Tuesday, April 19th, 2022.
Yesterday, at 53 years of age, and for the first time in my life, I interviewed for a fast-food job. I haven’t had to look for a job in 12 years, having been gainfully employed. In the interim things have changed significantly. Or maybe I am just tired of the grind. Don’t get me wrong, my resume is hardly an exalted one. But fast food is terra incognita for me. But more on that in a later post, perhaps. Let’s see if they even want to hire me, which they may not.
More promisingly, today I head up into the wilds of the Rocky Mountains to a Benedictine monastery. One tucked away in a remote valley far from the tainted world of strip malls, parking lots, and trivial conveniences of all kinds. I am told by those who have been up there that, “you won’t want to leave”. I hope that is true. I also hope it isn’t. In short, I don’t know what I am hoping for. We shall see.
More than a few people in recent years have suggested that I become a monk. I have always resisted this. I have things to do in “the world” I tell myself, probably even important things. Perhaps get married, even at this late stage, and start a family. The past few months—heck, let’s face it, the past few decades—have shown me that reality is otherwise. God keeps conveying this to me with all the subtlety of a baseball bat to the bridge of my nose. And I keep wondering why God seems so distant, and even absent. Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?1 But He has been, as best I can tell, absolutely clear.
So I will drive up to the monastery with this question of vocation. Whether to live a life of work and contemplative prayer or “would you like fries with that?”.
So monastic life is on my mind and at fleeting moments in my heart. Truth be told, I have found the call to a life of prayer and contemplation to be increasingly difficult to drown out, try as I might. This is sometimes to my dismay. Yet it is my prayer life that has gotten me through the past two years. When few other things could.
Over the past year, during the pandemic, I have been waking up in the wee hours aware of a struggle already going on within me. We interrupt your regularly scheduled dreamlife to bring you this waking nightmare. Film at 11. I would get caught up in it even before I was fully awake enough to know what it is I am wrestling with. It can really ruin a fellow’s sleep.
My problem, which is hardly new, is that I want to figure things out, to be certain, to know where I am headed. Because I fear where I am headed—where we are headed—is right off a cliff and into the abyss But I don’t know. I can’t know. So I try to come back to myself and let the struggle go, and the fear along with it. Not my will, but Thine be done, Lord. I am not good at trusting.
More hopefully, when the weather permits I have been going out to the local wooded trails to pray. It has been more therapeutic than I would have imagined. I often pray for God to tell me his Will for me. Lord, what would you have me do? I don’t think I have heard a clear answer yet. Not the answer I am listening for, that hasn’t come. Instead, it is slowly dawning on me that maybe praying in the woods is the answer. Or part of an answer. God has been telling me all along what I should be doing.
Here is where I have been going:
I am seeking a more primal relationship with Reality. To God, to Nature, to myself, and to my fellow human beings. To this whole unfathomable mystery in which we find ourselves. It has taken a while for this eros for Reality to sift out from all the problems of merely continuing to exist. It is very easy for decades to pass just getting by.
We live in a broken world. One that in its very structure and externalized goals can almost entirely cut us off from the mystery of being.2 In it we can become indistinguishable from a machine, and we are reduced to mere function. Our inner lives, colonized by joyless entertainment become reduced to the fantasies of others. The need to survive this flattening of our interior depths leads us to disordered attachments and coping mechanisms. Which only makes matters worse.
As a kind of preparation for my visit to the monastery, I have been reading, “Orthodox Psychotherapy” by Metropolitan Hierotheos. It has shifted a lot of how I think about what life is or can be about, and why I would even go up there. Early in the book, Metropolitan Hierotheos quotes Orthodox Theologian John Romanides, who states the premise of Orthodox Psychotherapy like this:
Faith in Christ without undergoing healing in Christ is no faith at all. Faith in one’s doctor without undergoing the cure prescribed by him would be exactly the same kind of contradiction in terms. If prophetic Judaism and its successor Christianity had made their appearance in the twentieth century they would perhaps have been classified not as religions but as medical sciences akin to psychiatry with a wider impact on society due to their success in curing in varying degrees the malady of partially functioning human personalities. In no way could they be confused with religions which by various magical practices and beliefs promise escape from an alleged material world of evil or of false appearances to an alleged world of security and happiness.
In short, the Church should be a hospital for the sick. We don’t really like to talk about sin anymore, probably because we’ve long been muddled on what it means. Sin is a sickness. It is all of our disordered attachments and destructive passions. Sin is self-will. Not Thy will, but mine be done. All the thoughts, words, and deeds that cause so much disaster for anyone who engages in them. Not only a disaster for ourselves, but for all those who get caught up in our personal blast radius. Mea maxima culpa.
A monastery, then, is maybe the intensive care unit. But it is also a school. This is St. Benedict's position. He puts it this way in his rule:
We have therefore to establish a school of the Lord’s service, in the institution of which we hope we are going to establish nothing harsh, nothing burdensome. But if, prompted by the desire to attain to equity, anything be set forth somewhat strictly for the correction of vice or the preservation of charity, do not therefore in fear and terror flee back from the way of salvation of which the beginning cannot but be a narrow entrance. For it is by progressing in the life of conversion and faith that, with heart enlarged and in ineffable sweetness of love, one runs in the way of God’s commandments, so that never deserting His discipleship but persevering until death in His doctrine within the monastery, we may partake by patience in the suffering of Christ and become worthy inheritors of His kingdom. Amen.
In contrast, there is and has been a growing and rising flood of secular therapies of dubious efficacy over the past century or so. Simply put, we aren’t getting better. I am not getting better. As Jungian Analyst James Hillman put 30 years ago in the title of one of my favorite books, “We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse”. Amen to that. Correlation isn’t causation, to be sure. Though in this case, at least in part, I kinda think it is.
The world is not only getting worse it is darkening in increasingly disturbing and ominous ways. We are told we are being liberated into a new era, one free from past superstition. We should be overjoyed! Your eyes will be opened! 3It is, rather, an initiation into a new, and inverse, superstition. One that posits we can make everything better by our own methods of technical control. But by something new I really mean a novel variation on something quite old. Old enough to be the same species of mistake that goes all the way back. We can’t say we weren’t warned.
So many of us realize this, however vaguely, but think it better to carry on as usual. What else can we do? It seems to me that this pretense won’t hold for very much longer. How much longer is anybody’s guess? But at some point, a choice will likely be required of us. Maybe one we’d rather not face. This is a spiritual struggle and it is well past time to prepare.
This is what I would like to explore on this substack: the inner restoration of Christianity in a time of darkness. How do we heal our souls in an Age of Nihilism? How do we find true connection and community in an economic and political system that sells expressive individualism as a means of manipulation and control? How do we carry the fire4?
I don’t have any answers. Nor will I pretend to have any answers. Not that you thought I did. I just wanted to be clear. But I do want to have a conversation. One between actual struggling human beings, however virtual.
I will avoid trafficking in Grand Theories. Grand Theories are only useful, if ever, when they help us to act, to live more fully, to begin to become living flames of Divine Love. Any worldview that immobilizes us, or turns us into fanatics, is most likely flawed and should be quickly thrown away. I suspect that most, probably all, of our ideologies end up as a cure worse than the disease. Or worse yet, that our ideologies are the disease.
More importantly, we still have time to spiritually prepare for what is coming, for what is already here. What rough beast, indeed?5 Time to seek a new desert for a new dark age. A time to empty ourselves. Let’s not squander it, as time is short.
I uprooted my life a few months ago and transplanted myself into a new city without much plan on what I would do once I got there. My hope was that I could domesticate myself here in a way I couldn’t do there. Rather, it feels like all of that delusion has been stripped away from me. What I am to do next is unclear. Do I remain in the City of Man and work the fryer? Or flee to the interior desert, having seen man? 6 Is there a third option?
I certainly don’t know how this trip to the monastery will turn out. I could be making delicious chicken sandwiches for the lunch crowd in a few weeks with no thought of the contemplative life. It is surely a good idea to never get full of oneself. If nothing else my trip this week will be a brief opportunity to participate in the life of a Benedictine monastery. I hope to look upon a night sky filled with stars and experience, God willing, the mystery of being. This may have to be enough.
St. Benedict, Pray for Us!
Psalm 10.
I am borrowing here from my forays into the thought of Gabriel Marcel. He isn’t easy to understand. Or as Marcel himself puts it, “The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.” Marcel, even half-understood, is better than nearly any well-wrought syllogism.
We live in a broken world, where there are only problems to be solved technically. Including ourselves. We have reduced ourselves to a function and the functional. Conversely, a mystery, for Marcel, is, “a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question. Getting to Mars is a problem.” We try to escape our life and the mystery in which we find ourselves at our own peril.
Genesis 3:5
The Road. Cormac Mccarthy.
I have started to listen to the audiobook. Again. It is really very good. I highly recommend it. The Road is a kind of post-apocalyptic The Way of the Pilgrim. I think it is a masterpiece. As I’ve heard said of a great book: you don’t read it, it reads you. The Road is deliberately ambivalent. He makes you choose. Ultimately it is a book about hope and nihilism. This is also our choice.
The Second Coming. W.B. Yeats. He really is hard to resist quoting. This poem in particular. I will probably find a way to shoehorn in his An Irish Airman Foresees his Death in future posts. Only because I love it.
The Soul’s Desert by Robinson Jeffers
August 30, 1939
They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.Beware of taking sides; only watch.These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but the governmentsOf the great nations; men favorablyRepresentative of massed humanity. Observe them. Wrath and laughterAre quite irrelevant. Clearly it is timeTo become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desertAnd look for God--having seen man.
I'm excited about this Jack. I am hoping it will render me happily redundant ;-)
I think that it is very clear whether you are a friar or a frier (geddit?) and that you know that too. I wish you much luck with the trip to the monastery!
Beautiful writing Jack! To fully enjoy reading Paul’s and now your Substack, including all the enticing appendices and recommended authors, I suspect I may have to give up my day job. But that may be where God is leading me. All the best on your journey - I understand you want certainty about your life’s plan, but as Robert Burns tells us, “the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft a-gley”.