A personal Piece: Martin Kelly's blog

I was very moved by the statement from Martin Kelly on the simpler direction of his blog. I admire Martin's mind at a distance, having never met him. It is certainly not the case that we agree necessarily on anything, and nor should it be. I think his faith may be more admirable than mine, because of all my private flaws.

This was a day when the ludicrous Honeyball popped up again to encourage some of the worst elements on the sociopathic left. Someone has told her to seem upset because the Pope won't visit her illegitimate and costly talking-shop. Comments on the article to which I have linked reveals the bitter, limited and vicious desert at the heart of the anti-human materialism that moves many on the left as on the right, and the moral cowardice of the same.

I am well aware of the tendency for a personal blog to become about that which, and those whom, we form the worst opinion of, so I am trying tonight to resolve never to expand on anything she does again. This sounds precious, and selfish.

Yet anger, which I bore in me for years, and hatred which flows from it, and contempt and all those other things are self-destructive. The church calls them sins against the holy spirit; I think of them as a kind of attack on oneself, and I do feel them and do not present myself as in any way worthy of praise for this. Some people are bad or silly and just don't learn, and the world rewards them and then it collapses beneath them, at the end.

When Labour crashes and burns, in her tawdry small way, Honeyball will have been one of those responsible. People at the end of things that were once great, one would like to imagine, are full of tragic doom. One would like to think that they have a sense of the burning world.

Often though, that is nonsense. Most of the time, those cutting down the gates and dancing in the firelight until the barbarians arrive are in the grip of trivia, silliness and narcissism, and sometimes they go through their whole life never having realised what they are and what they could be.

Good luck to you, Mary. I am never going to mention you again, which is my own small protest. Any cowardly anonymous posts from yourself or your flunkies will be blocked from now on.

Martin's piece was uplifting. Decent. And I strongly suspect he meant it for none other than himself and his desire to come to terms with his faith. It is therefore all the stronger.

He is right; politics is vile because politics is the game of gaining power over others and enforcing it. At least now I have realised that this is true of any party and likely to be true even of those who think what they are doing in the trouble of ants that is the political world hasn't happened before, or will again, or that it bears the weight of a human being's moral worth.

Indeed, the necessary logic at the heart of most parts of the political world since the disaster of 1789 is clear. If one takes one's moral rules only from politics or the world, the only rationalisations possible are either Nietzsche's eternal recurrence or nihilism.

No progress, no life worth living is possible without an understanding of our spiritual worth. Modern politics and economics in the English-speaking world seem to be bent on destroying any such understanding, whilst coddling the worst sorts of bigotry and worse, mental sloppiness. In poverty and under pressure of casual gangsterism, the world's poor still seem to see that, even as their beloved die around them and their childish hopes fall away at the hands of bad people and their own necessary badness, sometimes. I wish those who consider themselves richer and enlightened as they wallow in the west's gifts without keeping them in their proper place would, and I write as a man who enjoys sensualities.

The proper business of a man is his humanity, his reason, and his spirit. There is more than one way to that. I think flawed, broken, Catholicism the highest form; for most of the world there are other paths. Men and women of goodwill can differ. Any paths of respect might in themselves be rewarding, and any argument with them should be intellectual, but ultimately is a matter for the one who contemplates them. Before 381 the church saw it and I think it saw that again, in its way, after 1964.

A beautiful piece, Martin Kelly. I have a Kempis's book on my desk, and a small cross, and you made me want to contemplate them even more.

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.