Amongst the best moments of the essay is this one, a form of elegaic postlude to the disaster that Anthony Weiner made of his life.
You're so vain... she sang. I am so vain... The world is so vain... Our vanity is not a simple affront to God but our ultimate undoing. Only rightly ordered relationships can begin to hold this vanity in check... parent and child, husband and wife, citizen and neighbor. . . creature to Creator. Christ did not come to do away with these relationships or to set us from from their limitations but to restore to us the right relationship which sin had stolen from us. For it is only in light of these relationships that we know who we are. Sin steals away this identity. Rep. Weiner, Gov. Terminator, Sen./former Presidental Candidate Edwards.... not only forgot who they were but lost their identity in a sea of mirrors which inflated their egos and deflated their wisdom. In the end, we found out that they were not exceptional, like they wanted us to believe, but so full of themselves they thought they were above the Law (God's). The first casualty of our vanity is usually our conscience. The only treatment for this is Law and Gospel. The only medicine is grace. The only therapy is death and resurrection through the waters of baptism (and its daily dying and rising).
OS hopes his readers take time to read, and share with their friends and loved ones.
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