, and then slave away making enough money to pay for college and house debt. It didn’t seem worth the discipline.

So, instead of embracing these goals, I followed paths of least resistance and looked for pleasure and comfort. Why not? Live for the moment, as they say. Then, in a way, the comfort itself became the goal and it was harder and harder to say no to comfort to be able to say yes to harder things. Later, when goals I wanted presented themselves, it was very hard to have the discipline to reach them.

As Christian men we need to know why we have discipline because we do in fact need it. For me, it was not until realizing who I was in God and actually following the path charted by Jesus Christ that I learned who I was and how a man understands and executes discipline. In order to understand ourselves better, we need to understand what God has said about Himself.

Getting to God

In the ancient world, philosophers reasoned their way to belief in one God. They figured God is like a perfect thought thinking about the thought. Perhaps we should not be surprised that brilliant philosophers imagined that God was the ultimately brilliant philosopher! Philosophers “mused” on the highest things they could think of – virtue, honor, etc. – and since nothing is higher than God, then God must think about Himself. So, He is a thought thinking a thought.

This sounds funny – God sitting around thinking about Himself – but there is something true about it. And when Jesus came to reveal God to man, He burst open a whole new understanding about God that would bring the ideas of the philosophers into the full light of truth. In other words – the philosophers were really, really close, but God had to visit us in the Person of Jesus to bring us to a fuller understanding of Himself and, therefore, a greater understanding of ourselves.

Why everything is different now…

The Country GentlemanJason Craig writes a weekly column for the Catholic Gentleman from his homestead in rural North Carolina. — ***The Country Gentleman –*** Jason Craig writes a weekly column for the Catholic Gentleman from his homestead in rural North Carolina.

It is true that nothing is higher than God. So, if higher beings think about higher things, then God must think about Himself. So, what we have is the thinker and the thing he is thinking about – a thinker and a thought.

Right now you are thinking something, and that thought is from you but it is not you – it’s something separate. To voice that thought makes it into words – your words are like a gift to the world from your mind (at least they should be!).

God has an eternal Thought, and that Thought became Man and was born of the Virgin Mary. That Man was the Word of God – the “voicing” of the thought. This is why the Gospel of John is so profound when in the first chapter we hear that “the Word was with God… and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1).

God’s Word is the way He says, “This is who I am.” The Word of the Father (the Son) tells us exactly who the Father is (Matthew 11:27), what He eternally “thinks”. As a man says, “I give you my word” to prove his trustworthiness, God gives us His Word to show us that we can trust Him fully.

Through Jesus we learn that God’s inner life is not just a really lofty thought exercise, but an eternal act of love. It is Father and Son, not just thinker and thought. They both mutually love and give of themselves totally to the other, and their Love is so real, so intense, that it has the distinction of being another Person, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Love of the Father and the Son, and it is shared with us so that we can love the Father in the highest possible way. “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit Himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:15-16).

God is not a thought. “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

Why discipline?

This might all seem like lofty ideas, but what does it tell us about ourselves, about how we should live? Well, if you are united to God by faith then this life that He lives is the life that you live. In other words, as the Son shows us that the Father is a total gift of love, we as sons must become total gifts of love to live out who we are – created in His image and likeness.

So, what does this have to do with me not wanting to wake up early and do homework? Well, as I grew in laziness and selfishness I could not give myself away. I was enslaved to the comfort and even the vice and sins that came with it. So, in order to be able to give myself away, I had to have mastery over myself – I had to possess myself fully.

Living in Christ makes all suffering and all burdens worthwhile, most especially by making our suffering and discipline not about us, but about love. When He tells us he wants us to go and take up our cross, He allows us to unite every act of suffering and discipline with His cross. And what was the point of His cross? To save mankind in the greatest act of love of all time. All of our discipline, suffering, self-denial, and penances are united to Christ’s cross and find their worthiness there alone – and it is all for love. Don’t go out and try to have more grit and be disciplined, but go united to the cross and for the sake of love.

Living discipline for love’s sake instead of for the sake of worldly gain helps us to live as sons, not slaves to sin or anything else. “[Every] one who commits sin is a slave to sin,” said Jesus, “The slave does not continue forever; the son continues forever” (John 8:34-35). We are men when we give ourselves away. So to be men we must fully possess ourselves through discipline.

—

August 26, 2016 By Jason Craig 8 Comments

Ite! Go Forth With Friends

This post is part of a series.

One of the times Jesus says “Go!” is pretty scary. In the Gospel of Luke He sends His disciples on a preaching mission saying, “Go your way; behold I send you out as lambs among wolves” (Luke 10:3). I live on a little farm and I can tell you that when a canine rips into a farm animal, it is not pretty. As with the Christian life in general, the mission was not easy and was a guaranteed danger. But this story also gives us a great tip on meeting challenges head on and without fear. He sent them out “two by two” (v. 10:1). The simple lesson: we cannot go on our missions alone.

I have a best friend named Justin. Without hesitation I would call him my brother. In high school we ventured off, fishing and rope-swinging into the Haw River. In college we were roommates, both studying horticulture. Today we are both married, live a half-day’s drive from each other, and find it hard to get together. But when we are together, it’s as natural and enjoyable as if we were never apart. In life it seems like we are going two by two.

The Same But Different

One time I came across a quote from St. Augustine about one of his friendships and he described it as “one soul in two bodies”. He probably got that wording from Aristotle, who said, “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”

**The Country Gentleman** – Jason Craig writes a weekly column for the Catholic Gentleman from his homestead in rural North Carolina.

St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most brilliant theologians of all time, defined love with that one word – “friendship”. Aquinas defined it that way because Jesus describes His love and relationship to us as friendship – “I no longer call you servants… but friends” (John 15:15).

C.S. Lewis described friends as two souls living “side by side, absorbed in some common interest.” In a sense, the “spirit” of any friendship is that thing that holds them in common, that mutual pursuit that seems to help them be more of who they are. For the Church, the spirit that binds us together is the Holy Spirit Himself. “There is one body and one Spirit” (Ephesians 4:4).

I think this explains my lasting friendship with Justin. From catfish in the Haw River to majors in college, we often pursued the same thing, we were different but had the same “spirit”, and being together made us stronger in those pursuits. Blessedly, we both had conversions to Christ, desiring to live as Christian men. The spirit of our friendship became the Spirit of God. We both later converted to the Catholic Church from Protestantism. Now as married men we are seeking the same thing. We want to be holy fathers, and our friendship continues to help us remember what we are fighting for, and it helps us be better fighters.

Your Friends Make You

They say you become like the five people you spend the most time with. Now, imagine if you spent time with people that were seeking radically different things from you. You would probably part ways at some point. If an athlete has his eyes on the Olympics, seeing himself as an Olympian, he cannot spend too much time with friends that think it’s a waste of time and live in ways damaging to the body’s athletic potential. If he fails to create a healthy separation, he can call himself an Olympian, maybe even keeping some routines that look like he is pursuing it, but he wont be one.

You have the potential to be a saint. Every inner desire of the human heart is but a shadow of our ultimate desire, which is God. For this end we need Christian friendship and brotherhood. If we surround ourselves with friends that are seeking a different end, we can say we are seeking holiness, but it might become an empty routine, and later something we give up altogether.

We need brotherhood firstly because unholy friendships are a danger to our soul. “He who walks with wise men becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm” (Proverbs 13:20). We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that we will not be influenced by the company we keep. We are. “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company ruins good morals’” (1 Corinthians 15:33).

This does not mean being unkind or rejecting and ignoring every one that is not Christian, but we must carefully choose friends, those we associate closely with, because we will tend to live like them and seek the same ends. If they love the things of the world more than God, we too will learn to love those things. “If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him,” says St. John (1 John 2:15). This warning comes from someone who heard from Jesus’ lips the warning that you cannot love mammon (worldly wealth) and God at the same time – you will eventually hate one and love the other (Matthew 6:24). Choose.

Brotherhood and Holiness

The second reason we need brotherhood is that it encourages us to advance in holiness. As Christian men our core identity is a son of God. By having a common Father with other Christians, it follows that we are brothers in a very real sense (not just symbolically), and being together reminds us of who we really are. We are brothers in the family of God. This is why we are told to “love the brotherhood” (1 Peter 2:17), which is a reference to fellow Catholics. But we are not only reinforced in our identity, but encouraged in our faith – at least this is what we should be doing! We are told to “encourage one another” and to “build each other up” (1 Thessalonians 5:11).

Do you have healthy Christian friendships? If not, its time to assess how you spend your time and with whom you spend it. In today’s world we are swimming in so-called “friends” in social media and such, but those friendships are shallow – no amount of comments and likes will take the place of friendship that spends time in each other’s company. For that we have to go out. There are many things that can be done together, but in my experience I cannot help but suggest you go fishing and rope-swinging.

Many men feel alone in this, like they are the only ones trying to live a holy life. One time the great prophet Elijah said the same thing, even hiding himself in a cave lamenting that he was the last “good one” (1 Kings 19). God corrected him and let him know that there were thousands of other believers, but Elijah would not encounter them in the cave. If you feel despair because you feel alone, the two lessons are to leave the cave, and pray that God will bring you to the friendships you need. St. John says that he who fails to love his Christian brothers is in “darkness” (1 John 2:11) – failing to get out there with our friends keeps us in the dark cave like Elijah.

As you leave the darkness behind, seeking the Light of God, you need to remember that it is dangerous, and heed Jesus’ method of going “two by two”. Go forward with friends.

—

August 17, 2016 By Jason Craig 28 Comments

Ite! The Call to Go Forth in Christ

Today, I begin a series geared especially toward young men that have experienced a renewed commitment to Christ or a recent conversion. The series is titled Ite, is Latin for “go”.

I once taught my three-year-old son to climb up on the lower branches of a cedar tree. I left for a while and when I came back he had climbed as high as a telephone pole, his toddler body looking rather tiny way up there. My wife was less than happy (revealed by a long scream), but I was able to climb up and retrieve him, and I assured her that it was completely normal for him to want to climb to the top. He cannot help but reach for new heights.

As a man you are naturally action oriented, and there is a deep and mysterious pull that draws you to new heights. You have within you a desire to go and achieve greatness, unless this desire has been obstructed by sin, laziness, or brainwashing.

This desire for new heights has meaning, it is there on purpose. You were made to search out happiness on earth and ultimate happiness in heaven. That is where all of the “going” in your life is oriented toward – being happy and finding God. The problem is that many of us get climbing toward the wrong things, and instead of ascending in virtue and holiness, we actually descend into vice and hell. How many people have you seen strive after things with their whole selves, yet ultimately end up unhappy? What good is it then? That is the foolishness of the world. We all search for happiness, but only the wise find it.

Consider the men that cut each other’s throats “climbing” a corporate ladder, or those trying to be “on top of the world” through power, promiscuity, or popularity. The problem with looking down from the top of the world is that it is still looking down, and it will disappoint. You were made to look upward, climb a higher ladder, one that reaches God Himself.

The question we have to ask then is this – how do we go forward in a way that truly fulfills this desire for greatness? How do we ascend? If you are young in your faith, but are ready to leave mediocrity and boyishness behind, and to set out as the man God has called you to be, then this question is more important than ever.

That longing for more is actually a grace. Faith is not a feeling, but a gift from God. And that gift is calling you to new heights, telling you to “go”. We can only go to these heights when we are in Christ and free from sin. Will you go?

But if sin keeps us from Him, keeps us chained to earth, how can we ascend to God in heaven? How do we achieve the freedom from sin that Christ win for us on the cross? Is it just a sort of “substitute” where when we get to the gates of heaven and, realizing our sin excludes us, just swipe a “get out of hell” card with Jesus’ picture on it instead of ours?

No, the salvation of Christ reaches us when we become one with Him as members of His body, the Church. We are still who we are, but “in Christ”. St. Paul in the Bible describes it as being “co-heirs” in His Kingdom (Romans 8:17). His royalty becomes our royalty.

This is what grace is, God giving His own life to us, sharing His life with us. He doesn’t just cancel a debt like a benevolent banker, but unites us to His cross and therefore His resurrection. St. Paul also describes it as a sort of adoption, where we become sons of God through the Son of God, by being united to Him. This is why we pray “Our Father” – we can never go alone. Jesus did not teach us to say “My Father”. We pray “Our Father” because we go to Him through, with, and in Christ.

My point in all this is to say that to “go forward in Christ” you have to first go to Christ. You must trust Him completely, listen to Him, and go forward at His command, not through your own ideas or engineering. You must say like St. Paul:

I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me (Galatians 2:20).

Our growth as men and as saints is just that, leaving behind the ways of sin and death and embracing life in Christ. You may want to reach new heights of holiness, and that is good, but as my son started on the first and most necessary branches, you too must start with this most basic request for grace. Speak with Christ, ask for this total faith, and in all your words, thoughts, and actions, go forward in Christ, because you have first gone to Him.

—