Thoughts on NTY Marriage Story Feature

New York Times has a weekly section on marriage which features the best marriage story among the ones submitted. Except when NYT wants to get some controversy raising attention, the marriages couples who have warm fluffy love stories are featured. Last week's feature unleashed a tirade of comments across the blogosphere about how despicable the feature was. It was the marriage of a former NBC anchor Carol Anne Riddell and the handsome president of media sales John Partilla, President of Global Media Sales.

It is a case of two divorcees gettting remarried. Divorcees getting remarried is a good thing. Sometimes, people get married to the wrong people and it would do much better for them and their kids to seperate rather than to be abused. But what was really noteworthy about this divorce and remarriage is that there was no history of abuse or ostentatious incompatibility in their original marriages, the reason why they divorced is because after having been married to a person for more than 10 years and having kids, these people suddenly realized that they were in love with someone else. But this is not the cause for the anger unleashed.

The story goes like this... Two families were friends who were going places from Restuarants to Vacations together for a few years until one of the spouses in each of the families get 'hitched' with each other and decide to dump the other spouse. The four people have 5 children between them. Basically Mr and Mrs. Ennis and Mr. and Mrs. Partilla are good friends until Mrs. Ennis and Mr. Partilla decide to get married and then dump their respective spouses. The dumped Mr. Ennis is himself a media executive who has held high-level jobs at IAC and News Corp and is now head of the digital media practice at the investment bank Petsky Prunier. The Ex Mrs. Partilla is a high level media executive as well.

We live in a world were somewhere between 1 in 2 to 1 in 3 marriages end up in divorce. I am sure this sort foursome scandals has happens quite a bit. But two reasons make this news feature infamous. One, the gumption that this couple had in sending their story to be featured the New York Times unmindful of the hurt it may cause their their ex-spouses and kids. Two, the notorious decision taken by NY to post it without even fact-checking with the ex-spouses. I don't intend to analyse NYT's motives, afer all the media loves to grab attention, besides NYT has a liberal worldview.

What stuck me most was the justification given the couple for their childishly selfish behavior. I wonder what made them think their story was an exemplary case of courage and bravery as exemplified in the comments below. I wonder what gave them a sense of entitlement to admiration of the readers.

Partilla says, “I didn’t believe in the word soul mate before, but now I do". Caroll says, “He said, ‘Remind me every day that the kids will be O.K.,’ I would say the kids are going to be great, and we’ll spend the rest of our lives making it so.” She adds, “I came to realize it wasn’t a punishment, it was a gift,” she said. “But I had to earn it. Were we brave enough to hold hands and jump?”

Having assumed that they have earned the readers admiration for being brave, they now indulge in quite a bit of self-pity feeling entitled to empathy.

NYT says, "As Mr. Partilla saw it, their options were either to act on their feelings and break up their marriages or to deny their feelings and live dishonestly. “Pain or more pain,” was how he summarized it."

It is incredible that it was lost on them that they acted like kids who want to 'feel good' play and dont want to work hard at homework. They shun pain and want to do what makes them feel good with a mypoic view of only their own self-interest, causing pain to their ex-spouses who did not abuse them and their kids who were not abused in their original marriages either. They want the world to applaud them for yeilding their childish 'feel good' proclivities.

Caroll says, “My kids are going to look at me and know that I am flawed and not perfect, but also deeply in love,” she said. “We’re going to have a big, noisy, rich life, with more love and more people in it.”

Actually, in the photograph of cake cutting at the reception where the five children are pictured, the face of the eldest girl who is probably 12ish is void of any clear emotion except may be angst. The stark fact is that Caroll's sentiment of 'deeply in love' is directed at none except her own feelings of love. This is the kind of immaturity that Shakespeare describes as 'love loves love'.

Mr. Partilla feels that "...options were either to act on their feelings and break up their marriages or to deny their feelings and live dishonestly".

It is intresting that the couple associate dishonesty with a feeling rather than their 'unprovoked' betrayal of their original spousal commitment. When there was no abuse in their original marriage, that they betrayed their committment to their spouse isn't seen as being dishonest by these 'blind lovers'. It is incredible that to excersice some 'self-control' over their 'frivolous' feelings is seen as being dishonest. Aren't self-control and honesty virtues which go hand in hand?

I wonder what they tell their kids when the kids 'feel' like they want to always play pingpong video games and eat french fries and avoid the pain of doing homework and eating healthy. Would they encourage their kids to just be 'true' to the feelings and avoid all hardwork so that they wouldn't be dishonest to the way the feel about things??? Or would they teach them the virtue of self-control???

Interestingly, they are not alone in their skewed idea of dishonesty which is contained only within the realms of their feelings and has nothing to do with their commitment to a person. One of the very few bloggers who supported them said, "...I feel encouraged to see that they are loyal to how they feel".

Until quite recently, Loyalty was something that can only be attributed to people. Would loyalty have the same meaning even if it attributed to non-personalities? Perhaps, it seems only right that after  having desecrated the virtue of honesty, in the same vein, they should extend it to the other age-old virtue like loyalty. Of course, unsaid, the virtue of love has been desecrated the worst of all. When 'feelings' takes precedence to Truth there is no saying where it goes.

This is a malady of the age we live in - The Age of Sentimentality. It is an age where we give an inordinate importance to how we feel about things. Unlike our ancestors, our greatest goal in life isn't aligning our life to the Truth of life, rather we pursue a 'feel good' factor about life. Steve Jobs in one of his interviews said it best, "I don't care about what is right or wrong, I care about success". In fact, the reason (apart from rigid i-phone protocols) why i-phones aren't used it the corporate world is becuase they aren't robust equipments, they just 'feel good'.

Back in those days when families were still stable and psychatrists weren't in much demand, people had a sense of what the Truth was, they tried to align their life to the Truth. Self-control was a virtue because it helped them align their life to the right way to live. But now, we live in a post-modern (hyper-modern) world and so Truth is relative. When Truth becomes relative, feelings take precedence. The result is the 'abolition of manhood' and move back to 'childishness'.

C.S.Lewis said in his book, 'The Abolition of Man' says that our generation is creating men without chests. Humankind has a chest and a spine so that they can go against their basal instinct and put the interest of their kids and spouses above their own and be truly loving and develop character. Once we loose our handle on absolute Truth and relegate right and wrong to the realm of frivolous feelings, we are sowing seeds for decadence of our civilization because none of the virtues that make man a man means anything anymore except how they make you feel at different points in time. I believe it is in this vein that G.K.Chesterton said, "A civilization can stand in one angle, and fall in every other. We are now testing angles."

The entitlement that this couple have to be admired and empathized with after having acted so immaturely following their feelings, is symptom of a decadence that has set in our civiliation. When sentiments and feelings to take precedence over Virtues and Truth, man loses his manishness. When man loses his God given manish nature, the civilization he creates begins to die, albeit a slow death.

Secretariat - The Dilemma between Family and Legacy

I admire horses. In fact the very reason why I ride the Motorcycle is because the Motorcycle is the closest modern man can get to riding a horse. It is common probably knowledge that 'Secretariat' is an excellent movie about the most legendary Horse that ever lived. Here, I do not want to write about the obvious. I want to write what the movie has to do the dilemma that most people face between caring for family and following life's passion.

The movie has a spin that makes the viewer realize that the real hero of the movie is not the horse but its owner, Debbie. The movies starts off showing her as a home maker with a successful attorney for a husband and four kids, two of them adolescent, one of them almost outright rebellious, all of them still in school. Debbie is at a stage in a woman's life where the demands of the family is more than the demands of any full time career.

Unexpectedly her mother dies, and she goes back to her parent's ranch . She remembers the tender memories of her childhood with the horses and how her father loved them and was so proud of the legacy of having bred the finest horses. Her brother suggests that they sell off the horses with the ranch, pay the taxes and continue on with their own lives. Being a Harvard economists, he sees liquidation of assets as economically most sensible. Debbie a plain a simple homemaker, with a heart for horses, is unwilling to let the legacy of her father fade into oblivion.

She remembers her father telling her about horse racing, "it is not about whether others think if you have won. It is not even about whether you think you have won." She wants to attempt to build upon the legacy of her father. This means that she has to spend time in the ranch away from her family. Her dilemma is between catering to the demands of her family and building upon her father's legacy.

She chooses to make her father's legacy her own. Consequently, she shuttles between the Ranch and her family for many years. The Ranch looses money, the horses do not have a good trainer and she misses not being with her teenage daughters who are becoming more beautiful by the week. She cries over the phone, she cries in her bed alone, for missing the most important moments in her kids life. But her passion to keep the legacy alive keeps her going.

Her husband tells her that she can't have her spending his money on something that seemed only to be a huge drain. She hangs up the phone. It is at this stage that her brother makes a second attempt to convince her to sell off the ranch and the horses and get back to her "long neglected 'duty' as a mother and a wife". She replies, "Next time you talk to me about my duties as Mother and a Wife, you'll be a stranger to me".

Her life is split between her home and the Ranch for about three years and she against all odds, breeds the most legendary Horse that ever raced in recorded history. Her 'Secretariat' becomes a National Phenomenon. I was talking to someone at Church and he told me that he remembered the horse 'Secretariat' when he was a kid.

As I was watching the movie, I realized that the suspense wasn't really about the horse. I knew the horse would win, after all there cannot be a movie if it didn't. I was really curious to know how choosing the tougher option between family and her legacy affected Debbie's relationship with the family.

Her husband loving as he is, is getting impatient. I was brazing myself for a confrontation and a breakup in that family, similar to the one that happens  in the movie, "Nothing But the Truth", where a female reporter takes a stand upholding a journalistic principle and pays a huge price. She gets pilloried for sticking too much to her passionate principles and being a unfit mother and wife. Eventually, her husband dumps her. But this never happens in 'Secretariat'.

What happened in 'Secretariat' is beautiful. The result of her choice and shuttling between priorities, initially appears to have the effect of being estranged from the family but as time passes, her passion and legacy gets 'inherited' into her family. Her husband and children 'share' into the legacy she is building. The kids are overjoyed about the 'Secretariat'.   They are proud that their mother was bequeathing to them a great legacy. Her husband is at her back. Even her brother realizes that she made the right choice. She is known in the racing circles as the most attractive owner any horse ever had.

I think, herein lays the answer to the dilemma that many face when it comes to being with family and following ones passion. The essence of family is 'sharing'. All our successes, joys and sorrows are 'shared' and that sharing is what gives meaning to life. There are times when someone in the family feels a deep passion for something, at such times, a family that is true to its essence of 'shared experiences' can be a source of strength and meaning (not a liability) to helping that person to 'move out' achieve that which is passionately pursued and make that a part of their 'shared' legacy.

I believe family has this unique characteristic because the family was created by God to be a well-spring of joy and strength that results from shared experiences which becomes the 'bedrock' for men and women to 'move out' into the world and exercise their dominion over it making life more beautiful and more cherished for many, and most specially for the family itsef.

God Himself has His essence in the 'shared' experiences of His Triune nature (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). The Triune fellowship is His well-spring of joy. In fact, when God created the world, He did not just say, "I created the world". He rather said, "Let US create...", true to His Triune shared creative experience. He 'imputes' into the family, a part of the divine nature of being strengthened by 'shared experiences' and 'moving out' to create a legacy.

The family is thus a reflection of God's Triune nature of shared experiences and creative legacies. That is the reason why God wants family and procreation to be sacred rites. In as far as a family reflects the 'shared' experience within and 'moving out' - the creative legacy of the Triune nature, it shall be the most beautiful transcended experience of life. One does not have to chose between family and legacy. Rather, they mesh with each other and enrich each other as a true reflection of the Triune Creator's nature manifested through creative legacy strengthened by shared experiences.

Narnai - Voyage of the Dawn Trader

Just watched Narnia - Voyage of the Dawn trader - midnight show at Marquee - the first show in Houston theaters. In the first few minutes, I was a little disturbed that the screen writers had excersiced their artistic liberty quite a bit and I was afraid which part of the movie they would end up butchering... Now that I have seen the entire movie, I can affirm that my fears were unfounded. Indeed, the screen play writers have done a really good job in striking the balance between making the movie exciting and still holding on to the spirit of the Narnia Seriese.

I do wish the screen writers had not meddled with Aslan's stealthy appearances depicted in the book, but not much of a reason to be disappointed. I think the part where Edmund and Caspian turn against each other and how Aslan makes his fearsome presence felt shouldn't have been taken out of the movie. On the other hand, Aslan appearing in the mirror in Lucy's dream was quite a bit of digress from the book, but was most welcome.

The movies portrayal of the 'green mist' exposing human vulnerability was a brilliant improvisation of the book's 'darkness', which really tied the narrative together in a way that I think book does not. The 'grey mist' representing evil brings back the traitorous ambition of old evil witch into Edmund's conscience and the wanting to be 'materially' valuable into Lucy's.

I was glad Aslan's parting words, "In the other world I am known by a different name. The very reason you were brought into Narnia was so that you'll know me a little here, and better there.", was unaltered. After all, at the end of the day those are the words that give the Narnia the meaning that makes it eternally beautiful and true, Right?

Next Three Days – Love of God

I just saw (actually 4 days ago) the newest Russell Crowe movie ‘Next Three Days’. It is a intense thriller. After watching the movie I drove around the 40 mile 610 loop, among other things, reflecting on the movie and how it depicts the love of God.

In the movie, Russell Crowe’s wife gets arrested for a murder. She gets incarcerated because all evidence is against her. Russell is the only one who believes in her innocence. Incriminating evidence seals her doom. He vows to bring her out of prison. The wife, already suffering from a bit of inferiority complex goes into a self-destructive cycle. The more her tries to help, the more she resists and is spiteful. But still Russell perseveres believing in her innocence and tries to free her. She attempts suicide. He does not give up, he is at her bedside. 

This is amazingly similar to the love of God. In the Bible, God relates with man in a Father-Son relationship. But there is another very important, but less talked about, facet which is the Groom-Bride relationship. God is the Husband, human being is His Bride. He loves His Bride with an everlasting love. Even when we are spiteful and angry and allow our feelings of insecurity and inferiority to destroy us, He never gives up on us. Even if we decide to give up on us and attempt suicide, He never gives up on us. No matter how much we resist His plans for our freedom, He’ll not give up on us.

The wife has accepted her doomed life in the prison. She then realizes that only way to get him off his pointless endeavor to free her is to lie to him that she committed the crime. She does that. He does not flinch. He trusts her so much that he reaffirms her worth. He says, “I will not allow this prison to become your home”. 

The prison which the wife thinks has become her home, points to another metaphor in life - people thinking that living in chains is normal. Roussea said, "Man is born free, but every where he is in chains". Prison is bondage. Sin/hopelessness is bondage. Most people live in the prison of sin/faithlessness and think it is their home and that there is no hope for real freedom in life. They make a home of the prison of sin/hopelessness. But God does not want us to settle for a life of faithless  bondage. Jesus Christ says, “I have come to show the Truth. I am the Truth and Truth shall set you free.”

In the movie, to redeem her, Russell stoops down to the point of becoming a criminal himself. Till the end she does not see her worth and tries to jeopardize his carefully laid plans for her freedom. But he keeps on loving her and trusting her to redeem her to himself and start a new life in a new home far off in distant shores.

In real life, God allowed His own Son (Jesus Christ) to be killed in order that through Him, no matter how much we self-destructively jeopardize His plans for our everlasting freedom, we will not succeed. His Truth will set us free, because He will not give upon us. He loves us as a trusting Husband loves His self-doubting wife. No matter how much we resist, He’ll make us find our freedom and journey to the new Home He has prepared for us a on the distant Shores where we’ll live as free people fully redeemed and happy in Him. Nothing can separate us from the love of God.(Rom 8:28-39).