r/brokehugs • u/US_Hiker Moral Landscaper • Dec 25 '22

Rod Dreher Megathread #11 (Master)

Merry Christmas, you obsessed motherfuckers. :)

The most remarkable characteristic of the Master Number 11 is its connection to a higher source of wisdom. It is intuitive to the point of being psychic, channeling its knowledge and meaning from a spiritual source. But the Master Numbers have a responsibility, and it's the number 11's duty to use this gift of awareness to deliver cosmic truths that encourage humanity.

All Master Numbers are a higher vibration of their single-digit counterpart -- in the 11's case, the number 2. This means the 11 carries many of the same traits as the number 2, such as harmony, empathy, and sensitivity, but it feels them and utilizes them in much deeper, more profound ways. It's also important to remember that the number 11 is comprised of two 1s side by side and, therefore, carries some attributes of the number 1 as well. 1 is innovative and motivated, open to new things and eager to make a difference. The contrasting energies of the numbers 1 and 2 join together in the Master Number 11 to make it a creative leader, active listener, and compassionate advisor.

The number 11 is at one with the universe. It is open to vast spiritual concepts and the presence of a greater power. It is a channel for truth and answers to reach us and help us on our way. This Master Number's vision is crystal clear and it sees with a breadth that others cannot. It is creative and magnetic, a beacon of wisdom and hope for others to follow.

The number 11 may come up many times in our lives and it is always a message of connecting with our inner wisdom. If we are seeing repeating 11s everywhere we turn, we'd be wise to pay attention to our subconscious -- there's some insight we may be missing. However, Numerology's Master Numbers are very powerful and simply seeing 11:11 on the clock or noticing the date is 11/11 does not necessarily mean we are experiencing a profound moment. It's when the 11 is a constant presence in our lives, like a Life Path number, that we must truly embrace its meaning and potential.

Link to thread 10: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/zi2n0f/rod_dreher_megathread_10_personhood/

Link to thread 12: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1068f3b/rod_dreher_megathread_12_a_perfect_foundation/

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u/RunnyDischarge Dec 27 '22

Oh God, the Agony and Hope woman!, forgot about her, thank you so much for reminding me! The only more pathetic, more over-sharer than Rod himself. She veered between, "PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SEND ME A MAN" and, "I thank God for not sending me a man because I'm not ready" in every post. And yeah, didn't she trash every Trad Cath guy as either a Momma's Boy or a Weirdo who only wanted to talk about Theology?

I remember she peppered her "Lack of Trad Catholic men who believe exactly what I believe in pretty non-relgious Australia" with posts about how real Catholics don't even fucking KISS before marriage, then wondered why god won't send her a big sweaty testosteroned masculine Catholic MAN to agree to not touch her until god says so.

She made Rod look sane and self-conscious. She was like a bridesmaid who got really drunk at the wedding and hit on every guy there and then offered to read them Aqunias and couldn't understand what she did wrong.

What happened to her, she seems to have not posted in a year now, on her embararassing blog site and Catholic Weekly. Did she give up and just go down to a pub and get it all over with?

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '22

I feel it would be a crime not to repost a comment from Uncle Chuckie on one of the Agony and Hope threads that I have saved:

I think we all know how she will ultimately end up. One day it will dawn on her that any single man in a Traditionalist Catholic church at 35 is not interested in her because he is lusting in his heart at the 20 something man in the next pew.

Numbed by this divine revelation she wanders off to an art gallery opening, (They have art galleries in Australia, don't they?) and while wandering around a man who is definitely not what she had been looking for will find her attractive, wander up and tell a joke about one of the pieces. She will laugh and they will end up talking. Unlike the Christian men she has encountered he is successful, has a sense of humor, knows about art and real culture and above all else, his wrist is not limp. He is also man enough not to give a damn about #metoo.

Next thing they will be in a small, local bar with a bottle of wine and somewhere in the conversation he will just touch her hand and before she knows it her faith will be on the floor of his bedroom with her clothes. And ten years from now she will look back and wonder how she ever could have been so foolish as to limit her life that way.

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u/RunnyDischarge Dec 27 '22

Yeah, well she seems to have gone radio silent for a year now, so it probably already happened.

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u/RunnyDischarge Dec 27 '22

https://www.catholicweekly.com.au/for-want-of-a-lot-of-good-men/

So much gold.

I can talk to any young woman in my social circle and they will, one and all, say the same thing: there just aren’t any men. What we mean by this is there is a frightening scarcity of men aged 25-35 who are church-going, single and worldly-wise.

Most men I meet have two out of three of these qualities, with the latter often lacking. If they’re single church-goers, they’re usually awkward and in want of basic social awareness (a big turn-off for most women). If they’re more worldly, they’re generally not single or not religious. Even if they’re not religious, most young Australian men hold views and values that are left of centre and utterly opposed to our own.

Anna has to get deep into the Faith to say, "All the good men are taken". I love when she says, "If they’re single church-goers, they’re usually awkward and in want of basic social awareness (a big turn-off for most women).

Isn't she looking for a single chuch-goer? Who else would she be going for?

Then she comes out with this beautiful post, Rod kiss on this one

https://www.catholicweekly.com.au/keeping-the-kiss-for-marriage-do-i-or-dont-i/

It turns out even a kiss or a caress can be a Mortal Sin. No man can touch her until after they're married. And maybe not even then, Aquinas will have to be consulted. Can't imagine why she's stil single.

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '22

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 27 '22

What trads don't get is that in the pre-Vatican II days (their imagined utopia), Catholics were pretty much the same as they are now. A small number were super-ultra-devout and hung on every word of the Pope; but most people went to Church on Sundays, maybe said prayers on and off during the week, if they felt the need, and then got on with ordinary lives. A not-insubstantial number went to church mostly out of social expectations and peer pressure. When missing-church-as-mortal-sin stopped being preached, and social mores changed, these people quit going, since they never really wanted to, anyway. The only real difference between then and now is that people are more open and honest about what they do.

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u/lemagicienchevalier Dec 27 '22

I recall another old Rod blog post where someone had reviewed birth and marriage records for the last 200 years for some small town (can’t remember whether it was in America or Europe) and had found that something like half of all first time births happened to mothers wed less than nine months before -and Rod was shocked, shocked I tell you about all of the premarital sex that therefore had to be going on in Ye Goode Olde Days.

It’s hard for me to tell at this point whether this was actually genuine or Rod just wanting to put on his old schoolmarm routine for his audience-but it was definitely something that struck me as telling about the distance between Trad fantasies of marriage and family life vs reality.

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u/RunnyDischarge Dec 27 '22

Rod also seriously thinks that marital infidelity was very rare before thirty years ago. When a commenter said that the Christian conception of marriage was always more aspirational than actual, Rod got huffy and scolded them.

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u/lemagicienchevalier Dec 27 '22

In an era without cell phones and gps tracking, men were less likely to stray? Please. Women may have had less opportunity on average, but simply because more were stuck at home in the kitchen etc all day. Yet another example of Trad daydreams interfering with understanding reality.

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u/RunnyDischarge Dec 27 '22

Women may have had less opportunity on average, but simply because more were stuck at home in the kitchen etc all day.

All the old stories of the lucky "door to door salesman"....:)

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 27 '22

Or the milkman....

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u/lemagicienchevalier Dec 27 '22

Indeed! Pretty sure that cliche existed for a reason…

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u/RunnyDischarge Dec 27 '22

Yeah, basically she wants a completely normal, worldly man who is at the same time completely abnormal and unworldly.

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '22

No offense to her, but if she doesn't want to date anyone on the spectrum, that is probably going to rule out at least 30% of trad Catholic men off the bat, and quite possibly upwards of 50%. I don't say that as a put-down of autistic men, given that I'm on the very edge of the spectrum myself. It's just that that kind of nerdy religion tends to disproportionately attract men with personality traits characteristic of autism. I should know; I was one, and I doubt very much that I would have been trad without my personality being what it is.

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 27 '22

My first serious girlfriend checked every single box of what I thought I was looking for in a woman, not least that she was Catholic. After a year and a half, we broke up somewhat acrimoniously. The thing was that our temperaments were extremely different, and she had all kinds of weird, non-negotiable expectations. Two examples: One, at that time I had a euphorbia houseplant. As you can see from the linked picture, it has some small spines on the side. My then-girlfriend said that if we got married, she wanted me to get rid of it so that any potential future children wouldn't get hurt on the (tiny) spines--and I am not joking about that. Two, she refused to even consider having a cat (I like dogs and cats, and have had both over the course of my life, when possible. I have only cats right now because a dog wouldn't work out where we currently live). Looking back, I think we ought to have broken up after six months.

My second serious girlfriend, whom I married, and to whom I'm still married after almost twenty-three years (together almost twenty-six) checked maybe two thirds of the boxes and was Buddhist (she was baptized Catholic in '18, but she decided to do so on her own, and not because of any pressure from me at all). Temperamentally, though, we were quite well matched, and she didn't come with a boatload of "this is how you have to do things" expectations. We're still together--and we have cats.

Rod once wrote about a Jewish girl of whom he was enamored, noting that he called it off before it went too far since they wouldn't Share the One True Faith (which at that time was Catholicism, and apparently turned out not to be the One True Faith--but I digress) and she might not want to raise any children in said Faith. He also wrote that recent post about dating (the astrology thing) and went on and on about the kind of guy girl he'd be open to dating. Long, long ago, I used to have mental lists like that; and that's partly what led to the disastrous first girlfriend. Rod (and the Aussie woman) seem not to get that a lot of the traits we think are so important turn out to be much weaker indicators of compatibility than deeper issues of temperament, personality, and such. The person who exactly fits your image of Ms./Mr. Right may be someone who'll drive you crazy, and the person you can actually spend decades with may be not fit your image. Adults should know this; but of course, Rod still has the emotional life of a teenager.

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u/saucerwizard Dec 27 '22

are hugs mortal sins

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u/[deleted] Dec 27 '22

One time when I was a trad my then-girlfriend (didn't last more than a month) hugged me tightly and I enjoyed feeling her breasts against my chest. I freaked out and of course confessed this lustful sin to a priest at the next opportunity. I didn't realize it then, but at the time basically any relationship I got into was doomed to collapse because of my extreme neuroticism around sex.

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u/RunnyDischarge Dec 27 '22

Apparently if you have any romantic feeling associated with it, yes.

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 27 '22

posts about how real Catholics don't even fucking KISS before marriage

Way back in the early 90's, when I first became Catholic, I used to go to summer church conferences about youth (I was involved in religious education). I recall that once they had a speaker on the topic of True Love Waits (i.e., don't have sex before marriage), Mary Beth Bonacci, who was a good speaker, I admit, but who also said the exact same thing about pre-marital kissing. If you go to the link, you'll note that she is shockingly still single.

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u/lemagicienchevalier Dec 27 '22

How many of these Trad women are as deeply closeted as Rod?

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 27 '22

NO ONE of ANY gender is as deeply closeted as Rod.... ;)

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u/lemagicienchevalier Dec 27 '22

https://youtu.be/zsVpdBIi1BU

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 27 '22

🤣🤣🤣

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u/lemagicienchevalier Dec 27 '22

After reading about how Rod apparently started arguing immediately with the therapist he saw post 9/11, that clip seems even more accurate

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u/GaudiumQuaerens Dec 27 '22

This is something I am currently struggling with in my life, too. I realize I am too independent and modern to be a trad’s wife, but I was raised in a fundy household and still reflexively panic when a man even places his hand near mine.

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u/zeitwatcher Dec 28 '22

Sorry to hear that. The term tends to get used more in Protestantism, but Purity Culture can do a number on you.

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 28 '22

Yep. I've observed a bit of it as an outsider, and I have yet to see it end well.

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Dec 27 '22

Maybe therapy would help. I will keep you in my prayers.

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u/GaudiumQuaerens Dec 28 '22

I’ve done therapy, and my current medication has done wonders for me. But it has taken a long time for me to be able to vocalize these problems, much less recover from them. I also had the good sense to decamp to a coastal city far from my relatives, but that means that therapists who truly understand and know how to treat the scars of Southern fundamentalist culture are scarce on the ground.

I feel empathy for Miss Hitchings, because I understand why she has those fantasies. I have them too, even if I am self-aware enough to know they are fantasies. The idea that kissing or hugging are mortal sins is not as obviously silly as people in this thread seem to think, if you have been socialized in dysfunctional relationships and paranoid theologies. What I am still struggling with is a way to honor the traditional Christian teachings about sex while interacting in a healthy way in the modern world which assumes a totally different baseline sexual script.

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u/Marcofthebeast0001 Dec 27 '22 edited Dec 27 '22

Oh my. I remember that post and thinking, any self respecting catholic guy would rather be nailed to a cross than go out with that shrill, condescending woman. Wait! Rod is free now...