Thank you. Made me think of a quote from Frithjof Shoun, "It is necessary to conquer evil with Peace, being beyond evil, not its contrary. True Peace has no contrary"
My hubby and I were talking to one of the young farmers who sells at our market. He was recounting some of the conflicts and problems that have come up between himself and other like-minded sustainable ag, anti-capitalist, peace loving types. We all decided that what it comes down to is that real life is harder than people realize. Lots of them think that if you just have enough people working together it won't be so hard to live close to the land and to parent young children and cook from scratch etc. Basically, we've been pampered and our expectations are off.
I think it is going to be calamitous and it is going to be a long slow haul for us to re-learn how to do the wood chopping and the laundry scrubbing by hand without swearing or blaming anyone else.
There are many perks to this life but we have work to do to re-learn the pace, rythm, and community dynamics. This is the work that we have before us, now that we have seen where the world is heading.
Clara- It seems that one response to what I am saying is that I am advocating anti-intellectualism or to give up on thinking. I am at the end of a tether with a certain type of think which has dominated our civilization for quite some time. Does our situation right now seem clear to anyone? Is there much agreement to be found. I would say I probably need to clarify what I mean, but that isn't clear either.
We tend to want to create definitive systems wherein no contradictions or lose ends are to be found. Once it is believed to be complete, be it Marxist, Free Market, Liberal, whatever...it then *must* be made universal or one is being irrational. As various opposed ideological systems clash with one another this "refining" process goes into overdrive. We seek to clarify our clarifications and so on and are surprised somehow that we generate not clarity and peace but even more confusion in its wake. Why do we think that *this* time we will find rock bottom? Increasingly I see this as a misuse and degradation and even amputation of reason not its deeper fulfillment.
I am groping towards an embodied, located, communal and contemplative form of reason. By definition this cannot be explicated as a system. There would be I think, common features to this type of fuller and deeper reason, but not always. It would be negotiate between people in a place who seek to be in accord with reality. If they are not so in accord, reality will teach them very quickly.
I bring this up because as many of us start to try to bring our response to the current mess into a lived way of life we cannot count on there being a given way of being in the world, i.e., a common and obvious view of the world. We have all been mangled by the current dispensation.
We will have to be in the world in a very different way. with each other, with nature, with how we survive. The transition will likely be highly confusing. But in the end getting out of our little fantasy worlds will bring us back to real life. We will wake up. Life is difficult one way or another, but what we have now is increasingly ugly and destructive.
One interesting thing about our "information age" is that we can start to learn about and reviving long forgotten skills right now. I would guess you have already long done this. More so than I have.
But even this is an overly-theoretical response. Though something like it will probably show up in a future post. Will I ever learn?!? -Jack
That is a theoretical response, and I'm not sure I understand it all. I don't pretend to have a system that I am promoting or that explains things such as those you mention.
I think there is a decent chance that I won't survive the grim times ahead, and that's OK. I want to finish my race and fight my fight, love people, love earth and fellow creatures, learn humility.
I read a slim book by David Holmgren called Future Scenarios which is based on the concept of energy descent. Those who don't die in wars, or due to misguided govt policies, or due to lack of healthcare will have to learn to live with far less energy per capita over the coming decades. Those who want to love the Creation need to learn this just to act conscientiously. I think the energy lens is a very useful one for organizing all the wildly different information and analysis out there. Basically, most people are planning and living as though we will always continue to have cheap energy but we won't (I believe).
The spiritual side of the issue that you and Paul K explore is far more important and interesting; how we view this change and even embrace and grow as reality returns to us, as individuals and as a culture. I don't think most people are in a place to make a mature and compassionate response, so ugly things will come of that. I pray I am strong enough to hold to my higher ideals and keep the faith.
Ah, forgive me I get caught up in thinking about these issues. But suffice it to say it is going to be a huge adjustment to a post-anthropocentric world, when and if it comes. When I speak of contemplation my hope is that we don't just fall back into a barbarism. At least not completely. One task is learn and preserve the skills needed to survive in a human way, i.e., doesn't preclude human flourishing. David Fleming in his magnum opus Lean Logic, and its condensation in Surviving the Future tries to deal with this.
I also see the new for small communities of contemplatives. This is something I tend to focus on. How do we live, pray, and think, etc. in a way that leads us out are current confusion. Both together is what I have called the New Dark Age. It can be, oddly, a renaissance of a different kind. Even though I also might be long dead before anything like this comes about, I think it is worth trying to live right now as if we were.
With What do We Build a Community? Or, The Language that Silence needs.
On the back cover of the book I hold in my hand I am given this information about its author: “Tomas Halik worked as a psychotherapist during the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and at the same time was secretly ordained as a Catholic priest and active in the underground church.” He has since become quite a big noise in the Roman Church. Maybe you’ve read some of his stuff?
I begin with him for two closely related reasons. First, I love the idea that in my lifetime, in
Eastern Europe men were secretly trained and ordained for service in an underground church. I love, also, that he was led to the Faith by reading Graham Greene and GK Chesterton. But that isn’t my second point. I will come to that presently.
In the opening chapters of Night of The Confessor, Fr Halik offers a fine meditation on Luke 17:16. ‘Lord increase our faith’. This plea, you will recall, comes not from neophytes but the folk who have eaten at table with Him, walked the highways and byways at His side; folk who have seen Him cure lepers, give sight to the blind, ordered a paralytic to rise up from his bed, pick it up and jog along home. Increase our Faith?
What if the conventional way we have come to see this episode is not only wrong, asks Halik, but is actually upside down? What if by using the image of the mustard seed Jesus is not berating them for not having enough Faith, but is rather suggesting that they have a Faith that is, already, too bloated, too cumbersome a thing with which to work. What if they have invested their Faith in too many of the wrong kind of things? What if He wants them to develop a small Faith? A Faith that is as small as a mustard seed in the eyes of the kingdoms of this world but is packed with the power of Heaven? Fr Halik lays it out this way:
“God, who is preached and represented in this world by the One who was crucified and rose from the dead, is the God of paradox: what people consider wise He considers folly, what people consider madness and a stumbling block is wisdom in His eyes, what people see as weakness He considers strength, what people consider great He sees as small, and what they find small He considers great”.
Which leads me to the second point referred to above: I call on Fr. Halik because he stands as a witness to the fact that contexts determine cases. By which I mean that the ‘little’ Faith he extol’s in this book is a Faith with all extraneous embellishment burned away in the fire of the Cross. Well you would, wouldn’t you? If, that is, you had been trained through a clandestine network of low-profile saints dressed as rooming-house janitors and sanitation engineers, and secretly ordained for possible martyrdom in an underground church?
I want to say that the fact that the ‘underground church’ was the Roman Church is important. Not because it is important to be a Roman Catholic in this world, but for this reason: it illuminates the irreducible significance of the power of tradition as the vessel within which the Grace required to create and sustain ‘community’ is freighted.
A beautiful, if rather difficult, representation of that kind of idea is to be found in the work of Catherine Pickstock, a leading light in the theological movement referred to as Radical Orthodoxy. “All rituals”, she maintains are, “a declaration against indeterminacy”. And it is liturgical ritual that invests meaning and order in what Pickstock refers to as the ‘sacred polis’. It is the ‘sacred polis’ that holds the line against the colonising dynamic of the ‘chaotic quotidian’.
The ‘sacred polis’ is an ‘enclave’ wherein, “words are continuous with their referents, and where the violence of time is suspended”. She argues that there are, “various linguistic and semiotic devices which liturgical language employs to keep chaos at bay”, and, these have, “implications for the eventfulness of language, the initiation of sacral, temporal order, and creation of a cohesive community where there is a synaxis, or a ‘coming together’ of the disparate into a single unit.”
John- Beautiful and thoughtful as usual. Thank you. I think it is a very real question where community will or even can come from at this point. With some minor exceptions, the church has had all the communal qualities of a commuter bus station. I am not the only person to notice this.
Not that people didn't try, many did. It is my view that we have created for ourselves, at least here in the US, a situation that is almost precisely designed to preclude community. I say this not merely regarding how we design our housing (let alone the fact that they are designed by engineers at all) but how growing up with television and the internet formed us. This is increasingly true right down to our brains. The rule we have followed haved let us down a blind and dark alley, in fact a bewildering maze of such alleys. A lot of people I know have no sense on how to get out of that, and simply anesthetize themselves in various ways. There are a lot of the Walking Dead out there. I've been one.
Some are called to a lifetime of silence. I am still discerning this for myself. Few will remain there for their lifetimes. But I know from being it that it has helped me in ways that I wouldn't have expected or now even understand. It is clear that silence can be different things for different people. One thing it can be is a way to disconnect from unreality and find real things again. Maybe from there we will find a way beyond the current destructive rule to something filled with life and spirit and in that find each other again.
p.s. I go to a beautiful liturgy here at the monastery. Our 2-man choir is slowly singing more and more of the Mass. It is a true joy to participate at this level. There is a depth in doing so that is probably impossible to find elsewhere in life. This is definitely a necessary part of the topic at hand.
But many people have walked away from any liturgy at all and haven't looked back. Or headed to the East, which certainly isn't short on elaborate and often beautiful ritual and liturgy.
Then there is the sad fact that many forms of Christianity have cast off their older and very beautiful liturgies for something banal and uninspiring to most (certainly to me). To make matters even worse, they trashed transcendent Gregorian Chant for some really horrendous nouveau hymns. Some of them are really terrible beyond my means to fully express. I wish I were exaggerating! A great start would be a return to beautiful liturgies.
I say this because I do agree with what you are saying. -Jack
Wouldn’t presume to question your analysis of the Church in the USA, Dan. I would say similar-sounding things about the Church in these isles; except, I might wish to venture that the situation, here, is less hopeful.
In the States you have, at least, such things as Richard Rohr’s , Centre for Action and Contemplation, you have Fr John Dear’s, The Beatitudes Centre for the Non-Violent Jesus, in addition to a network of over 300 Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality. And I’m, not even counting the more traditional monastic foundations, and those Protestant networks of New Monastic communities and the like.
I would be interested to hear your take on some of that stuff, and how it feeds into, or fails to feed into your own notion of ‘community’, should you feel inclined to share a little. Peace, John.
Michelle- You are very welcome. It is often a struggle, but I do strive to write from my heart. When it starts to get too abstract I throw it away. I throw a lot of what I write away.
Thank you for reading and being here. And of course, I love you, too. Be well. -Jack
"What is all this information doing to my mind and heart. Let alone the stress if inflicts on the body."
Being able to gobble up information and then sometimes make accurate predictions about the economy and politics gave me an income, a sense of meaning and some minimal recognition.
But the psychological/physiological damage has been significant. (I bet my problem of buying way to many books and now subscribing to way too many substack sights is equal to or worse than yours!)
I link my info addiiction to my personal will to power but also to a genuine curiosity about the world, reality, power etc. I feel like I am now engaged in some type of fundamental internal struggle--partially along the lines of "The Journey" by Mary Oliver:
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and
began,
though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice --
I think we have experienced some of the same things. I sometimes find it difficult to articulate this to many people because they still believe more analysis is going to get us out of this mess. We can't even absorb, let alone use, all the analysis and commentary and meta-commentary we have now. And more every day.
I am ambivalent about my own efforts. But if I can encourage people to step outside all of this, if only a little, then maybe it's worth it. But even that is somewhat dubious to me. We shall see.
Good stuff. Perhaps a chunk of the problem lies in the very idea that “to be happy” is a good thing or even attainable... As someone who closed a successful School of Sustainability (SOS) in the early 90’s to begin my solo “schooling in spirituality” (SOS 2.0 ;), I recently have wondered if all my past “problems” were mostly rooted in being a bit of a spoiled brat, thinking I deserved something like happiness, instead of cultivating an ever larger relationship with the mystery. Anyhow, I am daily grateful for the journey. Thanks for your shares of your own 🙏🏼
L'Aura Claire- You are right. Our very notion of happiness is flawed root and branch. It goes against thousands of years of accumulated wisdom. We are seeking it where it can not possibly be found. In fact, we have built a whole civilization on this faulty premise. A civilization that seems to be getting more than a little shaky in the foundations with each passing day.
As you say, personal material happiness is such a narrow goal given the great mystery in which we find ourselves. Why would we aim so low? For a lot of reasons, it turns out. None of them good.
Thank you for your comment. I hope you are well. -Jack
“At the risk of sounding crazy, it very much seems like there are highly organized entities out there striving very hard to shape the way we think.”
It’s funny, how we sometimes feel this need to qualify ourselves (“at the risk of sounding crazy”), when we know it’s not crazy, when we know it’s true, and true in more chilling ways than we can imagine.
“I followed my bliss, which turns out to be terrible advice.”
I was never good at bliss, but it inevitably backfired whenever I tried to get it. The problem wasn’t the desire for bliss so much as the elevation of bliss above all else. This is the new spiritual poison, or rather the old spiritual poison: an effort to distill some perfect state, and keep it, or even harness it somehow.
There is something refreshing about committed language. At the same time language is complicated. I was just chatting with a (physical) friend who is very spiritual, but struggles with propositional spiritual statements, which I sympathize with. Propositions tend to freeze things and kill them. And yet, language and reason, I think, are part of spirituality. Perhaps I will write about this at some point.
In any case, glad you put “sounds crazy” under the grammatical guillotine. :)
Anything put into language is almost guaranteed to be misunderstood, no matter how clear we try to be. Especially when we are trying speak of the most important things, or the highest--language won't reach that high. Yet, being the animal that has logos (i.e, language, discourse, reason, as per Aristotle) to refuse to say anything wouldn't solve it either. We are in a kind of bind.
Perhaps what McGilchrist sees as our imbalance is the warfare over a type of clarity. Which ends in confusion. That said, whatever the cause, I do see we are way out of balance in many regards. The question many of us have is how to go about finding that balance again...or for the first time at all. But yes, we cannot leave out reason, in the widest and deepest sense, lest we fall into another kind of error.
What is the fullness of reason? Whatever it is it would take that fullness to even begin to know.
Just riffin' on your theme. I would love to hear your thoughts on it at some point. Thanks again for the suggestion on "crazy".
Peter- You are absolutely right. That there are "highly organized entities out there striving very hard to shape the way we think” should be a rock bottom, unapologetic first principle. The kind of contemplative life I am proposing is certainly a good unto itself, but it is also about staying sane in the face of this kind of pervasive manipulation.
"Follow your Bliss" is merely a variation on this. The carrot rather than the stick. But it is a poisoned carrot. Follow your bliss is just a poetic way of proposing the hedonic calculus. It destroys whoever attempts to live by it. But it keeps holding out its false promise...
Jeff- A great quote. Something I have thought a lot about of the past few years. I have been on something of a frenzied quest to gather enough information to "figure it all out". When we all do it we become like those in Matthew Arnold's poem On Dover Beach: ignorant armies who clash by night. It is a relief to let that go.
Jeff- It is an interesting thing. The more I let go of all my intellectual pretensions--such as they are--the more things change. The Cloud of Unknowing is a path of love. The author says it explicitly. -Jack
Camilla- You are are absolutely onto something. It is tricky. There are certainly many positive ways to frame this, as you have done. My concern is that even the more positive versions have been weaponized against us. For example our natural empathy--at least here in the US--is used to manipulate us to assent to positions that even a few years earlier would have seem impossible. Yet it works surprisingly well. When you write of "solidarity, empathy, love and community" this is exactly what so many of us are looking for. But these are repackaged and sold to us, and more and more people find themselves isolated and alone.
My own offering is that the ascetic/contemplative path is a way to let go of the bait by which we are hooked. As an aside, I have been thinking about Nietzsche's critique of the ascetic/contemplative view as world-denying. In some forms it certainly is. But I am trying to form a response that it is the only path that is truly world-affirming. Our passions and attachments are, as you say, tricky things, they can point us to the good and induce us to great evil. We are very prone to self-delusion on this count. I am continually seeing the ways that I have been so deluded over the course of my life, and still am. So, mea maxima culpa on that count.
But there is a deeper way to frame "follow your bliss" and this is the perennial reports of contemplatives throughout the world and for thousands of years. That the Kingdom of Heaven is within. I will be so bold to say that once we understand that deeply, the whole world changes. Rather than something horrible to be escaped or a dead thing to be exploited, the earth, the cosmos, becomes a theophany--something infinitely precious and beautiful that expresses a great harmony, a sometimes distant, but often intimate and silent music. Something to be preserved and when used for our necessary survival to be utilized with humility, gratitude and due reverence. This is where, as you say, compassion and love are fundamental ways of knowing/unknowing that connect us to the world and each other.
It's early here so I may be waxing poetic beyond my feeble understanding. I offer this anyway and for what it's worth.
Thank you for your comment. I hope all is well with you. -Jack
Camilla- Oh, I thought I was agreeing with you. Shows how much I know.
I also believe we need to understand the world we live in. Speaking only for myself I know I did it in a way that was far too narrow and, it turns out, effectively endless. It is what I call the para-scholarly approach. Lots of books. It was fun. I'm just not so sure it got me the understanding I sought. Sometimes it feels quite the opposite.
I am suggesting that there might be a broader and deeper way to understand. One that we--as a civilization--have lost somewhat. More than somewhat. This includes me at least as much as anyone. But as for any particular individual, I can only look at how I have done, and what I have missed. I don't know the vast majority of people well enough to say one way or another. So I don't.
So, I apologize if somehow I implied you were a "naive little lady". It was certainly not my intention. Not at all.
Thank you. Made me think of a quote from Frithjof Shoun, "It is necessary to conquer evil with Peace, being beyond evil, not its contrary. True Peace has no contrary"
Blessings
Fredrik- That is it exactly. - Jack
My hubby and I were talking to one of the young farmers who sells at our market. He was recounting some of the conflicts and problems that have come up between himself and other like-minded sustainable ag, anti-capitalist, peace loving types. We all decided that what it comes down to is that real life is harder than people realize. Lots of them think that if you just have enough people working together it won't be so hard to live close to the land and to parent young children and cook from scratch etc. Basically, we've been pampered and our expectations are off.
I think it is going to be calamitous and it is going to be a long slow haul for us to re-learn how to do the wood chopping and the laundry scrubbing by hand without swearing or blaming anyone else.
There are many perks to this life but we have work to do to re-learn the pace, rythm, and community dynamics. This is the work that we have before us, now that we have seen where the world is heading.
Clara
Clara- It seems that one response to what I am saying is that I am advocating anti-intellectualism or to give up on thinking. I am at the end of a tether with a certain type of think which has dominated our civilization for quite some time. Does our situation right now seem clear to anyone? Is there much agreement to be found. I would say I probably need to clarify what I mean, but that isn't clear either.
We tend to want to create definitive systems wherein no contradictions or lose ends are to be found. Once it is believed to be complete, be it Marxist, Free Market, Liberal, whatever...it then *must* be made universal or one is being irrational. As various opposed ideological systems clash with one another this "refining" process goes into overdrive. We seek to clarify our clarifications and so on and are surprised somehow that we generate not clarity and peace but even more confusion in its wake. Why do we think that *this* time we will find rock bottom? Increasingly I see this as a misuse and degradation and even amputation of reason not its deeper fulfillment.
I am groping towards an embodied, located, communal and contemplative form of reason. By definition this cannot be explicated as a system. There would be I think, common features to this type of fuller and deeper reason, but not always. It would be negotiate between people in a place who seek to be in accord with reality. If they are not so in accord, reality will teach them very quickly.
I bring this up because as many of us start to try to bring our response to the current mess into a lived way of life we cannot count on there being a given way of being in the world, i.e., a common and obvious view of the world. We have all been mangled by the current dispensation.
We will have to be in the world in a very different way. with each other, with nature, with how we survive. The transition will likely be highly confusing. But in the end getting out of our little fantasy worlds will bring us back to real life. We will wake up. Life is difficult one way or another, but what we have now is increasingly ugly and destructive.
One interesting thing about our "information age" is that we can start to learn about and reviving long forgotten skills right now. I would guess you have already long done this. More so than I have.
But even this is an overly-theoretical response. Though something like it will probably show up in a future post. Will I ever learn?!? -Jack
That is a theoretical response, and I'm not sure I understand it all. I don't pretend to have a system that I am promoting or that explains things such as those you mention.
I think there is a decent chance that I won't survive the grim times ahead, and that's OK. I want to finish my race and fight my fight, love people, love earth and fellow creatures, learn humility.
I read a slim book by David Holmgren called Future Scenarios which is based on the concept of energy descent. Those who don't die in wars, or due to misguided govt policies, or due to lack of healthcare will have to learn to live with far less energy per capita over the coming decades. Those who want to love the Creation need to learn this just to act conscientiously. I think the energy lens is a very useful one for organizing all the wildly different information and analysis out there. Basically, most people are planning and living as though we will always continue to have cheap energy but we won't (I believe).
The spiritual side of the issue that you and Paul K explore is far more important and interesting; how we view this change and even embrace and grow as reality returns to us, as individuals and as a culture. I don't think most people are in a place to make a mature and compassionate response, so ugly things will come of that. I pray I am strong enough to hold to my higher ideals and keep the faith.
Clara
Ah, forgive me I get caught up in thinking about these issues. But suffice it to say it is going to be a huge adjustment to a post-anthropocentric world, when and if it comes. When I speak of contemplation my hope is that we don't just fall back into a barbarism. At least not completely. One task is learn and preserve the skills needed to survive in a human way, i.e., doesn't preclude human flourishing. David Fleming in his magnum opus Lean Logic, and its condensation in Surviving the Future tries to deal with this.
I also see the new for small communities of contemplatives. This is something I tend to focus on. How do we live, pray, and think, etc. in a way that leads us out are current confusion. Both together is what I have called the New Dark Age. It can be, oddly, a renaissance of a different kind. Even though I also might be long dead before anything like this comes about, I think it is worth trying to live right now as if we were.
-Jack
With What do We Build a Community? Or, The Language that Silence needs.
On the back cover of the book I hold in my hand I am given this information about its author: “Tomas Halik worked as a psychotherapist during the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and at the same time was secretly ordained as a Catholic priest and active in the underground church.” He has since become quite a big noise in the Roman Church. Maybe you’ve read some of his stuff?
I begin with him for two closely related reasons. First, I love the idea that in my lifetime, in
Eastern Europe men were secretly trained and ordained for service in an underground church. I love, also, that he was led to the Faith by reading Graham Greene and GK Chesterton. But that isn’t my second point. I will come to that presently.
In the opening chapters of Night of The Confessor, Fr Halik offers a fine meditation on Luke 17:16. ‘Lord increase our faith’. This plea, you will recall, comes not from neophytes but the folk who have eaten at table with Him, walked the highways and byways at His side; folk who have seen Him cure lepers, give sight to the blind, ordered a paralytic to rise up from his bed, pick it up and jog along home. Increase our Faith?
What if the conventional way we have come to see this episode is not only wrong, asks Halik, but is actually upside down? What if by using the image of the mustard seed Jesus is not berating them for not having enough Faith, but is rather suggesting that they have a Faith that is, already, too bloated, too cumbersome a thing with which to work. What if they have invested their Faith in too many of the wrong kind of things? What if He wants them to develop a small Faith? A Faith that is as small as a mustard seed in the eyes of the kingdoms of this world but is packed with the power of Heaven? Fr Halik lays it out this way:
“God, who is preached and represented in this world by the One who was crucified and rose from the dead, is the God of paradox: what people consider wise He considers folly, what people consider madness and a stumbling block is wisdom in His eyes, what people see as weakness He considers strength, what people consider great He sees as small, and what they find small He considers great”.
Which leads me to the second point referred to above: I call on Fr. Halik because he stands as a witness to the fact that contexts determine cases. By which I mean that the ‘little’ Faith he extol’s in this book is a Faith with all extraneous embellishment burned away in the fire of the Cross. Well you would, wouldn’t you? If, that is, you had been trained through a clandestine network of low-profile saints dressed as rooming-house janitors and sanitation engineers, and secretly ordained for possible martyrdom in an underground church?
I want to say that the fact that the ‘underground church’ was the Roman Church is important. Not because it is important to be a Roman Catholic in this world, but for this reason: it illuminates the irreducible significance of the power of tradition as the vessel within which the Grace required to create and sustain ‘community’ is freighted.
A beautiful, if rather difficult, representation of that kind of idea is to be found in the work of Catherine Pickstock, a leading light in the theological movement referred to as Radical Orthodoxy. “All rituals”, she maintains are, “a declaration against indeterminacy”. And it is liturgical ritual that invests meaning and order in what Pickstock refers to as the ‘sacred polis’. It is the ‘sacred polis’ that holds the line against the colonising dynamic of the ‘chaotic quotidian’.
The ‘sacred polis’ is an ‘enclave’ wherein, “words are continuous with their referents, and where the violence of time is suspended”. She argues that there are, “various linguistic and semiotic devices which liturgical language employs to keep chaos at bay”, and, these have, “implications for the eventfulness of language, the initiation of sacral, temporal order, and creation of a cohesive community where there is a synaxis, or a ‘coming together’ of the disparate into a single unit.”
Enough.
John- Beautiful and thoughtful as usual. Thank you. I think it is a very real question where community will or even can come from at this point. With some minor exceptions, the church has had all the communal qualities of a commuter bus station. I am not the only person to notice this.
Not that people didn't try, many did. It is my view that we have created for ourselves, at least here in the US, a situation that is almost precisely designed to preclude community. I say this not merely regarding how we design our housing (let alone the fact that they are designed by engineers at all) but how growing up with television and the internet formed us. This is increasingly true right down to our brains. The rule we have followed haved let us down a blind and dark alley, in fact a bewildering maze of such alleys. A lot of people I know have no sense on how to get out of that, and simply anesthetize themselves in various ways. There are a lot of the Walking Dead out there. I've been one.
Some are called to a lifetime of silence. I am still discerning this for myself. Few will remain there for their lifetimes. But I know from being it that it has helped me in ways that I wouldn't have expected or now even understand. It is clear that silence can be different things for different people. One thing it can be is a way to disconnect from unreality and find real things again. Maybe from there we will find a way beyond the current destructive rule to something filled with life and spirit and in that find each other again.
Who knows though? I certainly don't.
Be well. -Jack
p.s. I go to a beautiful liturgy here at the monastery. Our 2-man choir is slowly singing more and more of the Mass. It is a true joy to participate at this level. There is a depth in doing so that is probably impossible to find elsewhere in life. This is definitely a necessary part of the topic at hand.
But many people have walked away from any liturgy at all and haven't looked back. Or headed to the East, which certainly isn't short on elaborate and often beautiful ritual and liturgy.
Then there is the sad fact that many forms of Christianity have cast off their older and very beautiful liturgies for something banal and uninspiring to most (certainly to me). To make matters even worse, they trashed transcendent Gregorian Chant for some really horrendous nouveau hymns. Some of them are really terrible beyond my means to fully express. I wish I were exaggerating! A great start would be a return to beautiful liturgies.
I say this because I do agree with what you are saying. -Jack
A Quick Note to a Sad-Sounding Man.
Wouldn’t presume to question your analysis of the Church in the USA, Dan. I would say similar-sounding things about the Church in these isles; except, I might wish to venture that the situation, here, is less hopeful.
In the States you have, at least, such things as Richard Rohr’s , Centre for Action and Contemplation, you have Fr John Dear’s, The Beatitudes Centre for the Non-Violent Jesus, in addition to a network of over 300 Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality. And I’m, not even counting the more traditional monastic foundations, and those Protestant networks of New Monastic communities and the like.
I would be interested to hear your take on some of that stuff, and how it feeds into, or fails to feed into your own notion of ‘community’, should you feel inclined to share a little. Peace, John.
I love you Jack. Thank you for daring to write what some of us only think about.
Michelle- You are very welcome. It is often a struggle, but I do strive to write from my heart. When it starts to get too abstract I throw it away. I throw a lot of what I write away.
Thank you for reading and being here. And of course, I love you, too. Be well. -Jack
"What is all this information doing to my mind and heart. Let alone the stress if inflicts on the body."
Being able to gobble up information and then sometimes make accurate predictions about the economy and politics gave me an income, a sense of meaning and some minimal recognition.
But the psychological/physiological damage has been significant. (I bet my problem of buying way to many books and now subscribing to way too many substack sights is equal to or worse than yours!)
I link my info addiiction to my personal will to power but also to a genuine curiosity about the world, reality, power etc. I feel like I am now engaged in some type of fundamental internal struggle--partially along the lines of "The Journey" by Mary Oliver:
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and
began,
though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice --
Sunshine-
I think we have experienced some of the same things. I sometimes find it difficult to articulate this to many people because they still believe more analysis is going to get us out of this mess. We can't even absorb, let alone use, all the analysis and commentary and meta-commentary we have now. And more every day.
I am ambivalent about my own efforts. But if I can encourage people to step outside all of this, if only a little, then maybe it's worth it. But even that is somewhat dubious to me. We shall see.
Be well. -Jack
Good stuff. Perhaps a chunk of the problem lies in the very idea that “to be happy” is a good thing or even attainable... As someone who closed a successful School of Sustainability (SOS) in the early 90’s to begin my solo “schooling in spirituality” (SOS 2.0 ;), I recently have wondered if all my past “problems” were mostly rooted in being a bit of a spoiled brat, thinking I deserved something like happiness, instead of cultivating an ever larger relationship with the mystery. Anyhow, I am daily grateful for the journey. Thanks for your shares of your own 🙏🏼
L'Aura Claire- You are right. Our very notion of happiness is flawed root and branch. It goes against thousands of years of accumulated wisdom. We are seeking it where it can not possibly be found. In fact, we have built a whole civilization on this faulty premise. A civilization that seems to be getting more than a little shaky in the foundations with each passing day.
As you say, personal material happiness is such a narrow goal given the great mystery in which we find ourselves. Why would we aim so low? For a lot of reasons, it turns out. None of them good.
Thank you for your comment. I hope you are well. -Jack
Yes! And doing well enough ;) here thank you. Hope you are too!
“At the risk of sounding crazy, it very much seems like there are highly organized entities out there striving very hard to shape the way we think.”
It’s funny, how we sometimes feel this need to qualify ourselves (“at the risk of sounding crazy”), when we know it’s not crazy, when we know it’s true, and true in more chilling ways than we can imagine.
“I followed my bliss, which turns out to be terrible advice.”
I was never good at bliss, but it inevitably backfired whenever I tried to get it. The problem wasn’t the desire for bliss so much as the elevation of bliss above all else. This is the new spiritual poison, or rather the old spiritual poison: an effort to distill some perfect state, and keep it, or even harness it somehow.
I changed it to, "I take it as fundamental that there are highly organized entities out there striving very hard to shape the way we think.”
Thank you. No more wishy-washy!
So now it just sounds crazy (kidding!).
There is something refreshing about committed language. At the same time language is complicated. I was just chatting with a (physical) friend who is very spiritual, but struggles with propositional spiritual statements, which I sympathize with. Propositions tend to freeze things and kill them. And yet, language and reason, I think, are part of spirituality. Perhaps I will write about this at some point.
In any case, glad you put “sounds crazy” under the grammatical guillotine. :)
Peter-
Anything put into language is almost guaranteed to be misunderstood, no matter how clear we try to be. Especially when we are trying speak of the most important things, or the highest--language won't reach that high. Yet, being the animal that has logos (i.e, language, discourse, reason, as per Aristotle) to refuse to say anything wouldn't solve it either. We are in a kind of bind.
Perhaps what McGilchrist sees as our imbalance is the warfare over a type of clarity. Which ends in confusion. That said, whatever the cause, I do see we are way out of balance in many regards. The question many of us have is how to go about finding that balance again...or for the first time at all. But yes, we cannot leave out reason, in the widest and deepest sense, lest we fall into another kind of error.
What is the fullness of reason? Whatever it is it would take that fullness to even begin to know.
Just riffin' on your theme. I would love to hear your thoughts on it at some point. Thanks again for the suggestion on "crazy".
-Jack
Riff away! Jazz theology. I will certainly think more about this...
Peter- You are absolutely right. That there are "highly organized entities out there striving very hard to shape the way we think” should be a rock bottom, unapologetic first principle. The kind of contemplative life I am proposing is certainly a good unto itself, but it is also about staying sane in the face of this kind of pervasive manipulation.
"Follow your Bliss" is merely a variation on this. The carrot rather than the stick. But it is a poisoned carrot. Follow your bliss is just a poetic way of proposing the hedonic calculus. It destroys whoever attempts to live by it. But it keeps holding out its false promise...
-Jack
Mark Twain said something like this, “If you don’t read newspapers you are uninformed, and if you do, you are misinformed”.
Jeff- A great quote. Something I have thought a lot about of the past few years. I have been on something of a frenzied quest to gather enough information to "figure it all out". When we all do it we become like those in Matthew Arnold's poem On Dover Beach: ignorant armies who clash by night. It is a relief to let that go.
I hope you are well. -Jack
Yes, I am well, thank you. I trust your journey into the Cloud of Unknowing will bring you , if it hasn't already, to Romans 5:5
Jeff- It is an interesting thing. The more I let go of all my intellectual pretensions--such as they are--the more things change. The Cloud of Unknowing is a path of love. The author says it explicitly. -Jack
“We love because because he first loved us” “ for love is from God” from 1 John
Amen.
I found this absolutely captivating and moving, thank you for this.
Camilla- You are are absolutely onto something. It is tricky. There are certainly many positive ways to frame this, as you have done. My concern is that even the more positive versions have been weaponized against us. For example our natural empathy--at least here in the US--is used to manipulate us to assent to positions that even a few years earlier would have seem impossible. Yet it works surprisingly well. When you write of "solidarity, empathy, love and community" this is exactly what so many of us are looking for. But these are repackaged and sold to us, and more and more people find themselves isolated and alone.
My own offering is that the ascetic/contemplative path is a way to let go of the bait by which we are hooked. As an aside, I have been thinking about Nietzsche's critique of the ascetic/contemplative view as world-denying. In some forms it certainly is. But I am trying to form a response that it is the only path that is truly world-affirming. Our passions and attachments are, as you say, tricky things, they can point us to the good and induce us to great evil. We are very prone to self-delusion on this count. I am continually seeing the ways that I have been so deluded over the course of my life, and still am. So, mea maxima culpa on that count.
But there is a deeper way to frame "follow your bliss" and this is the perennial reports of contemplatives throughout the world and for thousands of years. That the Kingdom of Heaven is within. I will be so bold to say that once we understand that deeply, the whole world changes. Rather than something horrible to be escaped or a dead thing to be exploited, the earth, the cosmos, becomes a theophany--something infinitely precious and beautiful that expresses a great harmony, a sometimes distant, but often intimate and silent music. Something to be preserved and when used for our necessary survival to be utilized with humility, gratitude and due reverence. This is where, as you say, compassion and love are fundamental ways of knowing/unknowing that connect us to the world and each other.
It's early here so I may be waxing poetic beyond my feeble understanding. I offer this anyway and for what it's worth.
Thank you for your comment. I hope all is well with you. -Jack
Camilla- Oh, I thought I was agreeing with you. Shows how much I know.
I also believe we need to understand the world we live in. Speaking only for myself I know I did it in a way that was far too narrow and, it turns out, effectively endless. It is what I call the para-scholarly approach. Lots of books. It was fun. I'm just not so sure it got me the understanding I sought. Sometimes it feels quite the opposite.
I am suggesting that there might be a broader and deeper way to understand. One that we--as a civilization--have lost somewhat. More than somewhat. This includes me at least as much as anyone. But as for any particular individual, I can only look at how I have done, and what I have missed. I don't know the vast majority of people well enough to say one way or another. So I don't.
So, I apologize if somehow I implied you were a "naive little lady". It was certainly not my intention. Not at all.
-Jack