THE ROOT OF OUR SELF-ESTEEM CRISIS TODAY ❤️🙂
Here’s one very valuable lesson I’ve had the privilege to learn and to work through: the reason people find it impossible to love themselves nowadays is because they are not taught to love their very best selves of all. To love oneself as a whole is very unwise, and probably impossible. However, to love all that is finest within you, including things that seem only to exist in latent form, like a mere mustard seed, is perfectly possible, even if it still may take a degree of courage and humility and patience. The L’Oreal Generation says ‘Because I’m worth it, baby!’ and the wealth creators try to indoctrinate us into narcissistic self-indulgence. Instead of co-opting the noble word ‘Just as I am, without one plea,’ one must remember the next line, which teaches humility, and reminds us we can’t do it all on our own. Our very best selves are what is to be loved, and when we come to understand what our very best self is, and what it looks like, and how beautiful it can be to ourselves and to others, and ultimately, before God (by whatever name you call Him).
https://www.facebook.com/JonathanTheBard/posts/162861024775986
REPORTS OF THE DEATH OF ART HAVE BEEN GROSSLY EXAGGERATED
Hold fast, and be of good cheer!🙂
For in an age where the inauthentic is uncritically celebrated, people may be tempted to despair. Has art lost its ability to change the world? Has religion? Has ecology? Has patriotism? Well, think about it this way: the epidemic of inauthentic exemplars only increases people’s undying thirst and hunger for the real thing. And that is a very powerful thought. The fourfold corruption and co-optation of artistic, religious, ecological and patriotic consciousness, of all that is most radical and subversive, into fake and inauthentic forms, is precisely where the key to liberation lies.
https://www.facebook.com/JonathanTheBard/posts/162868524775236
TOLKIEN & MATURE, RESPONSIBLE INDIVIDUALISM: THE LESSON OF GANDALF AND GOLLUM ❤️
Never let anyone tell you you’re their property. If a ‘community’ spokesperson does not speak for you, but insists you must obey them and submit to them, you owe them absolutely nothing. Think for yourself! You are not someone’s mascot, prop or magical talisman. Anyone who calls you a Tiny Tim, a Coconut, an Uncle Tom, a self-loather or an internaliser should be viewed with scepticism at best, and completely dismissed at worst.
Objectification and exploitation of innocent people are ALWAYS wrong, not least when it’s done under the hypocritical guise of ‘compassion’ and ’empathy.’ Anyone who truly respects you will respect your free will. In the Lord of the Rings, the noble wizard Gandalf had the RIGHT to steal the ring from Gollum, in order to save the whole of civilisation: but he chose not to exercise this right, because even this wretched creature was beloved of God (another Tolkien book, the Silmarillion, calls him ‘Eru.’) Even though Gollum exercised his free will badly, to the point where he was overcome with vice and fear and hatred and distrust, Gandalf loved this wretched creature, and preferred that the whole world should be imperilled, rather than one living creature should have the integrity of his free will violated. If this is true of Gollum, are you not worth more than Gollum?
And let us never forget: even Smeagol-Gollum, a man of sorrows and acquainted of grief, who we hid as it were our face from him, had a very special place in the redemptive history of Middle Earth. For as Gandalf himself has told us: ‘Even the wise cannot see all ends.’
And this brings us to the second insight here. As a divine being, a Maiar, Gandalf had the RIGHT to see all ends, but like the Jesus of the Epistle (Letter) to the Phillippians, he chose to empty himself out with the holy, self-sacrificial humility we know as ‘kenosis.’ If anyone on Middle Earth had the right to judge, it was Gandalf, he whose virtue was greater than all his contemporaries, from Aragorn to Elrond, from Gimli to Legolas, from Samwise to Frodo. But he chose to be the servant of all, rather than to be served. To some, this is counted foolishness. But the weak and the foolish of this world have been chosen to confound the haughtiness of the mighty.
https://www.facebook.com/JonathanTheBard/posts/162856518109770
ALL VIEWS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN, AND NOT THOSE OF GLOSSY NEWS.