Same here Paul, your writings were essential for me to have been able to find Orthodoxy. I just got baptized this past Pascha, and now I am part of a parish community which respects the sanctity of Creation and whose people I love very much.
If only some of us walk away from it how will it ever change for the better? It seems like there has to be some form of resistance against it directly to alter it's path of pure consumption. Or maybe not?
I watched several episodes of the documentary/series of interviews with Father Lazarus linked in the description below Paul's video. I'd suggest perhaps an answer might be found in there, in the example of this Coptic monk: that to begin and continue to move away from the Machine world and towards divinity/Christ on an individual level *is* the change for the better. Further, it is sufficient, though many of us will feel there must certainly be more we can do.
I've been torn about this, because it's easy to mistake for self-indulgent indifference. And while I feel the pull to break free from the grip of the Machine, I am quite confused about how to get there from here. I will quickly have no food and an angry landlord were I to smash my smartphone. And having been homeless in the recent past, I can attest the Machine has made sure one will spend every waking hour thinking of food and shelter rather than God.
It was not wasting time to read your post. I have not endured homelessness but what you describe about the Machine keeping us fixated on food and shelter is so true. There are many levels and versions of that fixation, but it is still ever present. Thank you for shining a light.
I think the last time that people did not have to actually pay to have a spot of earth to live on, was possibly when there was such a thing as The Commons. I have mentioned it before but a gr gr gr gr uncle of mine lived in England, on the Commons. A few sheep, vegetable plot etc. on land that was held in common by the peasant class. The commons was stolen by the ruling class and my uncle had to do some stealing to get food. He ended up a convict in Australia. Just because he could not grow his own food, to feed himself and his family.
I've never been homeless, but I have lived in some interesting substitutes for it. The trouble today is that even the interesting substitutes are really expensive. Back in the 70's I lived in San Francisco for about $300-350 a month total. Even allowing for inflation, today you couldn't afford a van by the river for that amount. I don't have any solutions for you, but the reason you are having difficulty carving out some time is that it is a lot harder to do it today. All I can say is good luck.
I think the answer to your dilemma is to not think in terms of an individual revolt, done by yourself. Unless you take the desert route and find a cave for solitude. Community is necessary for people to be able to function and keep themselves fed etc etc. A smallish community of like minds, common interests and goals is what is required. There is time then to attend to the sacred in the world in the self, and others. But then, I am still an old hippy at heart.
Thanks, that was very helpful to me. I've been trying, unsuccessfully for the most part, to stop following the news and to replace it with prayer and reading. I'm inspired now to try again.
The following has helped me immensely as I struggle much like you, to the point where I was so frustrated after my perceived lack of progress in "becoming Orthodox" I had considered "taking a year off" of EVERYTHING and setting up shop in a tent somewhere (ha, my husband wasn't buying it). This passage from St Theophan the Recluse in a "Letter to a Young Girl" has given me a tremendous amount of peace and helped me to stop torturing myself in that I have come to realize that my cross to bear will be not one created in my own imagination.
"You ask, 'Must one do something?'. Of course one must! And do whatever comes along--in your circle of friends and in your surroundings--and believe that this is and will be your real work. More will not be demanded of you. It is a great misconception to think, whether for the sake of heaven or, as the modernists put it, to "make one's mark on humanity" that one must undertake great, reverberating tasks. Not at all. It is necessary only to do everything according to the commandments of God. Just what exactly? Nothing in particular--only those things which present themselves to everyone in the circumstances of life, those things which are required by the every day happensings we all encounter. This is how God is. God arranges the fate of each man, and the whole course of one's life is also the work of his most gracious foreknowledge, as is, therefore, every minute and every encounter. Let's take an example: a beggar comes up to you; it is God who has brought him. What should you do? You must help him. God has brough the beggar, of course, desiring you to act toward this beggar in a manner pleasing to Him, and He watches to see what you will actually do--If you do what is pleasing to God, you will be taking a step toward the ultimate goal, the inheritance of heaven. Generalize this occurrence, and you find that in every situation and at every encounter one must do what God wants him to do. And we know truly what He wants from the commandments He has given us. If someone seeks help, then help him. If someone has offended you, forgive him. If you yourself have offended someone, then hasten to ask forgiveness and to make peace."
I can't begin to describe what a RELIEF it was to come to understand that just living my own life is God's plan for us. It is plenty to struggle with the things directly in my path.
Someone smarter can run with this idea better than me, and maybe its been talked about here already, but is our cultural exhaustion, anxiety, anger, sadness, etc etc a result of enough of us using social media to pridefully throw ourselves out into the digital world and not receiving the recognition we believe we deserve? Like jilted tiny gods. Its this illusion that "we" are enough to change the world in our image. But the world isn't responding to our perceived godhood. And maybe our collective subconscious shame is colliding with a weird cultural techno-ego. Rough idea, but I think something might be there.
Dear Paul, thank you as always for this. I too have been struggling with this notion of 'the world', and how exactly I'm supposed to approach it. As a layperson -- a man with a family -- the monastic option isn't available to me. Thank God for them! Their prayers hold the world together. But still, what about me?
Just last week, on Tuesday, the Gospel reading for us Orthodox Christians was from John chapter 12. It included the classic verse John 12:25, "He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life", which tugged at me as it always does. And from that quote came one of the most helpful 'frames' I've ever been given on this topic, which I would love to share with you.
It's from Fr. Alexander Schmemann, from his book "Church, World and Mission". He says:
"In the long history of Christian theology and spirituality, people have spoken of "the world" in two ways, both of them well rooted in the Gospel. On the one hand, we say that "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son"; that the world is an object of divine love, divine creation, divine care; that it is to be saved, transfigured, transformed. But in another sense, and with equal authority in Scripture and Church Tradition, we speak of the world negatively: it is the thing we must leave, a prison from which we must be free, God's rival, deceptively claiming our love with its pride and lust.
"The negative vision is very positive in a spiritual sense; that is to say, it is genuinely necessary to leave the world, to cultivate detachment and freedom from it. But this detachment develops too easily into a kind of indifference, a lack of regard for God's creation. If we chose one of them and pushed to its logical extreme, ignoring the other, we would end up in heresy: the original Greek sense of that word refers to error based on false choice."
The longer my Orthodox understanding deepens, the more and more I keep being confronted with the answer that "it's BOTH!" It's always joy AND suffering. It's the Cross AND the Resurrection. It's the fast AND the feast. It's love the world AND leave the world. The devil would have us think it's either or. But Christ is leading us on the royal path, balancing the two at the same time.
I join you in leaving the world, to the best of my abilities. And slowly, lest I hurt myself. But I pray for God's guidance that it doesn't darken my heart and make me fearful, suspicious, and angry against it -- all of which I'm prone to be. Again, thank you for these words today, they are a big help.
Thank you for this response, it neatly encapsulates much of The Spirit’s leading in my own life lately and I appreciate you articulately putting it down.
Amen! However, it is difficult for me to embrace the monks’ view that isolation and escape is the personal sacrifice that is most pleasing to God. While their commitment to denial of self is indeed a worthy goal, is it not perhaps a selfish act in some way, and is it the best response to the reality of this world of lie and shadow? We are advised to be “as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves.” This implies interaction, not retreat. We are counseled to “be not conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” This implies courage, involvement, awareness and commitment. Jesus said that the second great commandment was similar to the first, “to love your neighbor as yourself.” Kind of hard to do when you’re alone in a cave. No, I’m sorry, I think that while turning off the world certainly has an appeal and does lead to a better focus on ultimate reality, this is not our primary task. Rather, as someone else here has mentioned, it is to be faithful in the little things as they come across our path, perhaps even warning folks that things are not as they may appear to be. If there are no critics of the puppet-masters, if they are not engaged, they will have free rein and reign.
Agreed. My comment is not very far above yours, and you might want to check it out.
Being out of the world, I think, means feeling that you REST on/in your faith in Christ, that your faith in Christ is a PLACE where you can rest to avoid being caught up in the tumult and the anxiety that is Man's lot in life, and not just the world.
Being out of the world, for example, while being IN "Jesu, meine Freude", where Bach talks about the tumult of the world, and says that he is staying PUT, HERE, and singing IN PEACE. He is staying PUT, singing, IN Christ ? his faith ?
What you say about heresy applies also to "sin", which means to miss the mark. I like the fact that the word sin can be seen as a term of archery, even. Missing the mark.
As for retiring from the world, more than 15 years ago, I started hearing in my mind the Mahler song from the Ruckhert Lieder which is called "ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen", "I am lost to the world". You can surely find all the German lyrics, and listen to this song which I talk about here often.
When I first started hearing this song in my mind, it made me afraid, because I have a long history of withdrawing from the world... and it is not really comfortable to withdraw from it.
Now, more and more, watching the way the Internet is playing out in our lives, I feel the necessity to.. disconnect myself as much as possible from it, as the true... disembodied embodiment of what Paul calls the Machine.
Why I feel that the Internet is the Machine ? Because its invention pushes us to be permanently connected, and this push towards permanent connection is a negation of being born, the "natus" that is in the word "nature". "Nature" entails being born, being SEPARATED from the womb, and the connection to the womb, but I think that the Internet culture negates our birth in the same way that it negates our death.
So, I am resolving to the best of my ability to strictly limit my contact with Internet in any form, circumscribing it in time. Self discipline, which will be very difficult, because everything is being done to HOOK US on Internet.
I also feel the need to limit my... ex-pression of myself, particularly in writing, but also in speech. There are too many of us ex-pressing ourselves, and the Verb suffers in consequence. The people who have the discipline, are ready to make the effort to become WRITERS need to write, and maybe get money for it. This is not my case. I have talents elsewhere, and I don't need to work for money to live.
To those who may be interested, in France, the public administration near me which handles the identity status of out of the European Union people in our megapole has so much transferred all of its BUSINESS to Internet/Machine programs, that there is almost nobody working in the physical building, and the people working there are executants of... the Machine. They cannot humanely and adequately WELCOME the public, the aliens/immigrants who come to ensure that they conform to the legal requirements to remain on French soil.
This is the state of French public service because of the (computer) Machine. It is shameful.
It is shameful, and it constitutes a break of the social contract, in my opinion. To the extent that the State, with the help of the Machine, refuses to welcome even its own citizens in its PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONS, and institutions, it has broken the social contract, and must deal with the consequences, for itself and for... the citizens/immigrants.
Things are playing out this way in France, because globally ? the French are always eager to embrace the next.. church. Zealously, with no discrimination, on BLIND FAITH, and the results are always catastrophic on the dirty, aging bodies that WE ARE (in addition to our spiritual nature, of course).
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Yes, to "BOTH" in your comment. This is the hardest part : how to be an animal that has its head in the stars, and its feet on the ground, and its nose very very far away from dirt and most unpleasant odors, especially the smells of aging bodies, by the way.
And finally, back to leaving the world : yesterday, after doing my shopping at the small Mom and Pop store where I buy my staples that I can't get on the market, I walked through an area where I have been walking for about 20 years, with a small pond. It is a place... out of the world, where I have seen a kingfisher, a couple of squirrels nest, and the local heron wades from time to time. My eye was caught by a female duck ("cane" in French which has a word for a female duck), and a just hatched duckling. When I came closer, I recognized the mama duck who has successfully raised clutches of 10 ducklings on this out of the way pond for the past three years. She is repopulating the ducks in our neighborhood. It brought me joy to see her, to recognize her, and all her new life. So much joy that afterwards, I had to go to my farmer's market and spread the... good news about all that new life on the small pond right behind the farmer's market and... out of the world.
Everybody to whom I gave this good news was very happy to receive it from me.
Think about it... this is how Jesus spread the good news, by physically going OUT and talking with people, physically suffering for his temerity, not by Internet broadcast. And look how far it took/got him...
Sometimes you don't have to go very far to retire from the world...
You mention, "missing the mark", yes, as a builder of things, it brings to mind the idea of the plumb line, per Isaiah, "Also I will make justice the measuring line, And righteousness the plummet." The plummet of the house of Ahab was not the plummet of the Lord. Plumb bobs aren't used much anymore; hard to pinpoint when it's windy. But we have very accurate levels and the bubble is either in the middle or it's not and if it's in the middle, that side of the column is plumb. The plumb bob on a quiet day is better, though, because it accounts for all planes at once, whereas the level is only checking a single plane at a time.
Is the internet a machine? Certainly, yes. But the machine is only a problem if it’s in charge. Do we use the machine or does the machine use us? That is the question, and maybe we don’t really know the answer. Perhaps we are so enmeshed in its gears that we are blinded to true reality. That is possible. But as children of God, we have a Touchstone that transcends our circumstance. A Rock, so to speak. “Rock of Ages, cleft for me.” So we can use the machine, and I can read your words, and be the richer for it, even though I may take exception to your conclusions. Your voice from France is beautiful, and needs to be heard. You are a thinker and a writer whether you like it or not; doesn’t matter if you’re not paid. Why not commit your thoughts to paper, or a screen, if they are a blessing to someone else? There is a passage in Romans that refers to us as “vessels of mercy.” That is something we are, but is also something we can share, either face to face, or in words written down from across the sea.
I share your frustration with the bureaucratic conglomerate, but also with the sad state of the Church. Foreign to the Orthodox tradition, yet drawn to its reverence, I can’t help but think there’s a better way than modern Protestant contemporary practice, but it’s not a new way, rather a rediscovered old one. Your love of classical music is a key to what we seek, but a weekly communion as the high point of the service prefaced by a thoughtful Scriptural meditation is also a requirement. “We only have communion once a month, or once a quarter, because we don’t want it to become too common.” Really? The Son of God, hanging on a cross to absolve you of your sins is too common?
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By the way, “Multi-disciplinary research has revealed that electrically conductive contact of the human body with the surface of the Earth (grounding or earthing) produces intriguing effects on physiology and health.” From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378297/ courtesy of Dr. Robert Malone’s substack.
Your duck story resonates, and thank you for mentioning “cane.” I didn’t know. But it reminds me of an incident nearly a couple of decades ago. My colleague and I were installing rolladen in a densely constructed subdivision in San Antonio with a lot of concrete and very little grass. Richard said, “Chris, come look.” I stopped what I was doing, and there coming out of an open garage and parading down the concrete was a mama duck followed in a single file line by her well-behaved brood of young ducklings. It made such an impact on both of us! Joyous to see and so unexpected!. So much so that I mentioned the event at Richard’s funeral several years later. Survival in the face of adversity! Triumph over the machine! Life as it’s supposed to be lived in the most challenging of circumstances!
Very interesting, and a little frustrating, because I don't really know what you're talking about with the plumb line. I am a builder... in words, if you like, and music, too.
I do not agree with you about being in charge of the Machine, because all of our tools fashion us when we use them. We are not separate from our tools. If you hold a spoon in your hand, and use it to probe down in a glass, you can feel in your hand where the spoon makes contact with the glass. No, we are not separate from our tools.
But thank you for complimenting me on my writing. I love to write.
For years, the Catholic Church practiced communion several times a week, I think, because communion was a re-enactment of Christ's sacrifice, and I believe that sacri-fice, as what makes holy, or sacred, has to be continuously repeated in order for it to be... effective, shall we say.
As I have perhaps said elsewhere here, sacrifice is what makes a people, a community. Without sacrifice, there is no community, I believe. The catch is... who/what to sacrifice, where, when, how.... lots of questions, lots of possibilities there.
Isaiah uses the plummet as analogous to that of a moral standard, that of perfection. There is only one line that is truly plumb from Point A above to Point B below. There are a myriad of ways, or directions, an infinite number in fact, that the line can be out of plumb. Our behavior is measured against that line and we all fall short in this fallen world. We are thus in need of a Savior.
But we disagree concerning our relation to the machine, as long as we have the luxury of perspective and access to eternal truth. I put down the hammer after driving the nail. Although if it had not been for electricity, I would not have been a carpenter. Now if you ask about life without air conditioning in Texas, perhaps I would need to reconsider…
I am currently having an E-Mail conversation in French with a retired philosophy professor who specializes in Plato's dialogues from a literary perspective. We haggle a bit... what I notice in what you wrote above is that the plummet line is a mathematical, and thus abstract, construction. For millenia now we have been EQUATING mathematics with truth, but the question is just what kind of truth can be inferred ? from mathematical constructs ? Truth... of a certain nature. But we come down to Pilate's very pertinent (and not impertinent) question to Jesus in this trial (or mistrial, if you prefer) that has had such a tremendous impact on the western world : just what is Truth/truth ? Is it One ?
Whatever one can suppose, or pose about mathematics, the fact is that we have to go through our written and spoken word to get there and come back. And that fact has implications that most people can not, or will not, face. We are putting too much faith in mathematics to lead us to an absolute truth about the universe, and ourselves, in my opinion.
My husband and I live without air conditioning in our area. Many people are putting air conditioning in now, since U.S. technology has been colonizing the world along with U.S. ideas about doing business. But I think that air conditioning gives a significant push to buying and selling 24 hours a day, and hubris on a grand scale, and we definitely don't need that right now...
No, I wouldn’t say it’s abstract. No more than physics and gravity are abstract. Of course, the behavior of the plumb line is a function of gravity, so the plummet does become rather abstract in outer space, where it ceases to function in any capacity whatsoever. Yet the principle to which it was pointing remains unfettered and in tact since it is not earthbound nor limited by gravity. So when we tweak Pilate’s question a bit, and ask, “What is the origin of truth” we can say with certainty that it is a function of the nature of God, as is its essence. As is justice. As is righteousness. As is love. It is not bound by the constraints of time and space. It has no beginning and no end. It always was and always will be. When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life…” he was speaking way beyond our capacity to understand, which of course is why He spoke in parables so often. And He left no room to wiggle. As has been said, he was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Son of God. Mathematics is useful in its limited way, but Naturalism is a silly way to look for a First Cause.
Words convey thoughts. Yes, they are imperfect but we use words to think and without words we would be less than human. It’s hard to imagine a world in which words have been expunged and are non-existent. I often wonder how animals think. We have dogs and cats and they are not stupid. We see every day that dogs have masters and cats have staff. Perhaps they have a language without words?
I was kind of kidding about the air conditioning in light of your latitudinal advantage. We lived without it when we were younger, but have since become spoiled. Had several days of 110° last year.
Your comment on avoiding the news reminded me of something I came across many years ago on the effects of the 'consumption' of news. It was written in 2010, but still relevant I think:
Oh my! I’m 82, retired at 81 from providing therapy as a Clinical Social Worker, mother of 6, grandmother of 23 great gran of 2 and a Christian of all sorts and intensities since 30. And then came home to Orthodoxy and was baptized (for the 4th time) and Chrismated on the 4th of May. And I have more time to be still and “know the Knower” as someone expressed. And I do think only what we bring from that stillness to the world is valuable and will be different from what we brought before. You are giving up the news and feeling a loss. I am getting up at 6am rather than 10am or later and feeling shaky about continuing what is becoming a rich loving time. But apart from knowing the reality and sharing that which comes from spending time with God we are just tinkering with the Machine and producing what AI can reproduce. I only know enough about either of them from a few podcasts by you and your friends to know I don’t want any more of that. That message is received.
All this to say, that what you are sharing now cannot be duplicated very well by AI. And the more you listen to the Real True God, the less AI and the machine can copy. We don’t need you but God in you which we just heard from this time with you in your garden. And if further retreat is asked of you, trust for the good. Thank you Paul
Hi Sara you’re inspiring me ,at nearly 70 , having like you been a Christian a long time - since my mid teens but with ventures into different forms and more universal understandings of spirituality and now wondering about Orthodoxy .
I love this “what you are sharing now cannot be duplicated very well by AI. And the more you listen to the Real True God, the less AI and the machine can copy.”
Those of us that know God will be more discerning than others and there’s the audience right there.
“How far do we have to walk away from the human world in order to understand the nature of reality, and to connect to the creator beyond and beneath it?”
First, I would say that seeking to connect with God as Father should take precedence over connecting with him as creator. The paradigm of our relationship with the Father is rooted in his eternal begetting of the Son. Therefore, just as the uncreated Son does not relate to the Father as creator, so we - as creatures who are sons by adoption - do not relate to God first as creator but first as Father.
To seek connection to God as creator without first enjoying our adoption to sonship is to root our essential experience of God in our creatureliness, rather than participation in the divine nature.
Second, I would suggest that enjoying our adoption to sonship is synonymous with enjoying the eternal Sonship of Christ. So, the enjoyment of one’s sonship is found in and through one’s mystical union with the eternal Son. The mystery of our adoption to Sonship is that it gives us access - by grace - to the bond of love between the Father and the Son. This is infinitely higher and more glorious than any possible relationship between the creator and one of his creatures. It is an invitation to experience not just union with Christ, but the union of Christ with the Father.
““O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.””
So thirdly, I think we seek to know the Father in the way the eternal Son knows him, reveals him, and unites us to him. This knowing is first entered into by means of being loved by the Father, not by means of separation from the world but by means of union with Christ. However, the practice of the incarnate son was to slip away to desolate places in order to set his mind on things above, namely his Father. So it is for those who are in Christ. Our chief intention is not to retreat from the world as creatures seeking the creator, but to slip away as sons seeking intimacy with their father.
“Therefore, if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.”
I fear that it is a question that has a lot of bearing on where we are right now.
What is the role of Woman in all of this ?
I say this as an aging woman, wife, a person who is a body, a mind, and a soul, and the mother of a son.
I like to tell people that when you look at the word "woman", you can see how "man" issues forth from "woman", as in "man born of woman". How he proceeds AWAY FROM her, which is the source of considerable tension, conflict, and tragedy, even.
Well, in terms of status, I think the believer’s union with Christ - and their identity as a child of God - is the same for men and for women.
“For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
However, I can imagine that at the level of the individual believer there will be experiential differences of God’s fatherhood from one person to another, and that some of those experiences will relate to our biological sex.
Equality of status doesn’t mean uniformity of experience. Each of us will experience the Father differently because the Father is infinitely good and knows each of us personally.
It has taken me over 60 years to come to terms with being a woman (and not a female... big difference there), and I can't say that I look with great pleasure on Saint Paul's affirmation that belief in Christ levels the playing field for everybody everywhere.
Now, I like being a woman, and find it is one of the greatest challenges of my life, as I think it is a great challenge in the life of a man to be... born of woman. It is a great challenge to be born of woman, and a great challenge to have a future man issue forth from your body "inter feces, etc". I can assure you that it rattles you, particularly as your son becomes a man more and more, and stops being the baby whose diaper you changed.
I realize that we are haggling over this like rabbis, or early Christian... fathers, but sometimes I like to haggle. It can be invigorating to haggle, and I'm not against that. (What could I do with a sword over Internet anyway ?...)
What you say about equality is one of the greatest problems with the Machine, in our SIN in equating equality of status with uniformity.
I call that... sin. Missing the mark.
But I believe that fundamentally, relationships except perhaps with God... are unequal. I also believe that love is one of the greatest scandals of our human experience because so many people feel left out and jealous when they see it around them.
Our understanding of the word "equality" is one of the biggest motors of the Machine right now.
Indeed. Galatians 3:27-28 is one of the most misused texts of scripture in the church today. It is often used to suggest that union with Christ affects an annihilation of difference and a blurring of categories. This is not the case. It simply affirms that union with Christ is not affected differently for people of different sexes, social status, culture of origin and so on. It says nothing about the experiential and subjective dynamics of union with Christ.
Sure. The Apostle Paul isn’t saying that union with Christ destroys, abrogates or annihilates biological, social and cultural distinctions. He’s saying that biological, social and cultural distinctions are no impediment to union with Christ and that, with specific reference to salvation, union with Christ supercedes all such distinctions.
Yes! We must remember that the word “Our” was, is, and always will be on the lips of Jesus. He says it with us, so that we may say it with him and with one another.
Thanks for this Paul. This topic of asceticism, solitude, prayer, mystical foundations etc….has been circling in my mind for some time now. Of course it has much to do with my own circumstances and my personality but more than that it has to do with what healing looks like. Healing for the world, healing for the community and healing for each individual’s journey and soul. We are not disconnected from any of these things and we need our mystical theology. In a world that has forgotten faeries, enchanted forests and dragons we wander like fools into all kinds of trouble, and not Holy Fools either. Just simply arrogant idiots. Greenhorns, if you like. Ill equipped and dangerously ignorant of what really lies beneath.
Your video gave me the nudge I needed to begin a series on the Saints, Desert Fathers, mystical Christianity and a withdrawal from the world for the Life of the World.
I’m on holidays right now myself. So great for new perspectives. Have a good vacation yourself. God bless.
Thank you for this, the timing is just much appreciated. I just deleted the news app off my phone, partially to prepare for the upcoming election in the US and partially because of something similar to what you say. Recently I watched a video where the speaker talked about how the results you are getting are related to unconscious commitments. When I applied it to my everyday life and just how many articles I’ve read that spread doom, disaster, and how many are finely tuned to get under your skin I just realized I needed to step away.
While you mention that language may have been the start of the machine but now I think it’s also turning everything into data, which allows writers to turn nothingness into clickbait, gives provides large companies with the means to amplify everything to gain readers. Money clicks and engagement are prioritized over wellbeing and connection. Since we virtually killed print media all this hyper-stimulating content can be justified as a means to try and save the institutions that are dependent on money to survive. Or at least that’s the excuse now but over the next many months here in the states we’ll be told our democracy is at risk (truthfully it may be).
The biblical idea that the kingdom is all around us but we can’t see it seems to apply more today than ever. Strip away the mountains of absolute garbage on the internet, the algorithms force feeding you fear and politics and instead as you point out we have access to listening to a modern desert father on the other side of the planet. Strip away the clickbait and desperate posts where people are just tying to connect with others on platforms designed to disconnect and there are surely hundreds of thousands of families, religious and intentional communities that are not trending on any platform but have found a better way to live and thrive and get closer to the truth.
After the election of Donald Trump seven years ago my neighbor decided to not watch the news and did not want to be told anything about politics. I thought it was a position of extreme privilege,was offended by it, and judged him harshly for it. In the run up to this election I cannot help but see that he was right. I spent 4 years trying to stay informed, 4 years in stress, grief, and anger. For what? The current president has made little attempt to change many of the alarming policies that Trump instituted and has even doubled down on things like the trade war.
In the last week alone I’ve seen an uptick in intentionally triggering/offensive campaign materials; a man wearing a tshirt in a doctor’s office that said “Biden is more confused than Michelle Obama’s gynecologist”, multiple trucks with bumper stickers that say “Joe and the Hoe” written in a font made of assault rifles, and another bumper sticker at the grocery store that read “another republican working hard so you don’t have to”. I think you are absolutely right, it’s just designed to distract us from the truth and more so, the more we engage we tend to pull the other direction and come up with our own clever and often equally offensive/triggering slogans which just amplifies everything.
In Tennessee, the conservative southern state where I grew up, I’ve seen posts about how there are now two license plates for your car now, one with “in god we trust” and the other without but the ones without are easily identifiable because the first three digits are numbers rather than letters. So conservative Christian organizations have made posts about how you can identify the godless ones on the road which just makes people on the left feel they must reject these four words despite the fact that they are one our currency because now it represents a form of authoritarianism. I cannot blame people for rejecting it, and like me when I lived in the south I cannot blame people for rejecting these four words and Christianity as a whole because it has been so politicized.
Politics and belief just makes belief political and more often than many of us want to admit we will define ourself and change our positions based on being in opposition to the other and what we’re not. Religion and spirituality must be a way of seeing and being in the world and should align with ideals and truth rather than political parties.
I share your honest appreciation about what's going on in the States, although I have not lived in my country for 45 years now.
About two years, maybe more, before the Covid, I stopped listening to the 5 minute news bulletin on French public radio because it had become evident to me that it was sheer propaganda. I am not spending hours in front of my screen GETTING IN-FORMED about what is going on all over the planet.
When you think about it, the invention of the radio, then the television was very influential in forging a COMMON CULTURE in the U.S. (and elsewhere). Born in 1956, I can remember when American television was in black and white, and only on in the evening, limited to three networks.
But even then, there was an almost religious reverence for the national news broadcast, and that's how A MAJORITY of Americans were IN-FORMED about what was going on in the country and the U.S. It was a COMMON, and shared experience that pulled people together, uniformized them in their perception of what was going on in the world.
Things have certainly changed from my childhood. By the time I left the States in the late 1970's, American television had succumbed to the law of the least common denominator, and their was little effort to uplift ? the citizenry in A NOBLE WAY. Little effort to promote a culture of... excellence (which goes with the word "aristocracy", by the way).
Fifteen years ago, I started to watch the summer Olympic games on U.S. television, but gave up after 15 minutes because the commercial breaks destroyed the continuity of what I was watching. You may have noticed that this has happened on the Internet, too. What was... "for free" has always been financed by PUBLICITY. A mind staggering observation when you think about it.
I have just finished Mary Renault's book about the Peloponesian war between Sparta and Athens. She depicts the political climate of Athens, she fleshes out Sokrates and prominent oligarchs in the struggling democratic Athens. She has no complacency for democracy's ills, moreover. The book is called "The Last of the Wine", and is excellent. It taught me a lot, in a manner that helps me to think about our current situation. You might enjoy it as an antidote to journalistic prose, which we get a lot of these days. Dished out with sociology.
Ugh. What the Verb has sunk to staggers my mind...
Thank you for that. To you as well, the video I watched was by Jim Dethmer of Coaches Rising. He effectively uses the Karpman Drama triangle to illustrate and bring awareness to when we are out of presence. Combine that with the idea of unconscious commitments and it is pretty clear the United States is unconsciously committed to testing itself apart.
The idea that we are going to be in two ongoing wars, an economic/proxy war with China/Russia while still playing the left/right game at home feels completely insane and a plan that cannot be successful without a major and immediate transformation.
I'm a late adapter. I didn't get so much as a flip phone until I was over 60, a smart phone until I was over 65. A few months ago, I wasn't sure what Substack was or where it was "located." I only made the effort to find out because I heard you, Paul, were on it. Unfortunately, now I have taken to scrolling the Substack app for more "content.' Admittedly, lot of what I read there is good, some is actually excellent, but lately I feel that all I'm really doing is exchanging some old distractions for a new one. And it's just as addictive. I find that the trouble with leaving the world is that while most of it is total crap, as you say, some of it isn't. Sometimes I feel like Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Just dig a little more gold, I say, and then I will quit. Of course, we all know how that ended. It does seem the only way to do it is like Father Lazurus; just lay down the shovel and stop digging.
Your final thoughts quote remind me of another fellow’s thoughts on learning from monastics as those who yet remain in the world: “Not all Christians are called to be monastics, but we are all called to be ascetics.”
Thank you for your thoughts. Have a blessed holiday!
If we fast from the news as Paul is hoping to do, it can have a similar effect on our souls as fasting from food, to make us more receptive to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Then, whatever our station in life, we’ll have more love to spread abroad in the world.
What a wonderful video Paul. Very thought provoking. I too find more peace when I unplug from media/news. But I do drift back. Ugh. Interestingly, I just read the following article from St. Elizabeth Convent (Minsk) this morning:
This ascetic effort is perhaps worth considering (with the guidance of one’s spiritual elder), as many of us keep up the search for ways to become closer to God in a crazy world. Most of us cannot completely drop out of the world - but we can work on creating our own poustinya (desert).
I am subscribed to only 2 Substacks and it has been a complete joy to find someone who visits and writes about holy wells and hermits…..because they fascinate me. I’m not Orthodox but I am a Christian who, for years, has dragged my husband and sons to holy well sites and rocks in forests where hermits lived. There is something sacred, holy and it points to something…..it leaves the world behind and opens a door to engage with God and His son. I can’t express it very well but there’s something profound going on and I would say you are one of those people who stand on the edges and do the pointing suggesting ways that might lead somewhere.
It’s good stuff.
I am sick of all the political nonesense.
I joined Friends of Friendless churches and went to their open day at St Lawrence’s Church …..far better way to spend some spare time.
Are your writings and musings worthless? Goodness no.
Without them I doubt I'd ever never have become a Christian, let alone Orthodox!
Well, that has made me very happy as I depart for my holiday! Thank you.
Same here Paul, your writings were essential for me to have been able to find Orthodoxy. I just got baptized this past Pascha, and now I am part of a parish community which respects the sanctity of Creation and whose people I love very much.
Thank you for your work.
Glory to God 🙏☦️ Welcome home and many years!
If only some of us walk away from it how will it ever change for the better? It seems like there has to be some form of resistance against it directly to alter it's path of pure consumption. Or maybe not?
I watched several episodes of the documentary/series of interviews with Father Lazarus linked in the description below Paul's video. I'd suggest perhaps an answer might be found in there, in the example of this Coptic monk: that to begin and continue to move away from the Machine world and towards divinity/Christ on an individual level *is* the change for the better. Further, it is sufficient, though many of us will feel there must certainly be more we can do.
I've been torn about this, because it's easy to mistake for self-indulgent indifference. And while I feel the pull to break free from the grip of the Machine, I am quite confused about how to get there from here. I will quickly have no food and an angry landlord were I to smash my smartphone. And having been homeless in the recent past, I can attest the Machine has made sure one will spend every waking hour thinking of food and shelter rather than God.
Sorry for wasting your time, I have no answers.
It was not wasting time to read your post. I have not endured homelessness but what you describe about the Machine keeping us fixated on food and shelter is so true. There are many levels and versions of that fixation, but it is still ever present. Thank you for shining a light.
I think the last time that people did not have to actually pay to have a spot of earth to live on, was possibly when there was such a thing as The Commons. I have mentioned it before but a gr gr gr gr uncle of mine lived in England, on the Commons. A few sheep, vegetable plot etc. on land that was held in common by the peasant class. The commons was stolen by the ruling class and my uncle had to do some stealing to get food. He ended up a convict in Australia. Just because he could not grow his own food, to feed himself and his family.
These are the big questions. It is probably why I keep coming back again and again to this.
No time wasted here. Thanks for the response and I'll be checking out those vids as well.
I've never been homeless, but I have lived in some interesting substitutes for it. The trouble today is that even the interesting substitutes are really expensive. Back in the 70's I lived in San Francisco for about $300-350 a month total. Even allowing for inflation, today you couldn't afford a van by the river for that amount. I don't have any solutions for you, but the reason you are having difficulty carving out some time is that it is a lot harder to do it today. All I can say is good luck.
I think the answer to your dilemma is to not think in terms of an individual revolt, done by yourself. Unless you take the desert route and find a cave for solitude. Community is necessary for people to be able to function and keep themselves fed etc etc. A smallish community of like minds, common interests and goals is what is required. There is time then to attend to the sacred in the world in the self, and others. But then, I am still an old hippy at heart.
I like what you have to say and you are not wasting time, just clarifying what commitment cost.
Thanks, that was very helpful to me. I've been trying, unsuccessfully for the most part, to stop following the news and to replace it with prayer and reading. I'm inspired now to try again.
It appears the human touch is still what inspires!
Happy travels!
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/miles-astray-non-ai-photo-wins-ai-competition-2500809/amp-page
The following has helped me immensely as I struggle much like you, to the point where I was so frustrated after my perceived lack of progress in "becoming Orthodox" I had considered "taking a year off" of EVERYTHING and setting up shop in a tent somewhere (ha, my husband wasn't buying it). This passage from St Theophan the Recluse in a "Letter to a Young Girl" has given me a tremendous amount of peace and helped me to stop torturing myself in that I have come to realize that my cross to bear will be not one created in my own imagination.
"You ask, 'Must one do something?'. Of course one must! And do whatever comes along--in your circle of friends and in your surroundings--and believe that this is and will be your real work. More will not be demanded of you. It is a great misconception to think, whether for the sake of heaven or, as the modernists put it, to "make one's mark on humanity" that one must undertake great, reverberating tasks. Not at all. It is necessary only to do everything according to the commandments of God. Just what exactly? Nothing in particular--only those things which present themselves to everyone in the circumstances of life, those things which are required by the every day happensings we all encounter. This is how God is. God arranges the fate of each man, and the whole course of one's life is also the work of his most gracious foreknowledge, as is, therefore, every minute and every encounter. Let's take an example: a beggar comes up to you; it is God who has brought him. What should you do? You must help him. God has brough the beggar, of course, desiring you to act toward this beggar in a manner pleasing to Him, and He watches to see what you will actually do--If you do what is pleasing to God, you will be taking a step toward the ultimate goal, the inheritance of heaven. Generalize this occurrence, and you find that in every situation and at every encounter one must do what God wants him to do. And we know truly what He wants from the commandments He has given us. If someone seeks help, then help him. If someone has offended you, forgive him. If you yourself have offended someone, then hasten to ask forgiveness and to make peace."
I can't begin to describe what a RELIEF it was to come to understand that just living my own life is God's plan for us. It is plenty to struggle with the things directly in my path.
This is summed up well by an old song -- Brighten the corner where you are.
I really love this quote thank you
I wrote this down yesterday
We didn't want to depend on god
Now we don't want to depend on each other
We hid from god
Now we hide from each other
Like you said, people running from the world.
Someone smarter can run with this idea better than me, and maybe its been talked about here already, but is our cultural exhaustion, anxiety, anger, sadness, etc etc a result of enough of us using social media to pridefully throw ourselves out into the digital world and not receiving the recognition we believe we deserve? Like jilted tiny gods. Its this illusion that "we" are enough to change the world in our image. But the world isn't responding to our perceived godhood. And maybe our collective subconscious shame is colliding with a weird cultural techno-ego. Rough idea, but I think something might be there.
Dear Paul, thank you as always for this. I too have been struggling with this notion of 'the world', and how exactly I'm supposed to approach it. As a layperson -- a man with a family -- the monastic option isn't available to me. Thank God for them! Their prayers hold the world together. But still, what about me?
Just last week, on Tuesday, the Gospel reading for us Orthodox Christians was from John chapter 12. It included the classic verse John 12:25, "He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life", which tugged at me as it always does. And from that quote came one of the most helpful 'frames' I've ever been given on this topic, which I would love to share with you.
It's from Fr. Alexander Schmemann, from his book "Church, World and Mission". He says:
"In the long history of Christian theology and spirituality, people have spoken of "the world" in two ways, both of them well rooted in the Gospel. On the one hand, we say that "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son"; that the world is an object of divine love, divine creation, divine care; that it is to be saved, transfigured, transformed. But in another sense, and with equal authority in Scripture and Church Tradition, we speak of the world negatively: it is the thing we must leave, a prison from which we must be free, God's rival, deceptively claiming our love with its pride and lust.
"The negative vision is very positive in a spiritual sense; that is to say, it is genuinely necessary to leave the world, to cultivate detachment and freedom from it. But this detachment develops too easily into a kind of indifference, a lack of regard for God's creation. If we chose one of them and pushed to its logical extreme, ignoring the other, we would end up in heresy: the original Greek sense of that word refers to error based on false choice."
The longer my Orthodox understanding deepens, the more and more I keep being confronted with the answer that "it's BOTH!" It's always joy AND suffering. It's the Cross AND the Resurrection. It's the fast AND the feast. It's love the world AND leave the world. The devil would have us think it's either or. But Christ is leading us on the royal path, balancing the two at the same time.
I join you in leaving the world, to the best of my abilities. And slowly, lest I hurt myself. But I pray for God's guidance that it doesn't darken my heart and make me fearful, suspicious, and angry against it -- all of which I'm prone to be. Again, thank you for these words today, they are a big help.
Glory to God for all things!
Thank you for this response, it neatly encapsulates much of The Spirit’s leading in my own life lately and I appreciate you articulately putting it down.
Amen! However, it is difficult for me to embrace the monks’ view that isolation and escape is the personal sacrifice that is most pleasing to God. While their commitment to denial of self is indeed a worthy goal, is it not perhaps a selfish act in some way, and is it the best response to the reality of this world of lie and shadow? We are advised to be “as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves.” This implies interaction, not retreat. We are counseled to “be not conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” This implies courage, involvement, awareness and commitment. Jesus said that the second great commandment was similar to the first, “to love your neighbor as yourself.” Kind of hard to do when you’re alone in a cave. No, I’m sorry, I think that while turning off the world certainly has an appeal and does lead to a better focus on ultimate reality, this is not our primary task. Rather, as someone else here has mentioned, it is to be faithful in the little things as they come across our path, perhaps even warning folks that things are not as they may appear to be. If there are no critics of the puppet-masters, if they are not engaged, they will have free rein and reign.
Agreed. My comment is not very far above yours, and you might want to check it out.
Being out of the world, I think, means feeling that you REST on/in your faith in Christ, that your faith in Christ is a PLACE where you can rest to avoid being caught up in the tumult and the anxiety that is Man's lot in life, and not just the world.
Being out of the world, for example, while being IN "Jesu, meine Freude", where Bach talks about the tumult of the world, and says that he is staying PUT, HERE, and singing IN PEACE. He is staying PUT, singing, IN Christ ? his faith ?
Hard to tell.
What you say about heresy applies also to "sin", which means to miss the mark. I like the fact that the word sin can be seen as a term of archery, even. Missing the mark.
As for retiring from the world, more than 15 years ago, I started hearing in my mind the Mahler song from the Ruckhert Lieder which is called "ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen", "I am lost to the world". You can surely find all the German lyrics, and listen to this song which I talk about here often.
When I first started hearing this song in my mind, it made me afraid, because I have a long history of withdrawing from the world... and it is not really comfortable to withdraw from it.
Now, more and more, watching the way the Internet is playing out in our lives, I feel the necessity to.. disconnect myself as much as possible from it, as the true... disembodied embodiment of what Paul calls the Machine.
Why I feel that the Internet is the Machine ? Because its invention pushes us to be permanently connected, and this push towards permanent connection is a negation of being born, the "natus" that is in the word "nature". "Nature" entails being born, being SEPARATED from the womb, and the connection to the womb, but I think that the Internet culture negates our birth in the same way that it negates our death.
So, I am resolving to the best of my ability to strictly limit my contact with Internet in any form, circumscribing it in time. Self discipline, which will be very difficult, because everything is being done to HOOK US on Internet.
I also feel the need to limit my... ex-pression of myself, particularly in writing, but also in speech. There are too many of us ex-pressing ourselves, and the Verb suffers in consequence. The people who have the discipline, are ready to make the effort to become WRITERS need to write, and maybe get money for it. This is not my case. I have talents elsewhere, and I don't need to work for money to live.
To those who may be interested, in France, the public administration near me which handles the identity status of out of the European Union people in our megapole has so much transferred all of its BUSINESS to Internet/Machine programs, that there is almost nobody working in the physical building, and the people working there are executants of... the Machine. They cannot humanely and adequately WELCOME the public, the aliens/immigrants who come to ensure that they conform to the legal requirements to remain on French soil.
This is the state of French public service because of the (computer) Machine. It is shameful.
It is shameful, and it constitutes a break of the social contract, in my opinion. To the extent that the State, with the help of the Machine, refuses to welcome even its own citizens in its PUBLIC ADMINISTRATIONS, and institutions, it has broken the social contract, and must deal with the consequences, for itself and for... the citizens/immigrants.
Things are playing out this way in France, because globally ? the French are always eager to embrace the next.. church. Zealously, with no discrimination, on BLIND FAITH, and the results are always catastrophic on the dirty, aging bodies that WE ARE (in addition to our spiritual nature, of course).
...
Yes, to "BOTH" in your comment. This is the hardest part : how to be an animal that has its head in the stars, and its feet on the ground, and its nose very very far away from dirt and most unpleasant odors, especially the smells of aging bodies, by the way.
And finally, back to leaving the world : yesterday, after doing my shopping at the small Mom and Pop store where I buy my staples that I can't get on the market, I walked through an area where I have been walking for about 20 years, with a small pond. It is a place... out of the world, where I have seen a kingfisher, a couple of squirrels nest, and the local heron wades from time to time. My eye was caught by a female duck ("cane" in French which has a word for a female duck), and a just hatched duckling. When I came closer, I recognized the mama duck who has successfully raised clutches of 10 ducklings on this out of the way pond for the past three years. She is repopulating the ducks in our neighborhood. It brought me joy to see her, to recognize her, and all her new life. So much joy that afterwards, I had to go to my farmer's market and spread the... good news about all that new life on the small pond right behind the farmer's market and... out of the world.
Everybody to whom I gave this good news was very happy to receive it from me.
Think about it... this is how Jesus spread the good news, by physically going OUT and talking with people, physically suffering for his temerity, not by Internet broadcast. And look how far it took/got him...
Sometimes you don't have to go very far to retire from the world...
Good luck.
End of sermon for today.
You mention, "missing the mark", yes, as a builder of things, it brings to mind the idea of the plumb line, per Isaiah, "Also I will make justice the measuring line, And righteousness the plummet." The plummet of the house of Ahab was not the plummet of the Lord. Plumb bobs aren't used much anymore; hard to pinpoint when it's windy. But we have very accurate levels and the bubble is either in the middle or it's not and if it's in the middle, that side of the column is plumb. The plumb bob on a quiet day is better, though, because it accounts for all planes at once, whereas the level is only checking a single plane at a time.
Is the internet a machine? Certainly, yes. But the machine is only a problem if it’s in charge. Do we use the machine or does the machine use us? That is the question, and maybe we don’t really know the answer. Perhaps we are so enmeshed in its gears that we are blinded to true reality. That is possible. But as children of God, we have a Touchstone that transcends our circumstance. A Rock, so to speak. “Rock of Ages, cleft for me.” So we can use the machine, and I can read your words, and be the richer for it, even though I may take exception to your conclusions. Your voice from France is beautiful, and needs to be heard. You are a thinker and a writer whether you like it or not; doesn’t matter if you’re not paid. Why not commit your thoughts to paper, or a screen, if they are a blessing to someone else? There is a passage in Romans that refers to us as “vessels of mercy.” That is something we are, but is also something we can share, either face to face, or in words written down from across the sea.
I share your frustration with the bureaucratic conglomerate, but also with the sad state of the Church. Foreign to the Orthodox tradition, yet drawn to its reverence, I can’t help but think there’s a better way than modern Protestant contemporary practice, but it’s not a new way, rather a rediscovered old one. Your love of classical music is a key to what we seek, but a weekly communion as the high point of the service prefaced by a thoughtful Scriptural meditation is also a requirement. “We only have communion once a month, or once a quarter, because we don’t want it to become too common.” Really? The Son of God, hanging on a cross to absolve you of your sins is too common?
…
By the way, “Multi-disciplinary research has revealed that electrically conductive contact of the human body with the surface of the Earth (grounding or earthing) produces intriguing effects on physiology and health.” From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378297/ courtesy of Dr. Robert Malone’s substack.
Your duck story resonates, and thank you for mentioning “cane.” I didn’t know. But it reminds me of an incident nearly a couple of decades ago. My colleague and I were installing rolladen in a densely constructed subdivision in San Antonio with a lot of concrete and very little grass. Richard said, “Chris, come look.” I stopped what I was doing, and there coming out of an open garage and parading down the concrete was a mama duck followed in a single file line by her well-behaved brood of young ducklings. It made such an impact on both of us! Joyous to see and so unexpected!. So much so that I mentioned the event at Richard’s funeral several years later. Survival in the face of adversity! Triumph over the machine! Life as it’s supposed to be lived in the most challenging of circumstances!
Very interesting, and a little frustrating, because I don't really know what you're talking about with the plumb line. I am a builder... in words, if you like, and music, too.
I do not agree with you about being in charge of the Machine, because all of our tools fashion us when we use them. We are not separate from our tools. If you hold a spoon in your hand, and use it to probe down in a glass, you can feel in your hand where the spoon makes contact with the glass. No, we are not separate from our tools.
But thank you for complimenting me on my writing. I love to write.
For years, the Catholic Church practiced communion several times a week, I think, because communion was a re-enactment of Christ's sacrifice, and I believe that sacri-fice, as what makes holy, or sacred, has to be continuously repeated in order for it to be... effective, shall we say.
As I have perhaps said elsewhere here, sacrifice is what makes a people, a community. Without sacrifice, there is no community, I believe. The catch is... who/what to sacrifice, where, when, how.... lots of questions, lots of possibilities there.
Isaiah uses the plummet as analogous to that of a moral standard, that of perfection. There is only one line that is truly plumb from Point A above to Point B below. There are a myriad of ways, or directions, an infinite number in fact, that the line can be out of plumb. Our behavior is measured against that line and we all fall short in this fallen world. We are thus in need of a Savior.
But we disagree concerning our relation to the machine, as long as we have the luxury of perspective and access to eternal truth. I put down the hammer after driving the nail. Although if it had not been for electricity, I would not have been a carpenter. Now if you ask about life without air conditioning in Texas, perhaps I would need to reconsider…
Thank you for teaching me this.
I am currently having an E-Mail conversation in French with a retired philosophy professor who specializes in Plato's dialogues from a literary perspective. We haggle a bit... what I notice in what you wrote above is that the plummet line is a mathematical, and thus abstract, construction. For millenia now we have been EQUATING mathematics with truth, but the question is just what kind of truth can be inferred ? from mathematical constructs ? Truth... of a certain nature. But we come down to Pilate's very pertinent (and not impertinent) question to Jesus in this trial (or mistrial, if you prefer) that has had such a tremendous impact on the western world : just what is Truth/truth ? Is it One ?
Whatever one can suppose, or pose about mathematics, the fact is that we have to go through our written and spoken word to get there and come back. And that fact has implications that most people can not, or will not, face. We are putting too much faith in mathematics to lead us to an absolute truth about the universe, and ourselves, in my opinion.
My husband and I live without air conditioning in our area. Many people are putting air conditioning in now, since U.S. technology has been colonizing the world along with U.S. ideas about doing business. But I think that air conditioning gives a significant push to buying and selling 24 hours a day, and hubris on a grand scale, and we definitely don't need that right now...
No, I wouldn’t say it’s abstract. No more than physics and gravity are abstract. Of course, the behavior of the plumb line is a function of gravity, so the plummet does become rather abstract in outer space, where it ceases to function in any capacity whatsoever. Yet the principle to which it was pointing remains unfettered and in tact since it is not earthbound nor limited by gravity. So when we tweak Pilate’s question a bit, and ask, “What is the origin of truth” we can say with certainty that it is a function of the nature of God, as is its essence. As is justice. As is righteousness. As is love. It is not bound by the constraints of time and space. It has no beginning and no end. It always was and always will be. When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life…” he was speaking way beyond our capacity to understand, which of course is why He spoke in parables so often. And He left no room to wiggle. As has been said, he was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Son of God. Mathematics is useful in its limited way, but Naturalism is a silly way to look for a First Cause.
Words convey thoughts. Yes, they are imperfect but we use words to think and without words we would be less than human. It’s hard to imagine a world in which words have been expunged and are non-existent. I often wonder how animals think. We have dogs and cats and they are not stupid. We see every day that dogs have masters and cats have staff. Perhaps they have a language without words?
I was kind of kidding about the air conditioning in light of your latitudinal advantage. We lived without it when we were younger, but have since become spoiled. Had several days of 110° last year.
Your comment on avoiding the news reminded me of something I came across many years ago on the effects of the 'consumption' of news. It was written in 2010, but still relevant I think:
https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2010-dobelli.pdf
Oh my! I’m 82, retired at 81 from providing therapy as a Clinical Social Worker, mother of 6, grandmother of 23 great gran of 2 and a Christian of all sorts and intensities since 30. And then came home to Orthodoxy and was baptized (for the 4th time) and Chrismated on the 4th of May. And I have more time to be still and “know the Knower” as someone expressed. And I do think only what we bring from that stillness to the world is valuable and will be different from what we brought before. You are giving up the news and feeling a loss. I am getting up at 6am rather than 10am or later and feeling shaky about continuing what is becoming a rich loving time. But apart from knowing the reality and sharing that which comes from spending time with God we are just tinkering with the Machine and producing what AI can reproduce. I only know enough about either of them from a few podcasts by you and your friends to know I don’t want any more of that. That message is received.
All this to say, that what you are sharing now cannot be duplicated very well by AI. And the more you listen to the Real True God, the less AI and the machine can copy. We don’t need you but God in you which we just heard from this time with you in your garden. And if further retreat is asked of you, trust for the good. Thank you Paul
Hi Sara you’re inspiring me ,at nearly 70 , having like you been a Christian a long time - since my mid teens but with ventures into different forms and more universal understandings of spirituality and now wondering about Orthodoxy .
Orthodoxy will satisfy your wondering for the rest of your life.
Never a truer word spoken!
I love this “what you are sharing now cannot be duplicated very well by AI. And the more you listen to the Real True God, the less AI and the machine can copy.”
Those of us that know God will be more discerning than others and there’s the audience right there.
Ah YES! Really knowing the Knower, making and taking the time will be the challenge. I slept in this morning!
“How far do we have to walk away from the human world in order to understand the nature of reality, and to connect to the creator beyond and beneath it?”
First, I would say that seeking to connect with God as Father should take precedence over connecting with him as creator. The paradigm of our relationship with the Father is rooted in his eternal begetting of the Son. Therefore, just as the uncreated Son does not relate to the Father as creator, so we - as creatures who are sons by adoption - do not relate to God first as creator but first as Father.
To seek connection to God as creator without first enjoying our adoption to sonship is to root our essential experience of God in our creatureliness, rather than participation in the divine nature.
That's a very good point. Thanks.
Second, I would suggest that enjoying our adoption to sonship is synonymous with enjoying the eternal Sonship of Christ. So, the enjoyment of one’s sonship is found in and through one’s mystical union with the eternal Son. The mystery of our adoption to Sonship is that it gives us access - by grace - to the bond of love between the Father and the Son. This is infinitely higher and more glorious than any possible relationship between the creator and one of his creatures. It is an invitation to experience not just union with Christ, but the union of Christ with the Father.
““O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.””
John 17:25-26 LSB
https://bible.com/bible/3345/jhn.17.25-26.LSB
So thirdly, I think we seek to know the Father in the way the eternal Son knows him, reveals him, and unites us to him. This knowing is first entered into by means of being loved by the Father, not by means of separation from the world but by means of union with Christ. However, the practice of the incarnate son was to slip away to desolate places in order to set his mind on things above, namely his Father. So it is for those who are in Christ. Our chief intention is not to retreat from the world as creatures seeking the creator, but to slip away as sons seeking intimacy with their father.
“Therefore, if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.”
Colossians 3:1-2 LSB
https://bible.com/bible/3345/col.3.1-2.LSB
One question, Daron.
I fear that it is a question that has a lot of bearing on where we are right now.
What is the role of Woman in all of this ?
I say this as an aging woman, wife, a person who is a body, a mind, and a soul, and the mother of a son.
I like to tell people that when you look at the word "woman", you can see how "man" issues forth from "woman", as in "man born of woman". How he proceeds AWAY FROM her, which is the source of considerable tension, conflict, and tragedy, even.
As we are seeing a lot these days...
Well, in terms of status, I think the believer’s union with Christ - and their identity as a child of God - is the same for men and for women.
“For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Galatians 3:27-28 LSB
https://bible.com/bible/3345/gal.3.27-28.LSB
However, I can imagine that at the level of the individual believer there will be experiential differences of God’s fatherhood from one person to another, and that some of those experiences will relate to our biological sex.
Equality of status doesn’t mean uniformity of experience. Each of us will experience the Father differently because the Father is infinitely good and knows each of us personally.
Thanks for your answer, Daron.
I am a hard headed woman.
It has taken me over 60 years to come to terms with being a woman (and not a female... big difference there), and I can't say that I look with great pleasure on Saint Paul's affirmation that belief in Christ levels the playing field for everybody everywhere.
Now, I like being a woman, and find it is one of the greatest challenges of my life, as I think it is a great challenge in the life of a man to be... born of woman. It is a great challenge to be born of woman, and a great challenge to have a future man issue forth from your body "inter feces, etc". I can assure you that it rattles you, particularly as your son becomes a man more and more, and stops being the baby whose diaper you changed.
I realize that we are haggling over this like rabbis, or early Christian... fathers, but sometimes I like to haggle. It can be invigorating to haggle, and I'm not against that. (What could I do with a sword over Internet anyway ?...)
What you say about equality is one of the greatest problems with the Machine, in our SIN in equating equality of status with uniformity.
I call that... sin. Missing the mark.
But I believe that fundamentally, relationships except perhaps with God... are unequal. I also believe that love is one of the greatest scandals of our human experience because so many people feel left out and jealous when they see it around them.
Our understanding of the word "equality" is one of the biggest motors of the Machine right now.
Indeed. Galatians 3:27-28 is one of the most misused texts of scripture in the church today. It is often used to suggest that union with Christ affects an annihilation of difference and a blurring of categories. This is not the case. It simply affirms that union with Christ is not affected differently for people of different sexes, social status, culture of origin and so on. It says nothing about the experiential and subjective dynamics of union with Christ.
Since we are haggling a little bit like rabbis, maybe you could develop a bit what you just stated there, for my understanding. Thank you.
Sure. The Apostle Paul isn’t saying that union with Christ destroys, abrogates or annihilates biological, social and cultural distinctions. He’s saying that biological, social and cultural distinctions are no impediment to union with Christ and that, with specific reference to salvation, union with Christ supercedes all such distinctions.
This emphasis on our sonship is infused into us through our daily praying of the “Our Father” as Christ taught us ❤️
Yes! We must remember that the word “Our” was, is, and always will be on the lips of Jesus. He says it with us, so that we may say it with him and with one another.
Thanks for this Paul. This topic of asceticism, solitude, prayer, mystical foundations etc….has been circling in my mind for some time now. Of course it has much to do with my own circumstances and my personality but more than that it has to do with what healing looks like. Healing for the world, healing for the community and healing for each individual’s journey and soul. We are not disconnected from any of these things and we need our mystical theology. In a world that has forgotten faeries, enchanted forests and dragons we wander like fools into all kinds of trouble, and not Holy Fools either. Just simply arrogant idiots. Greenhorns, if you like. Ill equipped and dangerously ignorant of what really lies beneath.
Your video gave me the nudge I needed to begin a series on the Saints, Desert Fathers, mystical Christianity and a withdrawal from the world for the Life of the World.
I’m on holidays right now myself. So great for new perspectives. Have a good vacation yourself. God bless.
Thank you for this, the timing is just much appreciated. I just deleted the news app off my phone, partially to prepare for the upcoming election in the US and partially because of something similar to what you say. Recently I watched a video where the speaker talked about how the results you are getting are related to unconscious commitments. When I applied it to my everyday life and just how many articles I’ve read that spread doom, disaster, and how many are finely tuned to get under your skin I just realized I needed to step away.
While you mention that language may have been the start of the machine but now I think it’s also turning everything into data, which allows writers to turn nothingness into clickbait, gives provides large companies with the means to amplify everything to gain readers. Money clicks and engagement are prioritized over wellbeing and connection. Since we virtually killed print media all this hyper-stimulating content can be justified as a means to try and save the institutions that are dependent on money to survive. Or at least that’s the excuse now but over the next many months here in the states we’ll be told our democracy is at risk (truthfully it may be).
The biblical idea that the kingdom is all around us but we can’t see it seems to apply more today than ever. Strip away the mountains of absolute garbage on the internet, the algorithms force feeding you fear and politics and instead as you point out we have access to listening to a modern desert father on the other side of the planet. Strip away the clickbait and desperate posts where people are just tying to connect with others on platforms designed to disconnect and there are surely hundreds of thousands of families, religious and intentional communities that are not trending on any platform but have found a better way to live and thrive and get closer to the truth.
After the election of Donald Trump seven years ago my neighbor decided to not watch the news and did not want to be told anything about politics. I thought it was a position of extreme privilege,was offended by it, and judged him harshly for it. In the run up to this election I cannot help but see that he was right. I spent 4 years trying to stay informed, 4 years in stress, grief, and anger. For what? The current president has made little attempt to change many of the alarming policies that Trump instituted and has even doubled down on things like the trade war.
In the last week alone I’ve seen an uptick in intentionally triggering/offensive campaign materials; a man wearing a tshirt in a doctor’s office that said “Biden is more confused than Michelle Obama’s gynecologist”, multiple trucks with bumper stickers that say “Joe and the Hoe” written in a font made of assault rifles, and another bumper sticker at the grocery store that read “another republican working hard so you don’t have to”. I think you are absolutely right, it’s just designed to distract us from the truth and more so, the more we engage we tend to pull the other direction and come up with our own clever and often equally offensive/triggering slogans which just amplifies everything.
In Tennessee, the conservative southern state where I grew up, I’ve seen posts about how there are now two license plates for your car now, one with “in god we trust” and the other without but the ones without are easily identifiable because the first three digits are numbers rather than letters. So conservative Christian organizations have made posts about how you can identify the godless ones on the road which just makes people on the left feel they must reject these four words despite the fact that they are one our currency because now it represents a form of authoritarianism. I cannot blame people for rejecting it, and like me when I lived in the south I cannot blame people for rejecting these four words and Christianity as a whole because it has been so politicized.
Politics and belief just makes belief political and more often than many of us want to admit we will define ourself and change our positions based on being in opposition to the other and what we’re not. Religion and spirituality must be a way of seeing and being in the world and should align with ideals and truth rather than political parties.
I share your honest appreciation about what's going on in the States, although I have not lived in my country for 45 years now.
About two years, maybe more, before the Covid, I stopped listening to the 5 minute news bulletin on French public radio because it had become evident to me that it was sheer propaganda. I am not spending hours in front of my screen GETTING IN-FORMED about what is going on all over the planet.
When you think about it, the invention of the radio, then the television was very influential in forging a COMMON CULTURE in the U.S. (and elsewhere). Born in 1956, I can remember when American television was in black and white, and only on in the evening, limited to three networks.
But even then, there was an almost religious reverence for the national news broadcast, and that's how A MAJORITY of Americans were IN-FORMED about what was going on in the country and the U.S. It was a COMMON, and shared experience that pulled people together, uniformized them in their perception of what was going on in the world.
Things have certainly changed from my childhood. By the time I left the States in the late 1970's, American television had succumbed to the law of the least common denominator, and their was little effort to uplift ? the citizenry in A NOBLE WAY. Little effort to promote a culture of... excellence (which goes with the word "aristocracy", by the way).
Fifteen years ago, I started to watch the summer Olympic games on U.S. television, but gave up after 15 minutes because the commercial breaks destroyed the continuity of what I was watching. You may have noticed that this has happened on the Internet, too. What was... "for free" has always been financed by PUBLICITY. A mind staggering observation when you think about it.
I have just finished Mary Renault's book about the Peloponesian war between Sparta and Athens. She depicts the political climate of Athens, she fleshes out Sokrates and prominent oligarchs in the struggling democratic Athens. She has no complacency for democracy's ills, moreover. The book is called "The Last of the Wine", and is excellent. It taught me a lot, in a manner that helps me to think about our current situation. You might enjoy it as an antidote to journalistic prose, which we get a lot of these days. Dished out with sociology.
Ugh. What the Verb has sunk to staggers my mind...
Thank you for that. To you as well, the video I watched was by Jim Dethmer of Coaches Rising. He effectively uses the Karpman Drama triangle to illustrate and bring awareness to when we are out of presence. Combine that with the idea of unconscious commitments and it is pretty clear the United States is unconsciously committed to testing itself apart.
The idea that we are going to be in two ongoing wars, an economic/proxy war with China/Russia while still playing the left/right game at home feels completely insane and a plan that cannot be successful without a major and immediate transformation.
Best to you Debra
I'm a late adapter. I didn't get so much as a flip phone until I was over 60, a smart phone until I was over 65. A few months ago, I wasn't sure what Substack was or where it was "located." I only made the effort to find out because I heard you, Paul, were on it. Unfortunately, now I have taken to scrolling the Substack app for more "content.' Admittedly, lot of what I read there is good, some is actually excellent, but lately I feel that all I'm really doing is exchanging some old distractions for a new one. And it's just as addictive. I find that the trouble with leaving the world is that while most of it is total crap, as you say, some of it isn't. Sometimes I feel like Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Just dig a little more gold, I say, and then I will quit. Of course, we all know how that ended. It does seem the only way to do it is like Father Lazurus; just lay down the shovel and stop digging.
Your final thoughts quote remind me of another fellow’s thoughts on learning from monastics as those who yet remain in the world: “Not all Christians are called to be monastics, but we are all called to be ascetics.”
Thank you for your thoughts. Have a blessed holiday!
If we fast from the news as Paul is hoping to do, it can have a similar effect on our souls as fasting from food, to make us more receptive to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Then, whatever our station in life, we’ll have more love to spread abroad in the world.
What a wonderful video Paul. Very thought provoking. I too find more peace when I unplug from media/news. But I do drift back. Ugh. Interestingly, I just read the following article from St. Elizabeth Convent (Minsk) this morning:
https://catalog.obitel-minsk.com/blog/2022/03/weighing-the-benefits-and-risks-of-praying-at-night
This ascetic effort is perhaps worth considering (with the guidance of one’s spiritual elder), as many of us keep up the search for ways to become closer to God in a crazy world. Most of us cannot completely drop out of the world - but we can work on creating our own poustinya (desert).
I am subscribed to only 2 Substacks and it has been a complete joy to find someone who visits and writes about holy wells and hermits…..because they fascinate me. I’m not Orthodox but I am a Christian who, for years, has dragged my husband and sons to holy well sites and rocks in forests where hermits lived. There is something sacred, holy and it points to something…..it leaves the world behind and opens a door to engage with God and His son. I can’t express it very well but there’s something profound going on and I would say you are one of those people who stand on the edges and do the pointing suggesting ways that might lead somewhere.
It’s good stuff.
I am sick of all the political nonesense.
I joined Friends of Friendless churches and went to their open day at St Lawrence’s Church …..far better way to spend some spare time.