Aussie Mum teamed up with a Freemason?

The following poem, simply entitled “If”, is by Rudyard Kipling, penned when he was already a long-time, freakishly enthusiastic Freemason in the late 1800s. Freemasons are notoriously relativistic, and therefore enemies of true religion, enemies of all that which is noble, in denial about Jesus as The Way, The Truth, The Life.

Rudyard, taking the high ground, but not too much, holds himself up as the ultimate reasonable sharer of nice values, which are the death of Christianity. Who says what nice values are?

Having said that, in the midst of all that, the Living Absolute Truth pursues us, wanting to bring us to the fullness of Truth, and to heaven, of which the scars on His body provide the proof that Truth is Love.

If you but understand the words “Will” and “Man” – capitalized by Rudyard himself – as referring to Jesus, you’ll see what I mean.

I think that’s what Aussie Mum saw in this poem of Rudyard. She saw Jesus reaching out to grab the soul of Rudyard amidst all his peripherality and distraction. She cited this by way of a video she posted in a comment four years ago, long before she got deathly ill.

---

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

---

And, no, James, Aussie Mum’s son, is not referenced here in particular. The poem is Rudyard’s advice to his son John.

Instead, Aussie Mum redirected this poem to all readers of this blog, and surely also to myself, in all my distraction. Thanks for that, Aussie Mum.

As far as good advice in the face of the death of a loved one, it might be good to dust off one’s Bible and look up the book of Tobit in the Old Testament. Chapter 4ff. Really great.

---

P.S. Don’t be scandalized. The great Saint Thomas Aquinas cited all sorts of knuckleheads who preceded him. Aussie Mum rejoiced in the truth wherever she saw it.