Most of the SOC posts begin while the coffee is brewing in the Mister Coffee. Today is a day off from work, so I get to do some blogging. My head hurts because I begin each day in caffeine withdrawal. Since these posts are basically writing down whatever is in my brain at the moment, I usually write about coffee to begin. In this case, the coffee is the fine Eight O'Clock brand. Here is a picture:
This brand used to be made by the A&P grocery chain, but they spun off the division that made the coffee. The coffee lives on despite the demise of the stores. The reason for this is because the coffee has a devoted fan base who swear by the stuff. It is very good coffee relative to the price. It doesn't have that extreme bitterness that you will find in cheap brands like Folger's. I think 8OC is the perfect midpoint between the cheap coffees and the expensive coffees.
Now that I have some coffee in me, I can reflect a bit more on Lance Armstrong. He had his titles stripped, but the story now is the feeding frenzy that is starting around the guy. That is a bit surprising. It is like the stream of fleas fleeing from the fresh carcass of a dead animal. They were all for him before they were against him. I always wondered how the crowds that greeted Jesus on his trumphant entry into Jerusalem could be the same crowd that would turn against him and demand his crucifixion. Seeing the sudden about face on Lance Armstrong shows just how fickle devotion can be.
Lance Armstrong was my hero. I believed in that guy. It was 1999, and I was working at Hell, Inc. I had lost my faith in God, but I had yet to declare myself an atheist. An ex-triathlete who had competed professionally was working for me in my area, and he was gushing about this former triathlete turned cyclist that I had never heard about before. The guy almost died from cancer, and he seemed to pull off a sort of secular resurrection by beating the disease and returning to competitive cycling. The guy was Lance Armstrong. I was intrigued, so I went home and fired up the internet. This was the beginning of a decade long fascination with the guy.
I loved Lance Armstrong. He had a tenacious work ethic. He was brash. He was from Texas. And Lance was an atheist. This was a guy who didn't need God because he had an unshakable faith in himself. He was the embodiment of Nietzsche's superman. This was someone you could believe in. Here is a sample of the greatness:
This video seems rather embarrassing in hindsight now that we know the truth about Lance Armstrong. The guy was a phony. He was an atheist touting a miracle, but in the end, he was just another liar.
I stopped believing in Lance years before others discovered the truth about him. I always knew this day would come. No lie ever remains hidden. Truth has a strange way of coming out no matter how clever you are at hiding it. But Lance's disgrace comes at a propitious time for me as I have renounced atheism and embraced the Catholic faith. I am forced to reflect on the nature of heroes.
A Google search of the C-blog will show that I have had a lot of heroes over the years. I don't have any heroes now. The series I used to call Heroes, Villains, and Pricks will no longer be seen here because I have abandoned all my heroes. It doesn't mean that I don't admire people. It is that the people I admire now are saints not heroes.
The difference between a saint and a hero is very basic. Heroes are proud. Saints are humble. Heroes point to their own greatness. Saints point to the greatness of God. As someone once put it, the four cardinal virtues are "humility, humility, humility, and humility."
Atheists don't do humility. You figure they would be humble since a distrust in oneself is a cornerstone of the scientific method. But atheism is about pride. Atheists have a supreme confidence in themselves and their abilities. I know because I was an atheist. I was humble for an atheist because of the residue of religious training, but I was still proud all the same. I directed my life, and I lived by my own light. Such pride can only invite ridicule.
Lance Armstrong is ridiculous now. All his greatness is nothing as truth has turned into his enemy. Atheists lie just as much as anyone else. Lance Armstrong promulgated a fairy tale. Now, look at him. Look at his disgrace. He is a quiet and silly man now. The proud one has been humbled.
I think about my own life now as I am clearly in a transitional period of my life. I lack direction in my life at the moment because I don't know what to do next except read and work. The real question for me is this. Is this blog going to become a Catholic blog? I don't know.
The only constant on this blog has been me. Where others have abandoned their blogs as their views changed, my blog keeps chugging along because the only thing I have to do to keep it going is to keep being me. The problem is that I now believe different things and see things in a much different light. This brings me to the subject of my fiction.
I have written various stories over the years from an essentially nihilistic viewpoint. The stories are either ridiculously comical or absolutely soul sucking. Naturally, people want me to continue writing that stuff. The problem is that I don't want to write it anymore. Blame it on Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language. I love Shakes. It is only recently that I discovered that Shakespeare was Catholic. Shakes was Catholic at a time when it was dangerous to be Catholic, so this part of him was kept secret. People are amazed at how smart Shakespeare was which has led to all those conspiracy theories about other people writing those plays. But Shakespeare wrote those plays, and he was most likely educated in secret in the Catholic underground of Elizabethan England.
Catholics are big on what we call "the true, the good, and the beautiful." This was why Shakespeare was so good. This is why his work resonates across time. The man was utterly Catholic.
Being a Catholic writer is not about didacticism such as you see in the Christian ghetto that Protestants craft for themselves. This was a point of contention between the Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien and the Anglo-Catholic C.S. Lewis. Christian allegorical fiction tends to be very bad.
My favorite Catholic writer is Flannery O'Connor who was heavily influenced by her faith, but you will have a hard time recognizing it in her work much as you would in Tolkien or Shakespeare. Catholics recognize it immediately in much the same way that it hit me the other day that Bruce Springsteen was Catholic. I never knew it, but I immediately picked up on it when one of his songs was playing on the radio.
What is the difference between a Protestant sensibility and a Catholic sensibility? Protestant work is saccharine. It is imitation as opposed to being truly creative and original. In short, it feels fake. This is because Protestants tend to be fake themselves. "Fake it 'til you make it" is their motto. The best illustration I can give is this. When a Protestant builds a car, he takes a car that is already made and puts a Jesus bumper sticker on it. When a Catholic builds a car, he goes out and studies the design of every car ever made. He learns the craft of carmaking as completely as possible. Then, he builds the absolute best car he knows how to make. The car has no outward religious aspect to it. You just really like it. This is how good Catholic writing is. It is not explicitly religious, but it speaks to the human condition. This is the influence of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
I'm not a good writer. People have told me I write well, but the truth is that my writing is very empty and without fulfillment. When I first read Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" back in high school, it stayed with me until the present day. It is a story about a ridiculous atheist, but it still stays with me like no other story I have ever read. I wish I could write a story like that. That is what I want my writing to be. Everything I have written to this point in my life has been nothing but straw.
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