Blessed Holy Theophany! "The beginning of the beginning." My Orthodox priest-monk just left from giving a house blessing. Just before he walked out the door, he stopped at my bookshelf and pulled out my old copy of The Cloud of Unknowing. I hadn't read it (or attempted to read it) in over a couple decades while I was wandering in the desert. And there is the quote you presented at the top! As it states, I've moved out from books into Love. Blessings!
Will- The Cloud of Unknowing is a masterpiece and well-worth reading. But I dare say our Anonymous author would be more than pleased to see us leave it behind. This is the path on which we have always been standing.
"God cannot be grasped through knowledge but only through love". Amen.
Out of all the substacks I subscribe to yours puts me in the most “contemplative” mood.
I love your writing and I relate to everything you describe. I feel fortunate that some 30 odd years ago I settled down in rural Maine amongst cow farms and cornfields, grateful that my home town is not (at least yet) a draw for developers. So it’s remained pretty much the same all these years: quiet. Silence is everything today because “the world is (indeed) too much with us” and we with it. May you find all the peace and solace your soul desires.
Thank you, Joanna. The world tells us the cow farms and cornfields are boring, and silence to be avoided. So much for the wisdom of the world! Even the shrinking parcels of rural land out here among the developers bring peace. I hope it remains ever so for you.
I’ve read your journey via Substack since you started publishing...and thoroughly embraced the irony of your finding the journey is everything, the destination simply a backdrop, waiting to embrace us when we find ourselves ‘back’ where we thought we had left. Place, I have found, reveals itself to one in totality once we cease layering expectations on it...our relationship with it. I, too, live in the West (Idaho). Covid brought me the gift of re-establishing my relationship with Place, and taking it to a completely different level of collaboration. The stillness of stepping back from humans and over-activity, has highlighted that ‘it’ really IS all here, always has been and always will be. From the outside, one would not see much change in my life as a result of the ‘long time out’ (with the exception of my urban permaculture project...a complete collaboration with Place/Nature). The journey would not even appeared to have taken place, except to my spouse and the closest of friends. Yet...I am not the same person. I have ultimately become another expression of Nature, no better, no worse...an equal. The Journey was everything, and was conducted within in a small radius of my home. For fifty-some years I have spent the early part of my day sitting in silence, and the exquisite time at nite when the dark and silence combine to create a clear opening in to the Divine. This is Home. It is immovable...no ‘thing’, no ‘machine’ can take that away, or replace how it has shaped me. Your year in silence is yours...it has shaped who you know yourself to Be, and it will always inform how you live your life, moving forward. 🙏
Very nice piece, thank you. I am also living in the stomach of the beast, in the hyper industrialized Netherland, and I want to get out of the getting and spending as you call it, but it's so difficult and I think a big part of it it's fear. I am also a gen X, self-employed piano teacher that went around in circles over 3 continents (from Argentina to Paris to the Netherlands to California and back to the Netherlands) but not proud of it. Because, in the end, it's all escape and I am still trapped in the machine's logic of work to pay for my right to stand in this little patch of earth. I consider myself a slave of the machine trying to break free and in my dreams, freedom is there back where I came from: Argentina, the land of perpetual inflation and political conflicts. So, I am quietly planning my return, even if that means living in poverty or with my parents well into my fifties. Why? Because I realize that the dream of progress we were sold back then when I was a young music student, the dream of Europe and its culture, it's dead and the only thing Europe has for us, and this I say as a warning to the young generation of argentinians that want to come here to get rich, that dream is fake, the only thing developed countries want from underdeveloped countries is explotation. So my lesson is: stay, find your way closer to home, nature, and forget about the mirages the machine tries to sell to young people of the third world. All that bling bling is not worth it. Where you live is important but first the heart has to be in the right place, then the rest comes.
TNW- There may be a growing minority of people, however small, coming to this same conclusion. If nothing else, it is an opportunity to reorient our lives towards something more ultimately satisfying and simple. May it be so.
Thank you for this post Jack. It's good to read you again. I missed your moment of internet revulsion in July and was wondering what had become of you. Glad to hear you're well.
I am going through a similar moment as your July outburst right now. I started my own Substack last year, hoping to do my bit to risk presenting ideas that challenge the orthodoxy of our civilization and offer new approaches to our unravelling.
And yet this site is full of so many doing the same. What impact does any of it have? Our spiral accelerates, while all but the algorithms go hungry.
Have you read "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr? He too quotes the line on the medium is the message, noting that just by using the internet we are altering the manner in which our brains function. As such, all our efforts on this platform to address our crises may only serve to rewire our brains to make that impossible.
I find myself disillusioned with this medium, having already turned my back on the cinema as a means to incite change. Perhaps that dream is in itself another symptom of a culture deceiving itself into thinking that we have power over our own history. The tide won't heed our cries.
I'm not sure I fully understand what has brought you back here. Perhaps you will say more on this.
I feel that I do not want my writing here to become the equivalent of playing the fiddle as the Titanic goes down. And yet not to write means only to watch, silent and still. To wait without hope, as the fella says.
Not that I expect any neat answers. But glad you are back.
You raise all the right questions. The same ones that I have long wrestled with. Honestly, I am not sure I have a good answer to them. Does anyone?
I would much rather plant the seeds of an immediate, concrete, real-life, contemplative community. But I wonder how possible that is, i.e., whether there are enough who are capabler of it, let alone interested (am I?). And whether the change in us you described has already happened.
The internet and whatever comes next (VR?) is the icing on the cake of media that we've all been gorging on (more or less) for quite some time. I grew up watching a lot of television, movies and I gobbled up all the music the large corporations dished out. My brain has already been rewired than was, say, my great-grandparents.
In my current situation I have greatly reduced my time online, at least at home (I am writing this on break at work). In my apt. I see to allow myself to stay in the realm of silence and solitude. It may not turn the tide--for myself, or anyone else--but it is nonetheless worthwhile to me.
We shall see what we can all make of this whole mess. But I remained convinced that the problem(s) we face will not and cannot be solved on the internet, for the reasons you outline. The real answer is to do something radically different. But will we?
Thank you for your reply Jack, I appreciate you taking the time. Perhaps I could throw one more imponderable your way...
And that is what kind of relationship you think a resuscitated community of the future will have with technology? I believe someone like Paul Kingsnorth sees almost all of it as a manifestation of something deeply evil and corrupting. Something that cannot sit alongside a healthy community of human souls.
And yet I cannot but believe that these new technologies must have some part to play in the divine masterplan, even if they have thrown us so out of balance at their inception.
In particular it is their democratising effect that interests me. Much like the printing press they break apart an elite monopoly on understanding and information - and could, in the most rose-tinted light, be seen as a means of reaching towards the utopia of equality among human beings.
I feel if I could envisage how they would settle down into solid form, it would help me navigate this primordial state.
Edward- Much, if not most, of my thinking about technology derives from McLuhan. He is more than work delving into if you haven't already. Another book that has influenced me greatly is, "Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age" by Peter D. Hershock, which was published in 1999 or so, and is radically farsighted in so many ways. The fact it is Buddhist shouldn't deter non-Buddhists at all.
One of the ways we get our view of technology wrong, I think, is to see it merely as a tool that can be used in any way we choose. Rather, McLuhan and Hershock see how technology shapes us in return. This brings up the question whether certain technologies (which Hershock sees as the social/political/economic/etc systems that undergird any tool use) are simply destructive by their very structure, regardless of our intentions. We can opt out of using a tool, we cannot opt out technologies, at least without great difficulty).
I will end it here, lest I go off longer than my break allows. But these are the very basics of my approach to technology. Are there atrophic technologies that by there very structures weaken us as persons-in-community even as we gain systemic power? I have to think the answer is yes.
And remember: the Machine has no desires. Human beings do. The Machine is their creation to satisfy their desires, so the Machine only reflects the ethics of the people who have built it. Die to your desires and unattachment awaits.
Brian- Good to hear from and I am glad you are here. Obviously, we come from different traditions, but it isn't a stretch to say there is overlap. I may have mentioned to you the book, "The Lost Way to the Good: Dionysian Platonism, Shin Buddhism, and the Shared Quest to Reconnect a Divided World" which examines these parallels.
My perspective--such as it is--is that of a Dionysian Christianity, both East and West. I am heavily influenced by Eckhart, the Cloud of Unknowing, Orthodox Hesychasm, and the apophatic tradition, etc. Of course, there are differences as well.
And it is safe to say, not everyone here will be on board. This is good. One of the great opportunities we have at this point is greater familiarity with other viewpoints and traditions will at the same time honoring our own.
I look forward to exploring both those aspects in upcoming posts.
As you know our paths lately are not wildly dissimilar, so here is my update. After my wife reposed in the middle of last year I sold my house, gave away my things and in my deep grief thought I’d enter a monastery. I settled into a tiny apartment in the city, my “monastic cell,” and talked to several monastics and Abbots, but my path into monasticism, like yours, was not clear cut by any means. I bought a 12 year old Forester, packed the few things I had left (some books, icons and clothes), loaded the dogs and left the West that been my home for 20 years, ending up in a small town outside a monastery in the rural east coast. Perhaps unsurprisingly there are others here with similar stories.
Here, most days I attend daily services for a bit over 4 hours. In between I read, repent, pray and rest. Time has become blurred, materiality and the temporal present but distant, the liturgical like the breath of real life, and the wide ledge of eternity omnipresent. The world’s “news” doesn’t exist for me at all unless someone mentions it to me and then I immediately eject it from my thoughts.
Another fellow who arrived a month before me and I are looking to purchase some land and build (for lack of a better word) “lay hermitages” where we will support each other in continuing to lead as fully a spiritual life as possible.
The last real wilderness in the technological age is simply “the cave of the heart.” Entering it while remaining in the world is no easy task. But the ties that bind us to the world must be cut and no new ones erected even if they seem to be just filigree. Then shut the door to the cave. Otherwise all talk about “how” to leave the machine will remain just idle conversation and intellectual curiosity. Leaving can be done only individually in the will to be closest to God and eternity as we can. This will feel unnatural and perhaps agonizing, but these are merely the thoughts the devil throws at us to stop us. Mass movements to leave the machine will not work. The weakest links in the chain will rear their ugly maws and chew us back in.
The world (or machine) is like a vast quicksand. We must fight to find a tiny solid place and from there stand in stillness, moving only ever further inward into the heart. Any step away from this inward movement merely lands us back in the quicksand of the world.
In any case, this is where I ended up. I pray that you find peace and “stillness in the west”!
Tim! Thank you for the update. There is, of course, great wisdom in what you say here. I think a small movement, barely discernable, towards living a life of silence, solitude, and simplicity--in *community* --is entirely possible. It is something I pray for and hope in. But I am glad you have found your way towards that. And I am very glad you are here.
I just read your piece here, Jack, and I really appreciate it. My family and I are also out west (in Wyoming), also surrounded by vestiges of the machine (we live in a subdivision, have wi-fi, follow a daily work/school schedule that largely mimics the rabbit wheel of secular American culture, etc), and also are trying through our Lutheran community to have and sustain life around the only true constant: Jesus Christ. Your comments about the internet articulate something I have long been unable to put into words--thank you. Like most people I’ve “found” here on Substack that have taught me something profound, I hope our paths cross in real life, on this flawed earth or in the next.
It’s good to hear your voice again, Jack, which is so distinctive and familiar even through a screen. Between the barber shop, used bookstore, looms and spindles, and post-factory monastic cell, you have probably found more un-machined living than a lot of other people actively looking for it!
Peter- Good to hear from you. I trust you and the entire Petrine household are well. The circle around was fairly large, but in spite of myself I seem to have been brought into a good situation. I am keeping my internet activity low and am better for it.
How is the novel faring? Well, I hope. I hope you are working on more. It is such a good story, rich in possibilities.
Ok I think I have found my people. THANK GOODNESS for that! I'll keep reading your thoughts. As they resonate very deeply to my sense of life. Thank you. 🙏
If you could help me figure out how to lead a genuinely contemplative life in this concrete death-scape of a city I now call “home,” I would be eternally thankful!
As others have said, glad to see you back at it. I think whatever work you publish here will be of valuable insight for the rest of us who are trying to live a contemplative life in the midst of living in the world. Perhaps a how-to for keeping the fire stoked and burning in the temple of our souls where God most intimately resides. Thankfully you're walking a well-worn path that many others throughout the ages have also walked, especially many saints. I think the regular, non-monastic, sometimes married saints, like the soon to be glorified Matushka Olga reveal this path to us. A modern Coptic bishop said that we all have a desert within that is more spacious and arid than any in the world, and we are called to sojourn in that desert even if we are in the midst of material comfort in the flesh. God be with you Jack!
Thank you, Eduardo. I have long been grateful for your comments here, which are filled with insight and wisdom. So it is good to see you here. I look forward to what we can discover together.
Good to see you back. I changed my Substack moniker from Jeff Alexander to BeardTree. You may remember me. The photo is a past one, my beard is now kept closer to my jaw line. I am wearing my Pentecostal flame skull cap in the photo. May we all find what Paul calls “the simplicity of Christ” who said “you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden light “.
Yes, of course, I remember you. I was hoping you'd show up. I am with you entirely in finding the simplicity of Christ.
Though we come from different interpretive traditions of Christianity I am glad you are here to give your view on things. I know I can all too often given into my polemical side, but I don't think that is very helpful. So, suffice it to say, I hope you continue to be part of this conversation and give your views on the various topics at hand. Even, or especially when it differs from my own.
Liked the term “different interpretative traditions of Christianity”. My interpretative approach is New Testament centered with support from the Old Testament. The structures, practices, and traditions of Christianity as it developed over time I see as historical, cultural, social developments and not necessarily as the work of the Holy Spirit over time. (I also put the various protestant varieties in that category). I respect the classic Trinitarian, Nicene , Chalcedon creedal statements as fitting the Bible but beyond that it gets dicey.
I am well. My own life, while quite different than yours, hasn’t turned out as well as I would have liked ( failed decades long marriage) but I am also in a lovely studio apartment for the past several years.
You asked for it. Here is a comment I posted on Rod Dreher’s Substack. Yes, I was being obnoxious. A response to Dreher’s advocation of an emphasis on mysticism and the saints as a means to reinvigorate Christianity. I certainly advocate direct knowing of God and being filled with the Spirit, but I look askance at the classic mystical systems of Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
“The immense Christian conversions in China from a very few million to tens of millions since 1950, possibly 80,000,000 or more was the work of ordinary people filled with the Holy Spirit in mostly varieties of Protestantism, not an exaltation and practice of classic mysticism, sacramentalism, monasticism, rituals and honoring of past saints. Read the book, The Heavenly Man for a snapshot of this.
As you know “no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit” apparently the Holy Spirit went awol from the Orthodox Church and displayed nearly no reliance on that church to get the job done as there wasn’t a similar growth in the Orthodox Church. Or as being heterodox those coming to Jesus in don’t count?
In the west at least, are the bulk of conversions to Orthodoxy coming from previously Christianized types such as yourself? Another good book is Gladys Aylward, TheLittle Woman, an autobiography detailing some of the work of God in China in the 30’s into the 50’s”
Anyway, Jack, to my amusement I realized the books I mentioned were about two Protestant “saints”. You may find them worth reading.
Just to say that the call to the Contemplative existence is so of the moment, although this scratch has been itching me for a goo number of years. To live on the Boundary so in these days there might be a living link between Heaven and Earth
Thanks for sharing! I, too, am in search of how to find a deeper (and more disciplined) contemplative life. Thank you for writing your journey here. It was an encouragement right at the right time
Blessed Holy Theophany! "The beginning of the beginning." My Orthodox priest-monk just left from giving a house blessing. Just before he walked out the door, he stopped at my bookshelf and pulled out my old copy of The Cloud of Unknowing. I hadn't read it (or attempted to read it) in over a couple decades while I was wandering in the desert. And there is the quote you presented at the top! As it states, I've moved out from books into Love. Blessings!
Will- The Cloud of Unknowing is a masterpiece and well-worth reading. But I dare say our Anonymous author would be more than pleased to see us leave it behind. This is the path on which we have always been standing.
"God cannot be grasped through knowledge but only through love". Amen.
A most blessed Theophany to you, as well! -Jack
Out of all the substacks I subscribe to yours puts me in the most “contemplative” mood.
I love your writing and I relate to everything you describe. I feel fortunate that some 30 odd years ago I settled down in rural Maine amongst cow farms and cornfields, grateful that my home town is not (at least yet) a draw for developers. So it’s remained pretty much the same all these years: quiet. Silence is everything today because “the world is (indeed) too much with us” and we with it. May you find all the peace and solace your soul desires.
Thank you, Joanna. The world tells us the cow farms and cornfields are boring, and silence to be avoided. So much for the wisdom of the world! Even the shrinking parcels of rural land out here among the developers bring peace. I hope it remains ever so for you.
And I hope you are well.
Thank you Jack. Keep the substack articles coming . While we might prefer silence, we hermits need each other . 😉
I’ve read your journey via Substack since you started publishing...and thoroughly embraced the irony of your finding the journey is everything, the destination simply a backdrop, waiting to embrace us when we find ourselves ‘back’ where we thought we had left. Place, I have found, reveals itself to one in totality once we cease layering expectations on it...our relationship with it. I, too, live in the West (Idaho). Covid brought me the gift of re-establishing my relationship with Place, and taking it to a completely different level of collaboration. The stillness of stepping back from humans and over-activity, has highlighted that ‘it’ really IS all here, always has been and always will be. From the outside, one would not see much change in my life as a result of the ‘long time out’ (with the exception of my urban permaculture project...a complete collaboration with Place/Nature). The journey would not even appeared to have taken place, except to my spouse and the closest of friends. Yet...I am not the same person. I have ultimately become another expression of Nature, no better, no worse...an equal. The Journey was everything, and was conducted within in a small radius of my home. For fifty-some years I have spent the early part of my day sitting in silence, and the exquisite time at nite when the dark and silence combine to create a clear opening in to the Divine. This is Home. It is immovable...no ‘thing’, no ‘machine’ can take that away, or replace how it has shaped me. Your year in silence is yours...it has shaped who you know yourself to Be, and it will always inform how you live your life, moving forward. 🙏
Beautiful and lovely. Thank you.
I am glad you are here, Penny.
Very nice piece, thank you. I am also living in the stomach of the beast, in the hyper industrialized Netherland, and I want to get out of the getting and spending as you call it, but it's so difficult and I think a big part of it it's fear. I am also a gen X, self-employed piano teacher that went around in circles over 3 continents (from Argentina to Paris to the Netherlands to California and back to the Netherlands) but not proud of it. Because, in the end, it's all escape and I am still trapped in the machine's logic of work to pay for my right to stand in this little patch of earth. I consider myself a slave of the machine trying to break free and in my dreams, freedom is there back where I came from: Argentina, the land of perpetual inflation and political conflicts. So, I am quietly planning my return, even if that means living in poverty or with my parents well into my fifties. Why? Because I realize that the dream of progress we were sold back then when I was a young music student, the dream of Europe and its culture, it's dead and the only thing Europe has for us, and this I say as a warning to the young generation of argentinians that want to come here to get rich, that dream is fake, the only thing developed countries want from underdeveloped countries is explotation. So my lesson is: stay, find your way closer to home, nature, and forget about the mirages the machine tries to sell to young people of the third world. All that bling bling is not worth it. Where you live is important but first the heart has to be in the right place, then the rest comes.
TNW- There may be a growing minority of people, however small, coming to this same conclusion. If nothing else, it is an opportunity to reorient our lives towards something more ultimately satisfying and simple. May it be so.
I am glad you are here. Be well. -Jack
Thank you for this post Jack. It's good to read you again. I missed your moment of internet revulsion in July and was wondering what had become of you. Glad to hear you're well.
I am going through a similar moment as your July outburst right now. I started my own Substack last year, hoping to do my bit to risk presenting ideas that challenge the orthodoxy of our civilization and offer new approaches to our unravelling.
And yet this site is full of so many doing the same. What impact does any of it have? Our spiral accelerates, while all but the algorithms go hungry.
Have you read "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr? He too quotes the line on the medium is the message, noting that just by using the internet we are altering the manner in which our brains function. As such, all our efforts on this platform to address our crises may only serve to rewire our brains to make that impossible.
I find myself disillusioned with this medium, having already turned my back on the cinema as a means to incite change. Perhaps that dream is in itself another symptom of a culture deceiving itself into thinking that we have power over our own history. The tide won't heed our cries.
I'm not sure I fully understand what has brought you back here. Perhaps you will say more on this.
I feel that I do not want my writing here to become the equivalent of playing the fiddle as the Titanic goes down. And yet not to write means only to watch, silent and still. To wait without hope, as the fella says.
Not that I expect any neat answers. But glad you are back.
All the best
Edward
Edward-
You raise all the right questions. The same ones that I have long wrestled with. Honestly, I am not sure I have a good answer to them. Does anyone?
I would much rather plant the seeds of an immediate, concrete, real-life, contemplative community. But I wonder how possible that is, i.e., whether there are enough who are capabler of it, let alone interested (am I?). And whether the change in us you described has already happened.
The internet and whatever comes next (VR?) is the icing on the cake of media that we've all been gorging on (more or less) for quite some time. I grew up watching a lot of television, movies and I gobbled up all the music the large corporations dished out. My brain has already been rewired than was, say, my great-grandparents.
In my current situation I have greatly reduced my time online, at least at home (I am writing this on break at work). In my apt. I see to allow myself to stay in the realm of silence and solitude. It may not turn the tide--for myself, or anyone else--but it is nonetheless worthwhile to me.
We shall see what we can all make of this whole mess. But I remained convinced that the problem(s) we face will not and cannot be solved on the internet, for the reasons you outline. The real answer is to do something radically different. But will we?
I hope this finds you well.
-Jack
Thank you for your reply Jack, I appreciate you taking the time. Perhaps I could throw one more imponderable your way...
And that is what kind of relationship you think a resuscitated community of the future will have with technology? I believe someone like Paul Kingsnorth sees almost all of it as a manifestation of something deeply evil and corrupting. Something that cannot sit alongside a healthy community of human souls.
And yet I cannot but believe that these new technologies must have some part to play in the divine masterplan, even if they have thrown us so out of balance at their inception.
In particular it is their democratising effect that interests me. Much like the printing press they break apart an elite monopoly on understanding and information - and could, in the most rose-tinted light, be seen as a means of reaching towards the utopia of equality among human beings.
I feel if I could envisage how they would settle down into solid form, it would help me navigate this primordial state.
Interested in any thoughts you may have.
Edward- Much, if not most, of my thinking about technology derives from McLuhan. He is more than work delving into if you haven't already. Another book that has influenced me greatly is, "Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age" by Peter D. Hershock, which was published in 1999 or so, and is radically farsighted in so many ways. The fact it is Buddhist shouldn't deter non-Buddhists at all.
One of the ways we get our view of technology wrong, I think, is to see it merely as a tool that can be used in any way we choose. Rather, McLuhan and Hershock see how technology shapes us in return. This brings up the question whether certain technologies (which Hershock sees as the social/political/economic/etc systems that undergird any tool use) are simply destructive by their very structure, regardless of our intentions. We can opt out of using a tool, we cannot opt out technologies, at least without great difficulty).
I will end it here, lest I go off longer than my break allows. But these are the very basics of my approach to technology. Are there atrophic technologies that by there very structures weaken us as persons-in-community even as we gain systemic power? I have to think the answer is yes.
I don't know if that helps. -Jack
Welcome back, Jack!
Hope this rebirth brings much joy and insight.
And remember: the Machine has no desires. Human beings do. The Machine is their creation to satisfy their desires, so the Machine only reflects the ethics of the people who have built it. Die to your desires and unattachment awaits.
Brian- Good to hear from and I am glad you are here. Obviously, we come from different traditions, but it isn't a stretch to say there is overlap. I may have mentioned to you the book, "The Lost Way to the Good: Dionysian Platonism, Shin Buddhism, and the Shared Quest to Reconnect a Divided World" which examines these parallels.
My perspective--such as it is--is that of a Dionysian Christianity, both East and West. I am heavily influenced by Eckhart, the Cloud of Unknowing, Orthodox Hesychasm, and the apophatic tradition, etc. Of course, there are differences as well.
And it is safe to say, not everyone here will be on board. This is good. One of the great opportunities we have at this point is greater familiarity with other viewpoints and traditions will at the same time honoring our own.
I look forward to exploring both those aspects in upcoming posts.
I hope you are well. -Jack
Thanks for the recommendation. The book looks interesting.
I look forward to your upcoming posts.
Good to hear from you, Jack!
As you know our paths lately are not wildly dissimilar, so here is my update. After my wife reposed in the middle of last year I sold my house, gave away my things and in my deep grief thought I’d enter a monastery. I settled into a tiny apartment in the city, my “monastic cell,” and talked to several monastics and Abbots, but my path into monasticism, like yours, was not clear cut by any means. I bought a 12 year old Forester, packed the few things I had left (some books, icons and clothes), loaded the dogs and left the West that been my home for 20 years, ending up in a small town outside a monastery in the rural east coast. Perhaps unsurprisingly there are others here with similar stories.
Here, most days I attend daily services for a bit over 4 hours. In between I read, repent, pray and rest. Time has become blurred, materiality and the temporal present but distant, the liturgical like the breath of real life, and the wide ledge of eternity omnipresent. The world’s “news” doesn’t exist for me at all unless someone mentions it to me and then I immediately eject it from my thoughts.
Another fellow who arrived a month before me and I are looking to purchase some land and build (for lack of a better word) “lay hermitages” where we will support each other in continuing to lead as fully a spiritual life as possible.
The last real wilderness in the technological age is simply “the cave of the heart.” Entering it while remaining in the world is no easy task. But the ties that bind us to the world must be cut and no new ones erected even if they seem to be just filigree. Then shut the door to the cave. Otherwise all talk about “how” to leave the machine will remain just idle conversation and intellectual curiosity. Leaving can be done only individually in the will to be closest to God and eternity as we can. This will feel unnatural and perhaps agonizing, but these are merely the thoughts the devil throws at us to stop us. Mass movements to leave the machine will not work. The weakest links in the chain will rear their ugly maws and chew us back in.
The world (or machine) is like a vast quicksand. We must fight to find a tiny solid place and from there stand in stillness, moving only ever further inward into the heart. Any step away from this inward movement merely lands us back in the quicksand of the world.
In any case, this is where I ended up. I pray that you find peace and “stillness in the west”!
Tim! Thank you for the update. There is, of course, great wisdom in what you say here. I think a small movement, barely discernable, towards living a life of silence, solitude, and simplicity--in *community* --is entirely possible. It is something I pray for and hope in. But I am glad you have found your way towards that. And I am very glad you are here.
Be well. -Jack
Indeed, 'cave of the heart' - John M Greer came up with a version maybe 10y ago in his Ecosphic way: 'the hermitage of the heart'.
I just read your piece here, Jack, and I really appreciate it. My family and I are also out west (in Wyoming), also surrounded by vestiges of the machine (we live in a subdivision, have wi-fi, follow a daily work/school schedule that largely mimics the rabbit wheel of secular American culture, etc), and also are trying through our Lutheran community to have and sustain life around the only true constant: Jesus Christ. Your comments about the internet articulate something I have long been unable to put into words--thank you. Like most people I’ve “found” here on Substack that have taught me something profound, I hope our paths cross in real life, on this flawed earth or in the next.
Thank you, Jack. Your writing resonates.
It’s good to hear your voice again, Jack, which is so distinctive and familiar even through a screen. Between the barber shop, used bookstore, looms and spindles, and post-factory monastic cell, you have probably found more un-machined living than a lot of other people actively looking for it!
Peter- Good to hear from you. I trust you and the entire Petrine household are well. The circle around was fairly large, but in spite of myself I seem to have been brought into a good situation. I am keeping my internet activity low and am better for it.
How is the novel faring? Well, I hope. I hope you are working on more. It is such a good story, rich in possibilities.
Anyway, may all be well with you. -Jack
Ok I think I have found my people. THANK GOODNESS for that! I'll keep reading your thoughts. As they resonate very deeply to my sense of life. Thank you. 🙏
Tara- Thank you. I am glad you are here. Be well. -Jack
If you could help me figure out how to lead a genuinely contemplative life in this concrete death-scape of a city I now call “home,” I would be eternally thankful!
It can be done.
As others have said, glad to see you back at it. I think whatever work you publish here will be of valuable insight for the rest of us who are trying to live a contemplative life in the midst of living in the world. Perhaps a how-to for keeping the fire stoked and burning in the temple of our souls where God most intimately resides. Thankfully you're walking a well-worn path that many others throughout the ages have also walked, especially many saints. I think the regular, non-monastic, sometimes married saints, like the soon to be glorified Matushka Olga reveal this path to us. A modern Coptic bishop said that we all have a desert within that is more spacious and arid than any in the world, and we are called to sojourn in that desert even if we are in the midst of material comfort in the flesh. God be with you Jack!
Thank you, Eduardo. I have long been grateful for your comments here, which are filled with insight and wisdom. So it is good to see you here. I look forward to what we can discover together.
-Jack
Good to see you back. I changed my Substack moniker from Jeff Alexander to BeardTree. You may remember me. The photo is a past one, my beard is now kept closer to my jaw line. I am wearing my Pentecostal flame skull cap in the photo. May we all find what Paul calls “the simplicity of Christ” who said “you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden light “.
Yes, of course, I remember you. I was hoping you'd show up. I am with you entirely in finding the simplicity of Christ.
Though we come from different interpretive traditions of Christianity I am glad you are here to give your view on things. I know I can all too often given into my polemical side, but I don't think that is very helpful. So, suffice it to say, I hope you continue to be part of this conversation and give your views on the various topics at hand. Even, or especially when it differs from my own.
Regardless, I hope this finds you well. -Jack
Liked the term “different interpretative traditions of Christianity”. My interpretative approach is New Testament centered with support from the Old Testament. The structures, practices, and traditions of Christianity as it developed over time I see as historical, cultural, social developments and not necessarily as the work of the Holy Spirit over time. (I also put the various protestant varieties in that category). I respect the classic Trinitarian, Nicene , Chalcedon creedal statements as fitting the Bible but beyond that it gets dicey.
I am well. My own life, while quite different than yours, hasn’t turned out as well as I would have liked ( failed decades long marriage) but I am also in a lovely studio apartment for the past several years.
Let's see what we can find together. I look forward to it.
You asked for it. Here is a comment I posted on Rod Dreher’s Substack. Yes, I was being obnoxious. A response to Dreher’s advocation of an emphasis on mysticism and the saints as a means to reinvigorate Christianity. I certainly advocate direct knowing of God and being filled with the Spirit, but I look askance at the classic mystical systems of Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
“The immense Christian conversions in China from a very few million to tens of millions since 1950, possibly 80,000,000 or more was the work of ordinary people filled with the Holy Spirit in mostly varieties of Protestantism, not an exaltation and practice of classic mysticism, sacramentalism, monasticism, rituals and honoring of past saints. Read the book, The Heavenly Man for a snapshot of this.
As you know “no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit” apparently the Holy Spirit went awol from the Orthodox Church and displayed nearly no reliance on that church to get the job done as there wasn’t a similar growth in the Orthodox Church. Or as being heterodox those coming to Jesus in don’t count?
In the west at least, are the bulk of conversions to Orthodoxy coming from previously Christianized types such as yourself? Another good book is Gladys Aylward, TheLittle Woman, an autobiography detailing some of the work of God in China in the 30’s into the 50’s”
Anyway, Jack, to my amusement I realized the books I mentioned were about two Protestant “saints”. You may find them worth reading.
Good to hear from you once more, Jack
Just to say that the call to the Contemplative existence is so of the moment, although this scratch has been itching me for a goo number of years. To live on the Boundary so in these days there might be a living link between Heaven and Earth
Trust you are well
Eric
Eric- All is well here. I write this to you on break from the Loom factory. I hope all is well for you and yours on the other side of the planet.
I am glad you are here and part of the conversation and for all you have added to it.
Let's see where it leads us. -Jack
Thanks for sharing! I, too, am in search of how to find a deeper (and more disciplined) contemplative life. Thank you for writing your journey here. It was an encouragement right at the right time
Let's see what we can find together. I am glad you are here. -Jack