{"id":150,"date":"2006-05-22T07:15:41","date_gmt":"2006-05-22T12:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/?p=150"},"modified":"2022-01-02T07:39:48","modified_gmt":"2022-01-02T12:39:48","slug":"thinking-like-a-child-clanging-like-a-cymbal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"Thinking Like a Child, Clanging Like a Cymbal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”–I Corinthians 12:11<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.<\/p>\n

In my series “Blogging–The Wonder Years”<\/a> which will resume later this week, it’s been pretty apparent from my 7th grade journal that my thought processes have undergone a little evolution since the 1970s. I fancy myself a more grown-up thinker these days. But the truth is I’m still a work-in-progress, and if God grants more time, I’ll probably look back in twenty years and have a good laugh at some of my early 21st century pontifications and ponderings.<\/p>\n

\"gong.gif\"I’m figuring that will be the case because already I chuckle (and cringe) at some of the things I said and did twenty years ago. As I recall, I was a pretty smart guy and considered myself God’s gift to the discussion at hand. I think I may have even fancied myself a prophet. My poor friends and family–I’m still amazed they survived. I’ve come to believe that those who consciously desire and relish the role of prophet and then proceed to spray jeremiads like pellets from a sawed-off shotgun are perhaps the most noisome and nettlesome creatures on the face of the earth.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of all this recently when I read the commencement address that Senator John McCain<\/a> delivered this past week at both Columbia University<\/a> and The New School<\/a> in New York City. Neither of these schools are bastions of conservatism, and his appearance as a commencement speaker was met with considerable opposition and not a few ruffled feathers in both places.<\/p>\n

Senator McCain regaled the new graduates with some wise and winsome remarks on the nature of public discourse in the early 21st century. Here is the speech in its entirety<\/a>, but this particular section caught my eye:<\/p>\n

\n

“When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights. I had opinions on everything, and I was always right. I loved to argue, and I could become understandably belligerent with people who lacked the grace and intelligence to agree with me. With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them. It\u2019s a pity that there wasn\u2019t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium…It\u2019s funny, now, how less self-assured I feel late in life than I did when I lived in perpetual springtime.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Senator McCain is right, young men think they know everything and have all the answers. Furthermore the modern development of the blogosphere has given “angry young men” and self-proclaimed prophets, for better or for worse, a much broader reach and a wider audience. All this is available to them before they have had enough life experience to temper their cocksure proclamations and well ahead of the time when they will finally come to realize how little they actually know.<\/p>\n

For me that came in my mid to late thirties after I had weathered a few of the circumstances of everyday living, such as career, child-rearing, keeping my marriage together and watching helplessly as friends divorced and family died much too soon. Such experiences rounded off many of my sharp edges and left me at a loss for pat answers and a little worse for wear. The upside is they also taught me the valuable lesson of pausing and taking a deep breath prior to engaging my mouth (or keyboard). I’m still learning, to this day, how little I actually know.<\/p>\n

The blogosphere lends a more enduring effect to the rant du jour <\/em>as well, <\/em>giving it <\/em>an extended life it was not meant to have. Whereas my friends and family have long since forgotten most of the ill-spoken things I said twenty years ago, blogs leave a well-marked digital trail which is relatively easy to follow. If personal blogs occasionally cause a problem for those in the work force, how much more so for today’s students who have yet to hold a real job and who are still breathing the rarified air within the protective bubble of the academy. A future employer who searches the blog of a job candidate will gain more insight into the mind of that applicant than could ever be provided by a million Myers-Briggs personality inventories. The chances of a future employer digging up applicant “dirt” increases with each day and with each keystroke.<\/p>\n

So where am I going with all this? It’s just that in my strolls through the blogosphere, I routinely encounter young students, especially seminarians, who are quite taken with their own thoughts and impressed by how many gather round to read them. My advice, tainted as it is coming from a forty-something fogey, would be this: get a real job, get a life and check back with me in about 15 years. By then maybe what you have to say will be seasoned with the salt of experience and will sound much more like love than the rants of a child in arrested development and the clanging of a noisy cymbal.\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”–I Corinthians 12:11 Or at least…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,22,23,48,51,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-christianity","category-current-events","category-family","category-religion","category-scripture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9696,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/9696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}