Comments on: Wurtzel’s Pure Heart

By: Michael PS

Michael PS — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 19:01:19 +0000

It must be terrible to have no real sense of home and the stability that comes with that.

I live in a modest enough farmhouse, but fifteen generations of my family were born, lived and died in it and, perhaps, as many more were nourished by the produce of the same land. With that comes neighbours: the dozen or more families one dines with twice a year, because one’s father dined with their father or grandfather.

I do not think I should like city life very much.

By: S.L. Hersey

S.L. Hersey — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 17:22:00 +0000

I can’t argue with Mills’s evaluation of Wurtzel, but can’t quite sign onto Dreher’s root-and-branch critique of her stance, either. For whatever reasons, some folks have more issues than a handful of isolated life choices can fix. I can’t know how Wurtzel would have fared if she’d settled down with someone and gone domestic … but my personal guess is, she’d be only marginally happier than she is now, her luckless significant other would be a LOT less happy than wherever he is now, and she wouldn’t be a well-known, published author. In other words: depending on one’s character, one’s life choices might come down to the least of available evils.

By: Michael Snow

Michael Snow — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 11:04:46 +0000

“…the self’s drive to assert itself remains unmixed with caution or prudence or concern for the needs of others or submission to any external authority.”

Yup, that pretty well sums up the reason for so many divorces among Christians. ( I just read a blogger who bemoaned the announcements from a half dozen friends who had announced their divorces in the last month plus saw a facebook bumber sticker re: homosexual marriage: “If WE can’t marry then YOU can’t divorce”)

Wurtzel is but an extreme example of this spirit gone to seed.

By: andrew

andrew — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 23:24:30 +0000

What an agonizing diary entry. Pure torment and confusion, lies built upon lies until the world is upside down. Almost reminiscent of Fyodor Karamazov.

Well, God bless Ms. Wurtzel. I really mean it. Redeemer Presbyterian is probably around the corner from her, maybe even a good parish here and there…. God is nearest to those who are most broken, to those who know their rebellion.

In the meantime, I look forward to sharing Ms. Wurtzel’s torment with my prostitute of a wife and my parasites, oops, I meant kids.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 21:48:04 +0000

“The conviction that one must satisfy the self, whatever the consequences, and no matter what the evidence that this does not work, is never very far away from any of us. One can imagine one’s own face at the top of the article, or one like it expressing one’s own particular brand of self-deception, had things worked out differently.”

Your empathy is welcome–many of us do seek assertive selfish satisfaction, but often via means different, more subtle, than Wurtzel’s escapades. Nonetheless, such self-assertion is a reduction of desire, an immaturity of desire. Desire, truly pure and unreduced desire, inspires the human person to seek God. Even better, God’s desire for us inspires our desire to aspire to He-who-makes-us. The great paradox is found in the truth that only in the total gift of one’s life and sell, is the Alive Man born anew in us and thus we our born anew as a manalive (or womanalive). Absent the maturity and sacrifice to truly seek Thou-who-seeks-us, desire is never nourished, never grows, and eventually turns into despair–which only ends in a pitiful desperate voluntarism. Most of us our guilty of this voluntarism, to some degree, in our pitiful refusals of the daily graces that our hearts desire ignites in us. Thus we pray, Christ, have pity on us.