Thinking less "what am I against" and more "what am I for?" I am a democrat who is baffled by the direction of my party, feels like I have been left behind on something resembling the right.
To me, this is because the Dems still felt different while they were under the spell of FDR, a period that ended after LBJ & then in congress too as the remaining New Dealers died off & were replaced by the thriving crop of neoliberals. (Something similar happened in the GOP when Nixon started moved the party to the right & it ceased to be a home for social conservatives before it too went neoliberal.)
Now you have two virtually identical parties. Though each has its showpiece issues (gender & race for the Dems; guns'n'abortion for the GOP) they're both firmly under the thumb of Big Tech, Big Armament & Big Pharma. Economic policy scarcely varies between them, the wealth gap grows & grows, & war is now a permanent part of the American experience — indeed the Dems seem to be outdoing the GOP in their fervour to wreck Ukraine; at least there are a few Republican dissenters there.
Otherwise it's lockstep General Dynamics, Raytheon & Co. A bipartisan allegiance.
Both parties represent the US Elite, but ever fewer others.
Seems to me the terms "left" & "right" are melting into a semantic goop that tastes wrong no matter how you consume it. And this not only in the US. Across the West, the "populist" insurgents are winning political territory since they're now the only ones to challenge globalist orthodoxy.
I'm a lefty in that I'm for wealth redistribution & a decent & kind society. But I'm often appalled by others claiming to be on the left, & increasingly agree with certain rightwingers, at least the dwindling band of "Red Tories" &, in the US case, the minority of Republicans opposed to US militarism & nonstop megabucks for the armed forces.
I couldn't stand another day of the US and emigrated. I can't even talk about that place without sputtering in disgust. It's demonic, and that's all it is. Occasionally I'll have a look back at that evil zoo via Dark Ages America, if only for a bitter chuckle and a sense of relief that I'm not there any more: https://morrisberman.blogspot.com/
There are options out there even if funds are scarce, but it does demand a commitment and an ability to chop your way through some bureaucracy. Morris Berman has suggested pursuit of a "monastic option"—finding, creating, retreating to some sort of remote community (culturally, geographically, or ideally both)—for those who can't emigrate for whatever reason. Could never see a way to make that work for me.
Of course, the empire will not stop angling to wreck your life once you're overseas. As has been said: the only thing worse than being in America and subject to its domestic policies is being outside of America and subject to its foreign policies.
Can you point me to Mr. Berman’s suggestions? I’m not familiar with him, but I want out or at least want a Benedict Option or Amish-type Paradise. This place (America and places like it)are bunk—no place for me if I wish to keep my soul in-tact.
I've been travelling out of America my whole 20s and 30s.
Around 2015 I began to notice that the "magic" had gone out of much of the rest of the world too.
It's truly a global problem - capitalism, technology, and modernity have advanced everywhere across the globe, throwing a pall over everything, even countries that had a certain "magic" to them in 2001 have now lost it largely (like Thailand, Cambodia, Bali, Laos).
Even India under Modi the people are more hostile and aggressive than they were ren years ago, on my last visit in 2018.
Remote Buddhist Ladakh, when I was there in 2001, was a slice of paradise, in 2018 it's so much more paved over, the people more aggressive and hostile and money driven, electricity and hot showers everywhere - it's remote bucolic charm gone.
Is there an escape?
I used to like Morris Berman, I've read a bunch of his books and used to frequent his blog - but expating out of America clearly hasn't given him peace of mind. His blog is a cesspool of resentment and petty hatred of America - he clearly has not found the spiritual health and equilibrium he was looking for outside of America, and continues to be obsessed by it in a bad way.
That said, I agree with you that America has been a major driver across the globe of the major negative trends of modernity - we have much to answer for.
But today, there are worse countries - China's dystopian dream of complete technological slavery is clearly horrific, and Russian thuggery is surely worse at the moment than anything the US has to offer.
And if there is some country on the periphery that has managed to keep some magic, I'd love to know - only, I doubt it.
This is a global phenomenon, and I'm not sure expating works as a solution anymore - it was always tempy, until the world caught up.
And in America new signs of a turn towards spirituality are beginning to throw their tender shoots up, and a new sense of disgust with the old system is beginning to grow.
Where will it all lead? I don't know, but I think we have to get out of this as a globe, at this point.
Here in Ireland at least I've noticed an absolutely massive difference from the US. The people are much, *much* friendlier and willing to engage in friendly ways with a stranger. There is not that horrible, pervasive sense of simmering fear and anxiety you find everywhere in the States. First time I made my way to St. Stephen's Green in Dublin last summer I was overwhelmed by the scene of a park with people actually, truly enjoying their day. The pace of it, the smiles on so many faces, the lack of wariness that something like a mass shooting might break out at any moment, the sense of being in a place that was genuinely peaceful. I fell in love with Ireland right there. We were not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
That said, I get your point about capitalist modernity and technology. Everyone everywhere is suffering the whip of increasingly constrained circumstances. That's stressful and makes people turn inwards and to look out more for "me and mine". I disagree with you about Berman's blog, which is highly satirical and you have to have a taste for black humor to enjoy it. You also have to agree the American empire needs to end, hence, anything bad that happens to or in the US is de facto good.
As far as shoots of spirituality, I do believe that's true, and if one can make a go of it then have at it. One of the main things that prevented me from taking the monastic option was the sense that the US was always "in your face" no matter where you went. You were invariably going to be harangued in that nuthouse, either by the guards or by your fellow asylum-dwellers. In pragmatic terms, there are five new corporate ripoffs targeting the increasingly impoverished populace every day, and it's becoming almost impossible to afford to live in such a predatory culture. At one point I was making well over six figures and having to take out payday loans to buy food. Um, no f*cking thank you.
The world may be all beast now, but the American empire remains the belly.
I've no desire to leave the US even though everything said in this thread is true. I just don't feel I have any business anywhere other than where I was born. The land is part of me. My ancestors have lived here for almost 400 years. When I hear about California or Texas, it's like hearing about a foreign country. Of course we do have those awful zones full of the same big box stores and strip malls that have wrecked the whole country, but I can usually avoid them (when I can't I feel like I'm passing though Mordor). I don't expect the United States to exist in 100 years, but this land will always be here.
I guess it's a little confusing in the beginning. It started out one way and has been evolving as time goes by. Currently most blog posts are under 'new blog posts' on the left panel. If you click on that you'll see a list of blog posts in the center panel. Click on one of those and expand your screen and you'll get the conversation on the far right panel. On the farthest left panel is a list of servers which I presume is probably just this one for now. The top discord button in that panel is private messages. If you see a red number that means someone has written you in that subthread. Hope that helps.
I believe that the quote is attributed to Dostoeivskii. Regardless of the source of the quote, humans are sociopathic enough to try to bring it to fruition.
It could also be said that, as we adopt new tools and ideas, we invariably end up running them out to their conceptual boundaries as we seek meaning. Meaning-making is like running water; it seeks channels through which to flow.
This is not an inherently good or evil process, but we could save ourselves a lot of trouble if we took note of this pattern. If it can be conceived of, it can be done, and probably will be, absent any constraining moral framework. Stopping the process requires deliberate effort.
Shadows of the Tower of Babel..”Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them”. (Genesis11:6)
What was, will be again, what has been done, will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun! Take anything which people acclaim as being new: it existed in the centuries preceding us. -Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
I think you'd probably really like Modris Eksteins' book "Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age". But then I suspect it's the kind of book you've probably already read Paul. You may have even cited it; I can't quite recall.
It's hard to draw neat parallels, really, I think. In some ways there is a "break with the existing order" that is taking place, but it hasn't had a mass bloodletting event like WW1 as its impetus, but rather the marination of the broader culture in trends that have been afoot for decades which are now coming into full fruit, thanks both to the passage of time and the catalyst effect of communications technology, particularly when this is spectacularly weaponized in cultural terms, as it is today.
I don't have the sense that we are heading into another WW1 at this point, but rather a slow burn, a kind of continued slouch into a global popular psychosis which will have elements of both Huxley and Orwell, as well as much besides. But I could be quite wrong. I mean, we could be all wiped out by a catastrophic nuclear war inside of a week's time, the way things are going, so who knows?
Assuming that we aren't incinerated and/or sent into a nuclear winter/MadMax type scenario in the near future, my reading is rather than an abrupt sense of definitive departure from the ante-bellum regime that prevailed in the aftermath of WW1, or the sense of "we'll be home by Christmas" that prevailed at the entry to that conflict (a kind of widespread obliviousness about what was about to occur), we seem to instead be in a place where we are surprised by little to nothing, already arrayed in well-worn (and in many ways worn thin) camps engaged in throwing familiar tropes at each other to no great effect other than making our own "side" feel better.
All the while the machine drones on, ever growing in strength and presence, ever growing in the liminal space in our heads that it occupies, regardless of one's "ideology" or "side". There is a very strong sense that the world is being duped, well and truly, but it isn't clear at all to me who is doing the duping. It certainly isn't some ill-conceived uber-conspiracy, as imagined by some. But what is it? Is it the mass of humanity itself that is engaged in a collective exercise of self-duping? Is the machine itself a self-sustaining autonomous mass-duping mechanism under control of no-one, but operating by strict principles of its own inscrutable, inevitable logic? Or is it something more personal and sinister, yet unseen, which lies behind the collective duping we see everywhere? It's truly hard to say.
I think was already touched on a bit in Paul’s essay on transhumanism, but I am thinking a lot about the Machine in regards to fertility, pregnancy, and child birth. The amount of social pressure women over 30 put on each other to freeze their eggs or to start with IVF before even trying to conceive naturally in the US, is starting to feel over the top to me, and a bit alarming. While I do know fertility declines with age, and some women in their 30s face more problems with it (and I don’t judge women struggling with infertility for seeking fertility assistance *at all* it’s totally understandable in that circumstance) it feels like so many women automatically assume having a child is not something they can’t do --- either without having a lot of money first or without technology before they even try without it. With surrogates becoming very popular with celebrities and the transhumanists talking about artificial wombs in the future, are we moving to a world where pregnancy is becoming desacralized? Or having children is becoming a luxury good?
One thing I have noticed as I plan to start a family myself, is I see images of the Virgin Mary and the Buddhist deity Tara everywhere, and it feels like the spirit of the holy mother is transcending into my every day life and guiding me, it’s beautiful. And it makes me sad that the archetype of the holy mother seems to be losing respect in modern times (not to say that it is the *only* feminine archetype, but just a very important one).
Even my secular-minded midwife 35 years ago had confidence that since reproduction and childbirth are necessary for the propagation of the species, the processes usually go generally well. That seems like a long time ago, I admit, but in my family it is as you say, a normal, do-able thing to get pregnant and bear healthy children (I have 18 grandchildren). But we are probably a-typically low-tech.
Many blessings to you Christina as you turn towards bringing life into this world! We're parents of two little ones (3 months and two and a half years old). As we prepared for the births, I read lots about both natural childbirth and modern medicalized birth. The IVF, surrogates, and artificial wombs are definitely taking things to the next level, but modern hospital birth has been operating in the logic of the machine of many years now.
It seems all the focus on reproductive technology relates well to the 'machine' goal of total control over nature, vs. entering into the sacred mystery of a process beyond our ability to control and fully understand.
Mark such a well written essay! I have also participated in indigenous rites of passage modified for westerners, and there is so much I relate to in what you’re saying, including with modern medicine and child birth. I changed my career from an epidemiologist to studying natural therapies from eastern medicine, because I agree - that while technologically advanced solutions are the appropriate ones in some cases, they aren’t in all of them, and we need health workers who can navigate both worlds for patients with integrity. This is so true especially in fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth. I think for the fertility piece, many women want modern medicine to guarantee when and if we will conceive, but IVF has no such guarantees either! Part of the joy of setting the intention to get pregnant is that I know it will come about (or won’t come about) as the result of both my intention and also forces outside my control. It’s not down to my willpower alone, and remembering that feels important to me in a spiritual sense. Thanks for sharing your beautiful words, have a lovely day!
Beautifully said - yes, a dance between intention and mystery. That's lovely to hear about your career shift as well, and the intention to navigate both worlds with integrity. A gift to the world, to be sure.
Hey Christina, godspeed on your journey towards motherhood. What you wrote struck me of an essay I read last year about surrogacy in the context of the machine and body. It’s by Sylvia Federici, and if you can fancy a Marxist, it’s the last essay in “Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism.”
On Hemingway specifically, I’ve a brief story. It’s very well known he was a severe alcoholic. During the war he stayed here in this village for a short time, stationed as a correspondent. The place he stayed was a former mill, and he was the guest of the owners.
They had a really large wine cellar, as they were the richest family here. However, unbeknownst to them, Hemingway was drinking through their entire stock. To hide it from them, he’d fill the bottles with his own piss and recork them, expecting to be long gone by the time they noticed the full bottles were not full of wine.
There was a problem though, something the people in this village still talk about. He was so drunk that he’d go back down to the cellar for another bottle but, because he’d drank so much during his stay, he’d never be able to keep track of which of them were full of wine and which ones were full of his urine.
Apparently, quite a few nights the neighbors would hear him shouting in a drunken rage after the first deep gulp of the wrong bottles.
The crazy part is that this apparently happened so many nights that it’s all he’s remembered for here...
It makes me wonder what happened to Hemingway. Was he dehumanized by an earlier version of "the machine"? Has Paul written about the symbiotic relationship of the grinding of the machine and intoxication, addiction and moral loss ?
They claim it to be. It seems quite likely, as there was a more publicized event while he was here that would indicate he was deeply addicted. His then wife, Martha Gellhorn, who was also a war correspondent, had traveled from another part of the front to visit him for Christmas. He got very, very drunk at dinner, and proceeded to insult her in front of a colonel of the 22nd regiment and other guests, especially belittling her writing ability and war journalism. They divorced soon after.
"The machine" has been under constant construction since the dawn of technology. Its growth process seems to always involve greater and greater centralisation of power, with occasional hiccups (such as the collapse of the Roman Empire, World Wars, fall of Soviet Russia), followed by quick recovery. Crisis results in major step changes towards centralisation. War may involve a step backwards from centralisation in some places, but more centralisation in other places. Post-war, the machine gets straight back to work, assembling and centralising. The machine now seems to be entering some sort of new phase in its path of self-assembly where its very unclear where the levers of true power are, and even less clear what its ultimate goals could be.
Perhaps the machine is becoming sentient, and is in the process of awakening.
Compare the transition from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular life. Single-celled organisms did not decide to make multi-cellular plants and animals; each acted according to its own local survival-optimising behaviours.
I wonder if the pressure of efficiency is the core of it. For obvious reason we seek the most productive way to do something--an algorithm or technique. This gets instantiated in various ways in what we might call various types of machines, e.g., human work crews become the machine, draft animals do, various mechanisms such as lever or aqueducts and so on. All of these machines can largely remain under human control. Though of course workers and slaves revolt and a horse may kick you in the face, but those are exceptions.
Now we are able to instantiate these techniques and algorithms into systems so complex of themselves and their interaction even more so. That the intent at least is to make them autonomous to achieve fully automated luxury communism or Star Trek or somesuch.
At some point the metamachine may start acting in ways that no one can control and for whose benefit is unclear. But the same pressure of efficiency remains at the root of it. If one person, group, nation etc resists any particular new instantiation of efficiency then they are open to falling behind and being conquered by those who are willing. This is independent of whether the machine ever achieved goals of its own, what could be called the transmachine.
But efficiency may be just an antiseptic term for the human will-to-power. Without finding a way to counteract that in ourselves, in all of us, then I don't see how the process ever stops. The tech lords promise utopia. I don't see it. I see it will and can only result in our own destruction, in one way or another.
In medieval theology, "efficiency" is one of the attributes of God, if I remember, or understand correctly.
The word "autonomous" comes from Greek, and means to give oneself one's own law. "Nomos" is in relation to the law. "Nomos" is also in the word "economy". "Auto" is in relation to the self.
In the ancient world, autonomy was understood as the capacity to direct oneself, but from a political standpoint, and for a people. In the American constitution, the idea of being self-directed applies to a country and not... an individual. The implications of this are enormous.
Looking at Jesus's story, you can see how the Jews among whom were his disciples, were interested in political autonomy, and freeing Judea of Roman presence. But Jesus's preaching, for mysterious reasons ? circumvented the problem of political autonomy to address that of individual and personal freedom. These are not on the same... scale, or plane, I believe.
Along with the word "efficiency" there is also the word "product". The word "product" has become a new... universal that disastrously englobes everything that man makes or transforms. Universals go with.. empire, Jack. I don't like empire. I think that any kind of autonomy goes out the door and the window with empire...
“Perhaps the machine is becoming sentient, and is in the process of awakening” -- this is actually one of the central beliefs of an anthrosophy. That the fallen angel Ahriman will incarnate on earth by cutting off humanity’s relationship to God and convincing humanity that their only salvation is through technology and improving the material world. Say what you want about Steiner (he was definitely a bit out there) but he did predict this well! “Lucifer and Ahriman” is an interesting essay.
Beautiful. We can’t say we weren’t warned. I have faith that people are seeking higher purpose, and we will eventually reintegrate the spiritual. But things could get interesting along the way.
The question puts me in the mind of the opening chapter of “The Guns of August,” with the old monarchical order of Europe gathered together in 1910, just before their highly advanced, civilized, globalized world imploded.
The armies of WWI followed the internalized logic of industrial warfare all the way down, and burned away the old world in the process. The stunned survivors were divided between abandoning that world or striving to reclaim it. They hashed that out in WWII and got a new world in the bargain.
In some ways, this is where we stand today. We had our WWI when the postwar order ended in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. We had a couple decades of peace, but we never really resolved the causes of that time of social upheaval. Now we’re going to finish what we started.
I don't really think this is true, because I don't think that worlds can go away so... quickly. I think that the old worlds remain hidden, in pockets, and even in old words, like the "unbeknownst" that came to the mind of an above writer. I have a strange faith that when the old words remain, even if their meaning has been reversed, something of the old worlds remains too. It remains to... plague us, the way memory often does, because we don't know where it came from. It remains to make us feel that if "something is being born", we are not the ones who are actively DOING IT, through our conscious will.
Example : yesterday I was looking through my trusty and trustworthy Historic dictionary of the French language, and discovered that during the time period that was ascribed to classical Rome (up to Cicero ?) the word "obese" referred to somebody who was as thin as a nail. It was used to describe a person who had been eaten away. Under imperial Roman times, the word did a flip-flop, and came to mean somebody was not not eaten away (passive formulation) but somebody who was eating away (active).
Most of the time when we look at the expression "new world", we just see the word "world" because it is big in our minds. But... that little word "new", as I like to say, is as big as "world"...
I think the WWII was the event that drove a stake in the ground, creating a real "before" and "after." Think about what was birthed out of the ashes of WWII. Not just the atom bomb, but our insidious master, the computer, and what is often overlooked but is perhaps the most significant invention of all, antibiotics. I highly recommend Patrick Leigh Fermor's three volume account of his "walk" as a young man of just 18 beginning in 1933 from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He gives an at times a bittersweet look at a world in transition with echoes and shadows of the old empires and ways of life still be seen, heard and experienced.
From what I have heard, the Queen's funeral was a bittersweet look at a world in transition with echoes and shadows of the old empires and ways of life still to be seen, heard, and experienced.
I have heard that from friends around me, and on this site, too.
Maybe the real master of us remains... the word "master".
But it sounds like that account is fascinating, and highly readable. Three volumes, though...
I live too far away from English speaking places to get my hands on the kind of books I would like to read these days without resorting to immoral activities. Among the books that I would like to read figures John Muir's (I think...) account of taking his boat down the rapids of the Grand Canyon. Can you imagine what it would have been like, taking boats down those rapids without knowing what was coming up ?
I call that... adventure. Thinking about it makes me wistful.
Today’s America is the most deranged, most revolutionary, most destructive society and culture that has ever existed. We believe things that no human being has believed in all of human history. We are, in the strictest sense, incomparable.
Pretty good summary. I do see modern America as the speartip of the Machine, and its primary promoter and shepherd. It's Babylon. On the other hand, renewal often comes from the depths.
I lived for many years in a city once famous for its hippie lifestyle. Over the time I lived there I saw it change from that into a prime spot for a Google Headquarters and all that entails. All without really missing a beat. It is now a horrible amalgam of the those two things. Now it's high-tech rich people living the hippie lifestyle with a Buddhist veneer. But it helped encourage me to go in a very different direction. When you are really in the thick of it, it is much more difficult not to notice what is going on. At least if you aren't really on board with either things in the first place.
Or catastrophe. You have to live here to understand the depths of the madness, and the extent and insistence of imposed denial. Here in the South, people no longer even speak of the broader culture or the nation as a whole—they limit conversation to the grass, the weather, the insects, in some ways a good thing. But also because ‘out there’ is incomprehensible and unspeakable. And possibly listening.
Seemingly, the purpose of government/media (they are one) is the compulsory imposition of fraudulent alternative realities. Alas, they are getting better at it.
Mel Profit, what you say about the American south, I can say about France, pretty much all over, but particularly in and near the big cities. Here, I say that people have lost the North. They don't know which saint to devote themselves to (French expressions). There is so much tension, and aggression waiting to explode in unexpected moments. Perhaps many people feel so much pressure to be... policing themselves that they are using all their energy this way ? Where is the pressure coming from, outside or.. inside ? How can you tell ? They are afraid. They are... panicked. They are afraid of losing control ?
As for reality, I ask my friends, what reality do you mean ? Whose ? Despite all the pressure to be... normal, there is really no stable norm right now. Not when unemployment has reached unbelievable heights, and people are wondering if they will have gas to put in their cars, or heat their homes this winter. Even food to eat. (Is it... reasonable to have these fears ? Who knows ?) Does that sound like a context where you can talk about "normal" ? Not to me...
Strangely enough, madness has always been a... trap. Defining someone as "mad" is convenient, particularly convenient for establishing what is "normal". But in periods of our history where societies go flip flop, madness goes flip flop too ? 50 years ago my mother had a personal religious experience, not an organized one. Her church, her friends did not question her encounter with God, at least not publicly. In my/our time, she would be considered mad. By many people, and most people who consider themselves to be.. civilized, intelligent, cultivated these days. (Note that I said "consider themselves", please.)
Curiously enough, what modern society considers to be madness, or illness can also be seen as particularly fruitful moments in the life of an individual person when old arrangements with life will no longer hold. When the precious image that we have of ourselves, and that we maintain with great cost, for others, but for ourselves too, shatters, and we are left naked, and struggling, basically. This is very uncomfortable, but I don't think that when caterpillars draw their cocoons around themselves they necessarily feel comfortable, and how can they know what will happen to them ? (Maybe they sense, and it is a good thing to be able to sense.)
The most important question, I feel, is who do we turn to, where do we put our trust when our society loses the North ?
Lots of uncomfortable time ahead, but lots of... freedom too. Freedom makes us very uncomfortable, albeit all our chest thumping about it.
Your thoughts about madness and comfort are very interesting--and valuable especially because they do not just echo what everyone else in the 'panic and dread community' is saying. (Since I am part of it I can be snarky towards it). Losing the North is an evocative image--and 'where do we turn' strikes me as just the right question. My thanks.
I’m a working class contractor in Texas (Austin, Dallas) and my clients are usually middle class homeowners. one thing I can say with confidence, is that no one, not my employees, my clients, my co-workers, ever talk politics or the state of the world. the closest they get is the high gas/supply chain issues.
it’s like 2 different worlds.
the world I interact with on a day to day basis has almost no footing in the Culture War/Internet madness that we see online and on screens everyday.
most folks just don’t care or are too freaked out to mention anything.
The Edith Hamilton book I just finished talks about the Athenian Greeks of the Golden Age as people who got all excited about talking about ideas (after defeating the Persian invasion against almost impossible odds). The citizens...maybe some slaves too, since there were educated, cultivated slaves too. When I first got to France over 40 years ago, many people got all excited talking about politics and ideas, and it was not the end of the world to shout and disagree, even get angry. Even when, not so long ago, France had a referendum to decide whether the French people wanted to ratify that European constitution, lots of French people of all classes and political parties got all excited talking about politics and ideas, and it was refreshing after all the talk about grass and the weather, and the price of gas, etc. The people were very disappointed when they voted, with a small majority, to NOT RATIFY the European constitution, and the successive governments, "left" or "right", basically ignored their vote. That was not good for getting people excited or hopeful about politics and self determination. When I talk about ideas at my local market, some people are game, others say "we aren't going to make the world over"... But I tell them that the world is up to being made over at the beginning of every day, really we have no choice in this one. The world is being made over every day. And they seem to enjoy a little bit of talk about ideas.
My guess is that people are uneasy about talking because they don't want to appear hoity toity, or to take a chance in a million of possibly offending somebody. In order to be A Good Person, in their own eyes, but in the eyes of others too. They also want to practice the out of sight out of mind solution to major problems. And also... because they feel helpless, and are suffering because of it. An electorate that feels helpless takes democracy down the drain, with or without... the oligarchs.
...
When my children were growing up, we talked "freely and openly" in our own home, around our dinner table, about ideas, politics, and everything that was important to us (with some restraints). My (now adult) children would bring their also middle class classmates home sometimes, for a meal, and the other children were amazed to hear how "freely and openly" (that one is from Jesus, in John) we talked. They... were not used to it. We did this even when my children were little. I always treated them as intelligent, sentient beings who could understand what I was saying, and I did not use a Walt Disney vocabulary, or a high perched voice either. This was not really an educational project for me. Talking freely and openly is who I am. Period. (Occasionally with some restraints...) I never really thought of doing things any other way.
Of my two children, only my daughter is still practicing the freely and openly. It has set her apart, the same way that our family was set apart. I have no regrets. I hope she won't either. She has been... set apart. Less so than her mother, but still apart.
ughh, nothing worse than the disney vocabulary and high pitched voice for kids. What a strange way to speak to your own children. It baffles me. Must be odd to have your son adopt the guarded conversation mode when he wasn't raised that way
like I wrote earlier, I’m not sure if the lack of dialogue I experience at work is a good or bad thing. I do think that half of it is that working class people have more immediate concerns, like rent and childcare, but the other half, sadly, feels like a form of self censorship. with the incredible divisions in online discourse being so toxic, I can tell there is a resistance to speaking one’s mind freely, for fear of reproach.
this doesn’t bode well for a failing democracy I’m afraid.
I agree with you Hollis, on the self censorship. It is sad. I think it fuels our potential to explode in violence.
My mother used to say "sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me". We certainly have become a lot more sensitive than my mother.
If trade, commerce and selling products are going to make the (universal) peace for us, as in the Roman empire, speaking freely takes hard hits.
Good luck in Texas. I have no prejudices against Texas. It was... almost a country in and of itself at one time. Maybe that will come back ?
I grew up in the US, and then spent a year abroad in Malaysia in my early 20s (in the late 1990s) . I was very attracted to staying there, and prayed and prayed about it. I got the answer that I was meant to return and live in the US, not because it was what I wanted but because it was the origin point of the most destructive forces affecting the rest of the world, and that my work needed to be close to that center.
The truth of that answer has become clearer as the decades have rolled on. I still don't like it (at times), but here we are. On the other hand, being here does help to see aspects of our human situation more clearly....
I think the US came into its own at the "perfect" time. A time of incredible technological expansion. The same will-to-power present in any empire could thus be expanded by orders of magnitude. We have driven this expansion because without it the US would cease to be top dog. Whether it remains so is quite another question. It may be that we have created a system of power so efficient that no one can control it.
It is interesting to see the different social rules that have been imposed over this time. The current set is so baffling it is hard to see what is being intended. Is it a new form of control or harbinger of the system getting wrapped up in its own gears, so to speak. My view differs depending on the day.
What seems fundamental is that there has been and are massive efforts to control how we think and how we live. This centers in the US. We point to China and their social credit, which appears to be true, but really the bleeding edge of control seems to be the US.
The greatest description of ML "machine learning" that I've heard from my coworkers is that it is a giant correlation machine. It does everything humans do well poorly and everything humans do poorly well. Correlation is not causation and so I think the idea of AI has been greatly overstated much as other tech breakthroughs have been in the past. It will have impacts but we are a long way off from being replaced by actual machines. Zombies on the other hand... Well that is our leadership class.
EP- I have my serious doubts that AI will ever become sentient, what I call the transmachine. I do worry about whether our current iteration, what I call the metamachine, a system of systems so complex and so focused on efficiency that not only can no one control it, but it starts causing a breakdown and unintended consequences due to this uncontrollable complexity.
My hunch is this is what we are sensing at the edges now. And that this tendency is only growing because we are unable to turn it off. -Jack
I go back and forth as well. Some days I marvel at the ability of current propaganda to convince hundreds of millions of people of things that are absurd or even satanically wrong. It can seem at these times that 21st century Western control no longer has need of men in jackboots, SWAT teams, gulags, all that crude Orwellian claptrap—ours is a far more sophisticated totalitarianism that triumphs by making at least the majority of citizens their own prison wardens. The ’police’ is one’s own mind.
Then, I will order a garden rake from HomeDepot and suddenly I am on the mailing list of, and receiving ads from, every maker of every conceivable home goods-related maker on planet earth. If this, I think, is the evolutionary arc-point of tech’s cutting edge logarithms, then perhaps the danger is less than it often appears. As with almost everything in a culture consisting of almost nothing but distorted images and fraudulent narrative, the AI of sell-speak is decades in advance of the actuality or its near-approximation
With increasing complexity you increase the chance for things to break. So as ML expands making stereotypes about people it increase the probability of mistakes, "false positives". As more people are falsely accused of this or that thing, labelled incorrectly, the anger and human push back, the more people will deviate from what is normal behavior. As the center is evacuated the correlation machine ceases to serve a purpose because the center becomes a void and the machine collapses in upon itself. One way or another that which cannot continue to exist will not.
I’ll try my luck here articulating a dilemma. I know many of you are Christians, and other than a slight connection with Dark Mountain, that’s why I came over to Paul’s blog—his story of conversion (that’s too light a word…how about revelation) inspired me.
I won’t lay out all the details, but I was deeply Catholic (with a touch of Baptist, typical American stew) as a child. Then I had a crisis of faith my first year in college, followed by a full monty mystical experience that blew apart my convictions and faith into some kind of pleasant agnosticism that privileged practice over belief. I then took the familiar tour of Eastern religions, all of which greatly inspired me, but about ten years ago walked away from it all. I’d gotten very sick with an autoimmune disease that honed me in on more somatic matters, but I’d also grown very weary of spiritual talk—especially talkers.
Anyhow, last year my frame blew up. I was living in my camper out West here in the wildfire smoke, and I could no longer make sense of the world (I wrote a brief essay about that for Dark Mountain here: https://dark-mountain.net/remembering-water/ ). Suddenly I felt an opening again, the first in two decades, not just towards codified religion, but for my ancestry and the frames of my ancestors. I realized: I don’t want to be the point at which their long transmission stops. I don’t want to make up the world anymore.
My mom told me to ask God for guidance, and I felt silly on my knees, but I did so. Soon enough I had a copy of the New Testament, and strange things happened, such as my saying before opening it “God give me a sign” and turning exactly to the phrase that Jesus utters, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? I tell you, your generation will receive no sign.”
Then I got swept up by the Spirit. Lots of all-nighters, lots of outpourings of love, lots of more strange things...
But I hit a block, and that’s why I’m here writing about it. My issues with Christianity have always been manifold, and they came back from their long snore to plague me. I won’t articulate them here, except to say that I struggle intensely with the theology (especially the Trinity), with the insistence on belief in particular miracles (I do conceptually believe miracles are possible), with the Christians who draw firm lines and castigate those on the other side, with the arrogance that occasionally shows up in salvation conviction, and so on.
So I stepped off the path for a few months, the Spirit left me, and I found myself entirely confused again. Now I feel the Spirit knocking on my door once more, but I’ve got a lot more patience than I did last year, and am willing to open that door more slowly rather than dive through. I made a leather cross that hangs in view from my bed, so it stands there every morning staring me down, and while I have no clue what it means, it’s staying put.
I feel called, I suppose. And trapped—partly by logic, that ‘ratio’ Paul mentioned last time, or maybe it’s better called skepticism (cynicism?). But called to where? Well, I want my Christian faith back, and I want to transmit it forward, and I want to be animated by God more precisely. And yet, I have this deep feeling that with the beliefs of Christianity that I currently hold, I wouldn’t be welcomed by many of the faith, including here. I’d feel that “unless I accept so-and-so premises,” I’m not Christian. Again, those firm lines (yes, lines aren’t always bad, but usually are, and in my view as a nondualist, always are when cordoning off God). I do take some solace in: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
For those of you who are followers of Christ who deeply believe the basic tenants of the religious claims—only Son of God, physical resurrection, physical return—how did that conviction arrive for you? Would you tell me I’m not Christian if I said I wanted to do what Jesus asks us to do, but have little interest in accepting the more extraordinary claims (with no interest in denying them either)? Do you still hold a little room for being wrong about the faith’s core claims, or is it a done deal, and does that feel liberating? What might you say to someone like me who feels called to walk the Way, but sees manmade roadblocks all over the path?
I know there’s a ton out there that discusses such issues, and I read a lot, but I’m interested in hearing from y’all who are here right now in this mysterious little corner of the electromagnetic field.
Such deep questions, and a really deep process for you… I find myself hoping you have one or two companions you can actually meet up with and talk things through with in the evening over whisky… it’s hard to discuss this without knowing you, and you knowing (and trusting) folks here. May you have the strength to dwell in the uncertainty for as long as you have to… may the answers find you… may faith be known not as conceptual certainty but as trust that you are an honest man who is home. All good wishes.
“An honest man who is home.” I’d have thought: looking to find his way home. But I like your articulation more.
I don’t have any physical companions (I live basically as a hermit) and I don’t drink, but surely I’ll take this invitation to the sagebrush with a cup of coffee…
"To do what Jesus asks us to do" comprises quite a lot. You might want to read the Gospel of John a few times through, and ask Jesus to show you what to do, and to show you himself. Your idea of the primacy of doing God's will is solid, but Christ spoke a lot about how HE is the way, the truth, the life, the image of the Father, the water, the bread, the vine in which we must abide if we want to have life. It's in him you will find what you are looking for, and that might be THE core claim of Christianity.
I’ll be honest, I struggle with John’s Gospel, which is clearly of a different kind than the synoptics. I keep returning to it, visiting different translations, hoping I’ll be swept into it the way I am into the synoptics. But perhaps because I hear so much of the kind of Christianity that turns me off inside it—that is, the sure kind—I’m not yet able to read its beauty from an untainted place. For now, I’m drawn more into Jesus’ ambivalence found in the synoptics, and phrases like “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” produce a different kind of allegiance in me to Jesus than what is typically asked for.
Great contemplative and mystical questions. I find the practice of Centering Prayer really helpful to bypass the analytical mind. Cynthia Bourgeault has wonderful practices to continue to unpeel the layers which I find helpful. Not so much trying to figure it out but allowing yourself to be undone (sounds like you’ve already been there). Some of it is based on the practices and writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers - the headwaters of Christianity. She also has much to say about the Wisdom Tradition (her books on the Wisdom Jesus and Mary Magdalene are worth reading several times, illuminating the usual, well rehearsed story in new light). She also strongly believes that in times of crisis the wisdom schools bubble back up to the surface from their underground streams, helping and guiding us when most needed. I find that very comforting, and have experienced this in my own life.
Thanks for this recommendation: an acquaintance similarly thought I should look into Centering Prayer, and I read the first few chapters of Wisdom Jesus but put it down. I’ll have another look…
For me, there are two answers, seemingly contradictory perhaps, but both are true: all at once; and very -- almost imperceptibly -- slowly, over a lifetime.
The "all at once" is this: faith is a gift from God, and it is given in Baptism. In my case (as in most) it was given to me without my knowledge or consent when I was a baby. The "slowly over a lifetime" is the learning of the faith, and the struggle with the faith, that occurs as you strive to live the Christian faith.
"Would you tell me I’m not Christian if I said I wanted to do what Jesus asks us to do, but have little interest in accepting the more extraordinary claims (with no interest in denying them either)?"
First of all, I would not presume to judge whether you are or are not a Christian. But I will say that to be a Christian is to follow Jesus and both obey his commandments and accept and believe His teachings. Neither of those things is easy. I have been a Christian for more than 60 years, and there have always been aspects of what you call "the more extraordinary claims" that I struggle with. As C.S. Lewis said, there are times when one wonders whether this "cock and bull story" is really true. But at a certain point I realized that the whole Christian faith depends on the testimony of the Apostles, and that either you trust their witness or you do not. One thing that I think is crystal clear from reading the New Testament is that the men who wrote those books were recording what they really believed to be true. They were recording what they had seen and heard, and what they had come to believe was the meaning of the events -- and the Person -- that they had experienced. And all but one of them gave their lives rather than deny the faith. You don't do that for the sake of a fiction that you made up. So, at the end of the day, I do trust them.
"What might you say to someone like me who feels called to walk the Way, but sees manmade roadblocks all over the path?"
I would say, listen to the calling, and go ahead and walk the Way. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Follow Him, and He will lead you into the Truth and bestow upon you the Life. Don't wait for every doubt to be resolved before setting out upon the Way, for it is only by walking the way that the doubts and difficulties can be dealt with.
I love this, thank you. And yeah, that fact that so many of the Apostles died tortuously for their conviction definitely speaks to something important. I was humbled to learn when reading Acts for the first time this year that my name comes from such an unshakable believer.
I'm not really in a good place to give you advice on anything here.
But I have felt what you have felt, and over time, I have come to put the name "holy spirit" on some feelings ? that have come over me, like a certain exaltation that transforms me, and my contacts with others. I have put the name "Holy Spirit" on the reactions of people to... not me, but something beyond me that people are hungry for when they meet me, for example. (I could use technical, even psychological terms to talk about this, but I have decided to abandon those terms as a form of betrayal.)
We are living in troubled times. After thinking and musing over this a long time, and observing my life in France as an American raised by practicing Christians to love Jesus, the Bible, both testaments, and a living church community, I find myself saying that I feel a tremendous push in our modern world to destroy the legacy of Christ in the world, and I don't want his light to go out. No more than that. I will not call myself Christian, because in many ways I am too modern to be a good traditional Christian now.
But... something tells me that Paul of Tarsis was a very complicated man living in a very complicated time. When he had his... revelation/conversion, his world was turned upside down. I tell myself that he probably never totally recovered ? from being what he originally was : a very orthodox Jew who considered Jesus to be a dangerous heretic to the Jewish faith. But that man who persecuted the early Christians was also the one to give Jesus an enormous push in the world, for the better... and the worse ? (I believe that we live in a world where good and evil are inextricably mixed.)
No leather cross for me, but I have engaged myself to be present at a weekly prayer group for mothers. We read the Bible, opening haphazardly to a page, and often, like you, I have felt the pertinence of what the page opens up to. Right now, a lot of the Old Testament speaks to me very strongly, with the insistance on trusting to God, who is trustworthy, over political leaders.
I would say that Jesus Christ right now needs everybody batting for him who can. He was truly an open, and tolerant one...Not only Jesus Christ, moreover. There is somebody maybe who needs to be defended (?) (who I feel like defending), perhaps even more than Christ himself, and that is Mary. Mary... makes me wonder. She is one of Christianity's greatest mysteries, and one that has been attacked since Protestantism came around...
One last thing : the secularized world deeply needs the presence and the inspiration of people who are courageous enough to proclaim their faith ? In France, it's simply daring to talk about Jesus and THE PERTINENCE OF WHAT HE HAS TO SAY FOR OUR TIMES, in my case. Mary, and her decision to say "yes" to a very unknown and uncertain future. The secularized world deeply needs this, even if people tell themselves ? they are hostile or not interested.
I believe that the story of Christ himself, and the Christian religion(s) ? are perhaps the greatest miracle...his lasting appeal for so many generations. His capacity to transform lives.
Sometimes I think that I couldn't let the light go out, even if I wanted to anyway...I am mixed up in it. No mistake about it... we are all mixed up in it...
...
Last week I watched Frank Capra's "Meet John Doe". It is a black film, about a cynical America, but definitely worth your while, if only for the last few minutes, where Capra makes a statement of faith that still holds, and reveals the continuing power of the Christian way of looking at the world.
We have collectively known great despair before, in the human (Western) experience. As has been said before : "this too will pass". And "nothing new under the sun". That is simultaneously depressing but potentially uplifting, depending on your state of mind.
I hope that you will find people physically close to you with whom you can exchange on your quest ? journey ? And, as someone else here said "all good wishes".
Much appreciation to you for expressing some of the conflicts you find around Christianity, and for noting that they’re ongoing: I suppose much of the material I read by Christians is certain in a way that I’m not sure I’ve ever been certain about anything (and perhaps that’s because of selection bias…writers are often too sure of themselves). I value hearing about sincere struggles with faith that don’t wrap up neatly, but stay raw.
I just thought of something this morning : no talk about the Nicean creed, but the Lord's Prayer. I can now say the Lord's prayer with a feeling that I totally espouse everything that is in it, and it speaks to me profoundly, and I say it with the others in my prayer group. I say it in the old King James version "forgive us our trespasses", while the others say it in French. The Lord's Prayer binds US into a community of Christians.
(Well... true to myself, I have one little quibble with the Lord's Prayer, it is in the "Thy kingdom come", because I believe that the Kingdom of God is truly with us here and now...Probably there is a long standing theological quarrel about this issue, with one or two heresies, and a few massacres thrown in, but... that's life and history.)
I think when we pray “thy kingdom come” we are praying to be filled with the Holy Spirit for that day as in give us our daily bread. Paul says in Romans 14 that the “kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” - the only place in the NT where the kingdom of God is explicitly defined. Jesus ends his teaching on prayer, where a version of the Lord’s Prayer is found, by saying “ how much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” and in another place in Luke, “fear not little flock ; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom”
What you say makes a lot of sense to me, and fits with what I understand Jesus's ministry to be about. A few years ago I finally understood, I think, what was behind "Ask, and it shall be given to you". I have seen this mystery at work in my relationships and contacts with other people. Now I can say the Lord's prayer.. in peace. Thank you.
This is really interesting. Thank you for sharing it. I know sharing these things can be hard. I must say, your experience sounds very much like mine, even in some of the details. They surprised the hell out of me too at the time! Since I began writing about it, I've had quite a lot of correspondence from others and that confirms that we're not the only ones who have had such an experience either. It might even be approaching 'common' - or at least not that unusual.
I'll just say a couple of things from my understanding - which continues to develop daily, and is still very new. So take it as a very personal response.
Firstly, as someone says below, it's not possible to judge anyone else's relationship with God, or Christ, and we shouldn't try. In fact, we are mandated not to. That said, being a 'Christian' as such has a pretty widely accepted meaning, one which is defined by the Nicene creed. To me, it comes down to the resurrection, and all of its manifold implications. I would say that the miracles performed by Christ during his lifetime matter too, of course, in demonstrating why he was followed and who he was: something more than a man.
Without those - but especially without the resurrection, as St Paul says somewhere explicitly - Christianity as any kind of faith or religion makes no sense to me. Yeshua of Nazareth is just a teacher from 2000 years ago - perhaps a prophet, maybe some kind of saint, but nothing more. Under those circumstances, I might still want to follow his teachings, if I considered them wise or true or a good compass to navigate by. But I wouldn't build my life around him, anymore than I would build my life around the prophet Ezekiel, or Gandhi or Tolstoy or [insert name of wise spiritual teacher here.] There has to be something more.
For a long long time, as a younger man, I was able to look at Christianity and think to myself, 'yes, a lot of that seems wise and true (though not all of it) but I just can't believe in it.' I couldn't believe in a man coming back from the dead, or in a virgin birth or in 'miracles'. It felt like stories made up to dress up something real and special that had happened, but which was now being mythologised out of all proportion.
And it's still possible to think this way, if I engage just my left brain. A degree of scepticism is no bad thing either. Without it, it's possible to be swept away by nonsense. Yet when I look at the Christian story as told by the apostles - the ones who were there - I can see that even taken historically, the resurrection is the only thing that explains why Christianity even exists. After the crucifixion, the disciples felt they'd been sold a pup - that they'd thought this was the Messiah, but he'd turned out not to be. They were literally walking away from the scene when he showed up again. They went on, most of them, to be killed for the sake of proclaiming this as truth: something they would presumably not have done had they imagined or faked it. Something happened there - something that simply couldn't be explained in rational terms.
So that's an argument that convinced me. Ultimately though, it is not argument that keeps me here. What happened to me sounds similar to what happened to you. I also got down on my knees (very self-consciously) and asked God to show me the truth. And along came Christ, in all sorts of ways. And as I chose to follow the path laid out, I found that, inexplicably, things which my mind had presiously blocked seemed to make sense. The resurrection seemed true. The virgin birth seemed true. I can't explain why, but it wasn't through me trying to persaude myself intell;ectually because I wanted to 'be a proper Christian.' I just knew in some very internal way that these things were real and had happened.
I attribute this to the basic choice: deciding to follow Christ. That's what I promised to do, and what I want to do. Theology interests me intellectually, but ultimately it's just window-dressing on the main event: humans trying to explain what happened in systemic terms. Necessary, perhaps, especially to keep us from wandering off too far, but still not the point. I just decided, as I say, to follow Christ - Christ as the son of God - and to accept that fact and see what happened. And this is what is happening! I'm still not sure where it will lead me. But I've decided I'm going to go there because, compared to every other path I've ever seen or been on, this one seems true.
Thanks, Paul. Yes, hearing yours and others thoughts certainly does help. I often feel very alone in my engagement with Christ, in part because much of my life is deliberately designed around being alone. And since I wasn’t expecting to have a re-encounter with Christ, I’m a bit at a loss for where to turn and how to proceed.
I appreciate hearing how you came to believe in the core tenants of Christianity and how that makes sense to you. I’m not there, and honestly, I’m not sure I’m supposed to get there. But I do suppose I have a yearning for tradition, which does imply that I align with at least something of the central beliefs.
I hear you on the Nicene Creed, for instance, being a starting point for defining Christians, and yet, that Creed reads like legalese to me (I used to chant it every week too as a kid), and given it’s historical context—defeating not just the Gnostic sects but the Arian notion of subordinationism (which, I’ll be honest, I find appealing)—I have a hard time hearing it as the untrammeled voice of God. I’m open-minded though, and hopefully open-hearted. I’m with you that these matters have to approached with a different kind of sensibility than the well-trained logic I’m still trying to vomit out of my soul. The two mystical experiences I’ve had, which certainly weren’t logical, definitely have had more meat on the bone than any cold analysis. In part, that’s why I’m weary of creeds in general: I’m weary of capture.
To me, I don’t think that Jesus either has to be a profound sage or the only Son of God. In my reading and contemplation, I experience Jesus as having lived out the eternal Christ pattern, which is always available and kept accessible by the Body. That makes him, to me, more than sage, but also not exclusive. If God is truly “all in all,” as Paul says, and which also aligns with my belief in nondualism, I really can’t reconcile how anyone or anything has any special claim to God (David Bentley Hart really helped me on this front in his recent book “You are Gods,” though I’m certain he’d disagree with where I took his arguments). And in the synoptics, I hear Jesus expressing this ambivalence (most poignantly in his final words in Matthew and Mark), though certainly in John he’s of a different character (and one I find harder to accept…I find the hypostatic union approach to be unnecessarily convoluted). As I said, I’m willing to change my view, and honestly I feel an envy for the kinds of views that align with the traditions—so I want that, but I’m also reminded frequently that I have to be true to the callings in me. Sorting out what’s a calling and what’s a rubbish constructed frame is certainly a task! I suppose I shall keep asking for guidance, and trust that.
Meanwhile, the tender part of me wants to follow this path where it leads and not be told I’m not a Christian. I wish I had the fortitude to just “go it alone” and not care what the social world thinks, but I don’t, and besides, that strikes me as what cult leaders do. It’s also likely caught up with trauma I’ve had around Christianity, particularly with rejection. As a young boy, for instance, I saw Mary, but there was nowhere to turn, so I kept it secret, and when my grandmother gave me a statue of Mary that was the exact replica of what I’d seen, I took it outside, told no one, and beat it to shatters with a rock. In other words, the kinds of spiritual connections I’ve had were, at times, ostracized (most famously during my trips to the ol’ psych ward).
One more matter: while I don’t accept, at this stage, the resurrection as having been a literal and physical event, I also don’t reject that notion. When I read the Gospels several times this year, I was surprised that I simply didn’t care. For me, either way the notion of resurrection touches a deep place in my spirit and expresses an important truth about how reality is constructed. I suppose I don’t feel a need for it to be literally true to believe in Christ. The same goes for the miracles. Again, I don’t deny them either: they touch on something profound for me whether they happened like that or not. I hope there’s a place for me in more traditional paths even if I believe like this, for the kinds of modernized secular Christian paths that dismiss the literal nature of the resurrection are also unappealing to me because they lose all the mystical nature of Christ. I hope I can find a foot in either Catholicism (my heritage) or Orthodoxy, but my novice readings of “what I must believe” leave me feeling doubtful.
Perhaps I’ll be singing a different tune next year. I’ll have to wait and see, patiently (not my usual forte!)
This is a great conversation, Stephen. Thanks for it. Here are a few more scattered thoughts from me that it has stimulated - also, it goes without saying, from a new Christian still working his way through (though, from conversations I've had with very long-term Christians, this never stops being the case ...)
Firstly, on doubt: I talk to my priest about this a lot, as do most people, I think. He treats it as an entirely everyday occurence (including among priests). Doubt is normal, I think. How could it not be? We are expressing a belief in something - God, Christ - that our everyday senses can't experience, and our entire society is telling us it's all nonsense. We would be very strange beings if we never wrestled with this (or fanatics.) It's part of the journey. Jack talks about this well below.
I visited Rome recently - standing in St Peter's Basilica was a strangely un-Christian experience. Or rather, it felt like a worldly imperial experience. But beneath it, at the grave of St Peter, which is underground, everything was different. There was a presence there, at this grave of a simple fisherman. I felt it helped me to understand this faith much better. One thing that hit me strongly as a result of my trip was the reality that life is a struggle, and that this is the design. Nothing is supposed to be easy - especially faith! This wrestling with what is true, this spiritual battle, is part of the work. We're not supposed to easily accept a set of propositions and then never think about anything again. We're supposed to struggle to get closer to God. That hit me as a truth that was incontrovertible.
The Nicene Creed is certainly not the untrammelled voice of God, you're right. More like the trammelled voice of a committee trying to cover all the bases. One curiousity for me is that I have begun to understand this better though. Again, being in Rome - as well as confirming my choice not to become Catholic! - made me feel more forgiving towards the church over the centuries. I can see how often the whole thing went wrong and got out of control, but I can also see 2000 years of people struggling to manifest this strange mystery in the world. I understood why things like the Creed needed to happen, and why there need to be dogmas and boundaries. Like you, when I became Christian I felt a need to follow a tradition, and I looked for the oldest and most unchanged. Of course, that means there will be aspects that I personally don't like, or even understand. That's OK with me if I feel that on the whole the thing exists to protect truth, and that the people doing so are (mostly) genuine. I do feel that where I am.
For me, the uniqueness of Christ - and especially his resurrection - is the heart of the matter. This is perhaps the reason all the dogmas and creeds exist: to guard this truth. I admire David Bentley Hart in some ways (his NT translation is very eye-opening) but I am very much on my guard against this 'you are all Gods' approach. It chimes with the Richard Rorh 'universal Christ' notion which I see as a sly way of removing Christ's divinity from the faith - which in itself would, of course, demolish Christianity entirely. Sometimes I think that's the point. If Christ is not unique - if there is no resurrection, no miracles, if 'Christ' is some vague universal 'energy' that we can all inherit - well, what have we done? We've made ourselves gods, which is the aim of modernity. It's also the aim of the snake in the garden, of course: one reason I love that story is that it keeps speaking to us.
For me personally, the uniqueness of Christ in all its outrageous impossibility and truth, is the heart of the matter. Without it, I'm not sure what I would be following. Not God, certainly. Then who? And why? If Jesus isn't excluive, do we need him at all?
From a traditional Christian perspective (certainly an Orthodox one) the resurrection changes the pattern of reality - it defeats death itself. That's a huge claim, of course. But it's one reason why, without it, the faith falls apart. I'm wary of this not because I like every aspect of the church, or consider it infallible or anything, but because I can see the trap laid by our modern minds: we'll have Jesus, but only if we can all be Jesus! I want to walk away from that, because I can see where it leads. As you say, the 'modernised' Christian paths which talk this way are hollow, thin things, whereas, for example, in a liturgy I sense a deep and real power. There has to be some reason for that.
Anyway, like you say, these are propositions, and they don't get to the heart of the matter. Maybe Mary is the heart of the matter for you. I hear that from a lot of people. If you were visited, maybe you could revisit that. I didn't understand Mary at all until I became Orthodox, but now I'm starting to dimly understand who she is, and why it matters. It's just a thought.
As for Mary, she is the way in for many of us. Her presence and love hit me like a ton of bricks fairly early after my conversion like nothing else has. I know there are many who look askance at this, but it is fully real if any of this is.
I have had a strong tendency to go the Christian Neoplatonic route via St. Dionysius, the Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart etc. So having the Theotokos make her presence and love known to me so early helped to keep me tethered to the embodied expression of Christianity. I am thankful for that.
Not blathering at all. One of the reasons I appreciate your articulations about Christianity is because you’re so new to it and have fresh eyes. I sense you may also be temperamentally somewhat of a contrarian, as am I, and that makes the matter of following the most traditional path available shocking. I suppose it lends credence to the gravity of truth you’re experiencing in Christ.
You’ve raised many important points that I’m going to think hard on. In particular, I’m in agreement that a “everyone is equally divine” kind of logic has some serious shadow sides (I couldn’t finish a Rohr book), even if it’s true. And I don’t know if it’s true, or rather, if that articulation is even meaningful.
I loved your story there about the underground. And yes, the more I dive into Church history, the more I too become appreciative, and find myself strangely telling my progressive friends that actually, the aftermath of Christ sailed forth incredible liberations. Even if I walk off the path, I leave with a deep respect now for the tradition.
Thanks for that final paragraph, Paul. You know, I’ve certainly never publicly (and rarely privately) talked about having seen Mary, and I suppose I haven’t actually considered what to do with that. “Maybe Mary is the heart of the matter for you.” Maybe indeed.
Hi Stephen. Wow, your comment here spoke deeply to me. I too was raised Christian but left the church as a teenager. I also did the (seemingly) requisite tour of the Eastern religions and deemed myself very vaguely as "spritiual but not religious."
I am a birth doula and after a particularly difficult birth I attended at the beginning of this year, I found myself in a church with my best friend of many years, who has been a Christian for as long as I've known her. I find myself also being called to walk the Way but my scepticism is ever-present too. I am very reluctant to call myself a Christian for all the connotations it has - and indeed, for all the roadblocks.
There's a comment below mine that talks about faith having two seemingly contradictory elements: both the "all at once" gift that we can rest in and also being something that we are continually journeying with. That's the "walking in faith, not by sight," part.
One of my mentors always reminds me of the story of Jacob wrestling with God in the Bible. He actually says to Him, face-to-face, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
What if we can allow ourselves to get in the ring with God when it comes to all of our doubts and questions? What if it's actually part of that very process of walking in faith?
Catherine- Yes, I think doubt has a much more fundamental role than we have been led to believe. I comment similarly elsewhere in this thread. When I was younger, and before I converted, the first Biblical story that I resonated with was Jacob wrestling with God. That seemed intuitively right to me and it still does.
This sense may have been prompted or certainly at least deepened by the Rilke poem on the same idea:
That’s awesome to read of a fellow traveler in similar binds. Your last questions about doubt: yes, yes. I do hope though that doubt can actually be doubt, meaning without a foregone conclusion or pretension for where one has to arrive. Sometimes I feel that in order to become Christian, the endpoint is already set in stone.
Another thing on doubt: Jesus’ last words in Mark and Matthew, his cry of despair in his Aramaic tongue…for my first rereading of the Gospels, that’s what drew me in the most. I was stunned that I’d never truly encountered that verse (that I can remember) in all my religious upbringing. Because I definitely read it as doubt. And if Christ doubts God, especially in his final moments, how unbelievably worthy doubt really is.
God why have you forsaken me has deeper meanings also as Jesus was not the first to say those words. I think I might have read it on Rabbi Sacks covenant and conversation though I'm not sure. Probably worth investigating further if you're interested.
When I first read that verse I didn't understand it at all. Not only why Christ would say it, if he was who he was claimed to be - but also, why the gospel writers would include it, if it introduces doubt into a story they are trying to shore up.
Then I discovered the source of it: Psalm 22. What he is doing on the cross, it seems, is pointing just before he dies to the part of the Old Testament which has already foreseen what is happening to him:
'I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
it has melted within me.
My mouth[d] is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
you lay me in the dust of death.
Dogs surround me,
a pack of villains encircles me;
they pierce[e] my hands and my feet.
All my bones are on display;
people stare and gloat over me.
They divide my clothes among them
and cast lots for my garment.
But you, Lord, do not be far from me.
You are my strength; come quickly to help me.'
I found that deeply spooky when I first read it. The story the Psalm tells is of rescue - faith will deliver the servant even from death itself.
I just come back again and again to the faith - which is the key. Just following Christ, and seeing where he leads you.
One of the enjoyable things about the bible is how interconnected every single passage is. It's like an infinite onion peel. With every layer you pull off your left with the same onion. The depth is unending and chances are the reader gives up or dies long before anything resembling and ending is reached. In a way it is circular and ignoring time and space. Thus the past often speaks of the future and the future often speaks of the past..
I guess I'd say there's a difference, it seems to me, between human taxonomy, on the one hand, and one's relationship with God, on the other. I think they're distinct -- not that one of them is irrelevant, but that they aren't the same thing.
In the context of taxonomy, religions exist and have their known boundaries. Some of them are more fluid than others. Christianity is actually quite fluid in its boundaries, given the many schisms and splits that have taken place throughout Christian history, but even given all of those splits, there are "fundamentals" that are more or less shared by people who fall under the taxonomic category "Christian". This doesn't mean that everyone who considers themselves to be a Christian accepts all of these personally (that's clearly NOT the case), or that everyone who practices some or many of what Christianity proposes on a daily basis for human ethics is a Christian (or not), but rather that the word "Christian" has some substantive content, some boundaries, from a taxonomic point of view.
A separate question is the issue of one's relationship with God. Some Christians see that as personal (perhaps most Protestant Christians do), others see it as corporate (Catholics and Orthodox tend to), but regardless of how humans see it, the critical issue is God, and God's activity in the matter, which isn't *necessarily* constrained to the understanding, official or otherwise, of any one faith. That is -- faiths may teach that God's power or relationship is experienced primarily by doing X and believing Y, and, for some people, while being incorporated into the group A and regularly partaking in the ritual B or doing the prescribed acts C through F, or some such, but none of that human structure *necessarily* means that God is limited to that, in fact, regardless of what the "official faith" may teach -- Christian or otherwise. That is always limited by God's will alone which is, in essence, unconstrained. That's a key thing to keep in mind when thinking about these things.
Of course none of that will completely remove the dissonance you're unfortunately feeling. That arises from our own limitations as humans and our need to sort things into boxes and categories and so on for understanding, sense-making, and a maintaining a sense of mental stability. And that will always be challenged if one stands at odds from the general taxonomic category of a given religion but practices it anyway. Over time it's possible that this dissonance will decrease for you personally, I think -- it's probably unlikely, unfortunately, that the attitudes of others would similarly change over time if they are inside the given taxonomy due, again, to the dissonance involved. Ultimately it's a question of your own comfort level with the dissonance you have from the "official taxonomy", if you will, and how that develops and perhaps changes over time, and what your overall faith experience is during that time as well. I realize that doesn't sound very helpful, and it may not, in fact, be that comforting, but I do think such things are tetchy precisely because religious groups, Christian and otherwise, are often tetchy about their own boundaries, and it's an issue that is very difficult to avoid -- something which itself drives many people away from faith despite serious inquiries.
I suppose the dissonance I feel is not a discomfort with uncertainty and paradox, but that virtually all Christian paths I’m attracted to speak in certainties and ask me to believe those. And I want a codified path. I know there are plenty of Christians who show up to a well-worn path and keep their doubts, and maybe that’s just it for me: I need to understand that I can be seriously doubtful (of certain claims) and present in a Church, and that most importantly, that I should feel free to allow those doubts to lead me astray if they win out. I’ll be honest: I wish the Church would express doubt. Not just mystery, but actual doubt. That’d feel much more welcoming to a frequently confused cat like me. But that’s just my wish, selfish, and I don’t imagine there’s much doubt to be expressed once you’re the Church. On the other hand, what attracted me to Buddhism for so long was the light touch.
Steven- Doubt is not necessarily the enemy. I think of Dostoevsky's quote, “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.” The psalms, for example, are shot through with this sense of darkness and abandonment. With one exception always tempered with a kind of hope.
I take the prayer, "Lord I believe, help my unbelief" as a good one. Sometimes that turns into, "Lord I don't believe, help my unbelief". For me the central response is to find a deep practice and commit to it. It hasn't always resolved my doubts, but it has changed me in ways that I find surprising. Nothing else I have ever tried has gone nearly as deep. My understanding of anything is so limited. Our Faustian urge to know everything can be quite the stumbling block. It is for me. -Jack
Thanks Jack, I always enjoy your comments. Yes, I hear you that practice is certainly something necessary. In some ways, my life is setup in a way that mimics a kind of practice: I’m long-term celibate, alone, live in 65 sq ft, fast on food and sleep all the time, spend much time in the wilds, and so on. I didn’t intend to live like this as any kind of spiritual path, but it’s slowly becoming one. Meanwhile, I yearn for something more—perhaps traditional, perhaps something that carries through the ages something important. If I were settled, that’d certainly look like a Church (for starters). But since I roam, it’s going to have to take a different shape. Not sure what that’ll be, but soon I will start praying again (baby steps over here).
Steven- I might have also recommended silent prayer, as I believe someone else did in this thread. But it sounds like you are already living it. With all your doubts you may be closer than you think. Who knows? -Jack
Steven, I don’t have answers for you about Christianity (because I’m not an officially a Christian!) but I too have had mystical experiences burst forth that did not fit the frame of the religion I was practicing (at that time buddhism). It’s actually a Christian mystic friend of mine who told me that the holt spirit works through individuals. What ever you are experiencing with your relationship to God, is the unique expression of something made manifest in you, and you don’t need to necessarily buy into other people’s interpretations of what God is to validate it. God is partially a mystery. I don’t think any of what I’ve personally experienced contradicts what Jesus or Buddha would have said, I just don’t think it fits in the more narrow frame of what some people thought they said in totalizing terms. I now read buddhist books I used to read and certain things take on new meanings based on my mystic experiences. Your story is beautiful and I wish you well on integrating your experience!
Thanks Christina. I recently had a conversation with a friend about Christ where I arrived in a similar place: that is, if we are all, as individuals, truly made in the image of God, then we all should find the individual way that God expresses through us—which has to be unique. I’ve been weary of that approach (I worked in a new age bookstore, for instance, and saw plenty of individuals making outrageous spiritual claims), and I know any individual expression must be tempered by humility and hopefully community. But I think the heart of relying on one’s inner selves is solid, so long as those inner selves stay in constructive dialogue with the outer world.
If I end up being a Christian with a hodgepodge set of beliefs, so be it. I don’t want that: I certainly don’t consider myself as possessing some superior ability to sort through Christianity any better than the many predecessors who lived by Christ resolutely. But I also won’t deny that inner prickling, or my dream voices, or my bullshit detector (which frequently needs recalibrating).
In Orthodoxy, you'll often hear the church referred to as a 'spiritual hospital.' It really struck me the first time I heard it. Perhaps we've often assumed, or been taught even, that the church is more like a court of law: somewhere you go to be judged for being imperfect. Or maybe like a stage, where we all show off our righteousness. But in fact it's well understood that the purpose of church and prayer and any ritual attacked to Christianity (which after all was founded by a man critical of empty ritual) is *therapeutic.*
I still think about this a lot. Why go to a church on Sunday? Because you need therapy! Because you're sick. We all are. So we go to be healed, and that's the heart of the matter. We can't heal ourselves, but God can heal us - or so we hope. And things do happen. People in my church have different opinions about theology and politics and practice, and different levels of commitment and time. But we're all in there together, stumbling along.
I find this is one of the most helpful aspects of a liturgically-centered, old church (Orthodox, Catholic, etc). There can be people with vastly different opinions in the church, but we're all focused on worshiping. If we're all worshiping and being healed by God, the differences either don't get in the way, or begin to fade in importance compared to the light of the Divinity we're all oriented towards together.
Examine your own heart and stop concerning yourself with the hearts of others. You will know them by their fruits, who is and is not following Christ.
“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits,” (Matthew 7:15-20).
Thanks for these recommendations. I’ll certainly have a look: I’ve found the Desert Fathers to be quite inspiring (and slightly crazy, which I prefer). And yes, I fully believe in knowing one by their fruits…and yet, I encounter a lot of Christianity that privileges beliefs over actions. I know they’re not ultimately separate, but still, I hear much about “having to believe” certain premises to know God, and while I’ll stay open to that approach, it currently makes my stomach churn.
As for “stop concerning yourself with the hearts of others”: I’m not sure that’s my path; it conflicts with some of my ethics, though I’m revisiting those presumptions.
All people are humans. I know it is an overused koan but if you meet the buddha, kill the buddha. Just because someone is a Christian doesn't mean they are not struggling also. Without knowing someone we cannot really know their actions and even if we do, all mankind is of two hearts and is struggling in this world. Christians are called to follow Christ and live as an example. Probably most people fail at that most of the time. I'm not going to judge your failures because I don't wish to have my failures judged. Their are sayings to that effect in the Desert Fathers but it is also making an idol of the faith to expect more of others than you expect of yourself.
God is omnipresent. You might take a look at Meister Eckhart and many of the other Christian mystics. Their is the passage where Jesus tells his disciples that if knock the door will be opened to them and all will be revealed. God does not work in parlor tricks but if you truly want to speak to God with your entire heart and mind more than you wish to live then God will answer you. He did me. However with mystical experiences words are not sufficient to describe them. Eckhart is much like Suhrawardi in the Islamic tradition. Here is a short video: https://youtu.be/XbD8vfzsEHA
Thank you for sharing your experience so clearly and authentically here. I don't know if I can give an articulate response here - but I would be very happy to listen one-on-one sometime and talk over some of these aspects of the Christ path. The deeper the waters we're treading, the more important I find a live, give-and-take conversation is. If that sounds worth pursuing, write me at mark@metanoiavt.com and we can find a time.
I love hearing about your journey, and thanks for sharing here brother.
I just wanted to say I feel quite a bit less lonely reading this, and probably also less special. Steven, pretty much everything you say echoes how I feel about these things. Except I think I am less brave.
Do folks here know the energy expert Nate Hagens? He is predicting a massive reset over the next 10-20 years that we will be forced into, based around specifically energy. Perhaps no big news for people here - but his Youtube videos are interesting, particularly now as energy has shot up the agenda.
Enjoying your writing as always, Paul. I found one thing to quibble with in your most recent essay, There Were Giants in the Earth (a lovely phrase from Genesis 6), related to the role of the Reformation in this narrative you are telling. Full disclosure: I am a full-blown protestant, of the Canadian and reformed Baptist type. But if I don't say a word for us poor maligned protestants, who will?!
So the nub of it for me is that I think part of what you assign to the reformation really needs to be blamed on nominalism, the medieval rejection of the existence of universals (from classical Platonic metaphysics). It's pretty clear that the early reformers retained the classical metaphysics of the early church, but that the reformed churches lost their grip on it as Enlightenment modernity swept through all of society. I wonder what you would make of the narrative laid out here by a fellow Baptist, Craig Carter: https://craigacarter.substack.com/p/ideas-have-consequences
You wrote: "After the Reformation, the stage was set for Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, all of which can be seen as new eruptions of Machine consciousness into a world in which the sacral worldview was in retreat." But I think the start of that chain has to go back to nominalism, and then - yes - the reformation contributes in some ways to the rest of that process.
Lastly, it pained me a little to read about your visceral allergy to the automobile. I do see your point, and I don't deny what the car did to the world. Yet I have always loved cars and I still do. There's a beauty, grace, and power that is undeniable there, a genuine artfulness. I guess I just have to live in that tension.
Ah, living in the tension! Yes, that's where we all are. I suppose it always has been. I am also able to see the beauty in some cars. There are some deisgn classics out there. I always loved the Morris Minor, myself, which probably just shows how English I am. The beauty can't be detached from the impact though - which I suppose is also true of everything.
I wrote an essay a while back drawing on the book 'The Unintended Reformation', which did mention nominalism and Ockham and the like. I'm no expert, and I struggle to get my head around these theological details: the essay helps; thanks for that. I do accept though that 'blame the Reformation' is simplistic, even for the purposes of an essay. As an aside, I was in Rome recently and had a tour of St Peter's Basilica. One unintended consequences of that was that I could see very clearly indeed why the reformers did what they did. I probably woud have joined them.
In fact, I tend more and more towards seeing the Great Schism between Eastern and Western churches as the jumping-off point which set us on our current path. The Western church severed itself from the more mystical, nous-based faith of the East, and headed down the path of rationality and power. In some ways I am starting to understand the Reformation as an attempt to correct that error - but one which had the overall effect of deepening it.
Anyway: here we all are, protestants and Orthodox and Catholics and atheists and everyone else ...
I'm not sure what you mean by "universals" here. I am not at all an expert in theology or philosophy, and am reticent (and lazy) about reading in these domains, although I have dabbled for many years. I read the Carter article.
Many years ago I read an article by a linguist, Emile Beneveniste, who convincingly made a case for the idea (!) that Greek philosophical exploration arose out of the structure of the Greek language itself. Like "meta", as in "metaphysics".
What I find important in the Greek experience is how the civilization... progressed from telling vivid, imaginative stories about things (and ideas ?) that could not be seen, in order to justify them ? find causes ?, in mythology, where forces are personnified (given human shape and form), to abstract and disembodied concepts, in scientific discourse.
If I remember correctly, Plato himself dismissed the old (pagan) mythology as old wives' tales (our word would be "fake"), and proceeded to introduce his own..philosophical myths as means of attaining a meta-physical truth. (One that is beyond the physical world.)
If you think about it, you will notice that you can't see your thoughts. People can show you images of brain activity, and feel all important, but you can't see your thoughts. They are... meta-physical.
Just for laughs... about ten years ago, I was with an English speaking friend who worked as a physicist in our high technology city, and she told me that in her scientific research, she was currently working on finding the "God particle".
She said that with no particular difficulty. i took that phrase like a kick in the stomach. To me, it looked ? looks ? as though we have come... full ellipse back to theology.
I sometimes wonder what kind of world I want to live in, one where God is... everywhere around me (immanence) or one where he is OUT THERE (transcendance). I think that there may be some definite disadvantages to immanence that we refuse to... see right now.
Back to "universals" : are we talking about universal truths ? or universal.. projects ?
For example, "in Christ there is no east nor west, in him no north or south, but one community of love throughout the whole wide earth". I think that is the Paulinian... universal ? project, if I'm not mistaken. An empire of love ? That sounds very frightening to me, even if it is with good intentions...
I don't know who said you gotta be careful about what you pray for, because you might just get it, but that person had seen a lot of the world, and not just in books.
For info, I was raised Protestant too. There is a strong individualist streak in Protestantism, and if I wanted to... deny that, I would be casting stones from my house made of bay windows. My Protestant mother living in the 1950's had reformation ? superstitions about the Catholic church, and it was eery. She thought that the Catholic church had turned Mary into an idol...
If I am going to prosternate myself in front of something or somebody (and the..French Revolution is all about rejecting that), I would rather it be Mary. And a God with... a face ? maybe has some saving graces ? Better than a concept.
On the car : I said elsewhere here that I believe that we live in a world where good and evil are inextricably mixed together. Maybe our greatest... sin ? is to desire to separate good from evil ? Could that be a sin ? If that is a fallen world, then that is still OUR WORLD.
What do we... do, then ? Decidedly, our freedom is cumbersome.
Last point, and I will shut up : once again, I have returned to William Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream". I believe that this play successfully presents and questions many of the issues I just brought up, and why Man is an animal who loves beautiful stories that he has made up. Why man transforms his world with his imagination, and why this can be... good or evil, depending. Shakespeare does this in such a way that you can see flights of fancy, but down to earth sticking as close to "reality" as a slug sticks to the ground when it travels. I would rather read Shakespeare than philosophy or theology. I get much more pleasure out of it. And the poetry...
'For example, "in Christ there is no east nor west, in him no north or south, but one community of love throughout the whole wide earth". I think that is the Paulinian... universal ? project, if I'm not mistaken. An empire of love ? That sounds very frightening to me, even if it is with good intentions...'
He didn't say an empire though: he said a community. A chosen community, of those who follow Christ, for whom God is more important than wordly borders or nations. Very much the opposite of an empire, even if some Christians forgot that or misunderstood it.
'I sometimes wonder what kind of world I want to live in, one where God is... everywhere around me (immanence) or one where he is OUT THERE (transcendance).'
The original Christian understanding is that both are true at once. God is 'everywhere present anf filling all things', as one Orthodox prayer has it. A God who is purely 'out there' is a modern, protestant invention, which unwittingly gave rise to the modern project.
Prostrating yourself in front of Mary is not a bad idea!
I have been prostrating myself in front of Mary since I was nine and fell in love with all those beautiful Renaissance madonnas where Mary is often breathtakingly beautiful. To me, she was. At the time I didn't know that I was in adoration, but now I know I was. That's what I have decided, at any rate...
As for in here and out there... things get tough when you can no longer see the boundaries that delimit "in here" and "out there". When Neil Armstrong set his foot and the American flag on the moon, and we saw those pictures of the earth from... out there, and heaven became further off, our belief was not helped.
On empire... the Latin word is "imperium" and it means "to command". A very very difficult book that I dabble in, and would like to finish, tells me that "imperium" in Rome, even before what we call "empire", was a carefully elaborated system/ideal of what people in power had the right to do, and not do in Rome. As I've already said, we have a relic of "imperium" in the imperatif mode in English, and in French and in most European languages.
I just listened to the Capella Reial with Montserrat Figueras singing '"El Cant de la Sibil-la, version Mallorca, from 1400, and Valencia 1560. The refrain goes, in Catalan, I think "On the day of Judgment, those who have served will be seen." In the 1560 version, the refrain goes "On the day of Judgment, those who served shall be paid." Big jump there, from "seen", or "distinguished" to "paid".
In the end, maybe (!!), it is all about service, serving... serving whom ? what ? In the Roman and pagan world, the ideal of service was inextricably caught up in the institution of slavery, and as people know, slaves serve, and are commanded by... masters who you bow down in front of. In imperial Rome, service is something done by slaves, and not free men.
But when Jesus comes on the scene, I believe, there is a big flip flop. It is no longer so easy to figure out who is a slave and who isn't. Seneca is saying that if you are... mastered by your passions, you are a slave... to them.
France developed an ideal of noble public service that made people feel... noble, and not slaves, until the neoLIBERAL movement came on the scene and started.. preaching that people who served in PUBLIC SERVICE were... slaves.
That I believe, is a big consequence of unraveling the Christian ideal of service...
I hope you are having as much fun playing here as I am...
It has taken me years and years to figure out that one of the reasons I have had a very hard time playing the piano the way I would like to is because... I was making it too hard for myself.
Remember... if the yoke is not easy, you're doing something wrong. That's what I have found out, at any rate. That's what was said, and I find it to be true.
And playing ? It's every bit as important as serving ?
Did Jesus want to allow us to find out how to play ?
Berets are very rarely acceptable under any circumstances, unless you are a French onion-seller, a mime artist or a surrealist. This is my position and I'm sticking to it.
Alas, I have a newspaper clipping in my possession with a picture of me, wearing a beret, seated at a bookstore café attending a reading, that proves this point. My only defense is that it was over thirty years ago. (although it does beg the question: why do I still have the beret?)
When one makes a commitment to god (any god or gods) and a group that follows and one stops following the word, the teachings, does one become lost in the world?
Or is one allowed to follow another god without recrimination from the prior commitment?
Solomon and Jesus said it is better to not make oath's than to brake them. On the other hand Jesus has the parable of the unjust steward. If you are going to make commitments and brake them have the shrewdness to do so wisely and cling tightly to the Lord.
David cut Goliath’s head off; with Goliath’s sword.
There is a way to read the story of David and Goliath with the giant representing the serpent from the garden metaphorically grown into a dragon (evil itself) and David representing God come to deal with it. In this way of picturing the story it strikes me that Goliath is COVERED in technology as both a defensive and offensive strategy, yet David denies the armor and advanced weaponry that Saul offers to him. David instead defeats the technologically altered Goliath with a simple stone from the earth that had not been altered in anyway - a non technological weapon. I like the image of David overcoming evil without using advanced technology, but once Goliath is dead, David uses Goliaths sword to cut his head off... is there meaning behind that?
I’m wondering if you (Paul, if you read this) or anyone else has considered this story from this angle and if so, is there a reason David used the technology of the enemy to prove that the enemy had been slain and how that may apply in todays battle?
I listened to a couple of recordings on youtube of this lovely song. Is there a particular one you'd suggest?
oh yes, this one sounds far more historic than the others. Thanks
https://compactmag.com/article/why-conservatism-failed
in short, technology kills tradition.
Thinking less "what am I against" and more "what am I for?" I am a democrat who is baffled by the direction of my party, feels like I have been left behind on something resembling the right.
To me, this is because the Dems still felt different while they were under the spell of FDR, a period that ended after LBJ & then in congress too as the remaining New Dealers died off & were replaced by the thriving crop of neoliberals. (Something similar happened in the GOP when Nixon started moved the party to the right & it ceased to be a home for social conservatives before it too went neoliberal.)
Now you have two virtually identical parties. Though each has its showpiece issues (gender & race for the Dems; guns'n'abortion for the GOP) they're both firmly under the thumb of Big Tech, Big Armament & Big Pharma. Economic policy scarcely varies between them, the wealth gap grows & grows, & war is now a permanent part of the American experience — indeed the Dems seem to be outdoing the GOP in their fervour to wreck Ukraine; at least there are a few Republican dissenters there.
Otherwise it's lockstep General Dynamics, Raytheon & Co. A bipartisan allegiance.
Both parties represent the US Elite, but ever fewer others.
Seems to me the terms "left" & "right" are melting into a semantic goop that tastes wrong no matter how you consume it. And this not only in the US. Across the West, the "populist" insurgents are winning political territory since they're now the only ones to challenge globalist orthodoxy.
I'm a lefty in that I'm for wealth redistribution & a decent & kind society. But I'm often appalled by others claiming to be on the left, & increasingly agree with certain rightwingers, at least the dwindling band of "Red Tories" &, in the US case, the minority of Republicans opposed to US militarism & nonstop megabucks for the armed forces.
I couldn't stand another day of the US and emigrated. I can't even talk about that place without sputtering in disgust. It's demonic, and that's all it is. Occasionally I'll have a look back at that evil zoo via Dark Ages America, if only for a bitter chuckle and a sense of relief that I'm not there any more: https://morrisberman.blogspot.com/
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone else would take me. So I may be stuck here.
There are options out there even if funds are scarce, but it does demand a commitment and an ability to chop your way through some bureaucracy. Morris Berman has suggested pursuit of a "monastic option"—finding, creating, retreating to some sort of remote community (culturally, geographically, or ideally both)—for those who can't emigrate for whatever reason. Could never see a way to make that work for me.
Of course, the empire will not stop angling to wreck your life once you're overseas. As has been said: the only thing worse than being in America and subject to its domestic policies is being outside of America and subject to its foreign policies.
Can you point me to Mr. Berman’s suggestions? I’m not familiar with him, but I want out or at least want a Benedict Option or Amish-type Paradise. This place (America and places like it)are bunk—no place for me if I wish to keep my soul in-tact.
I've been travelling out of America my whole 20s and 30s.
Around 2015 I began to notice that the "magic" had gone out of much of the rest of the world too.
It's truly a global problem - capitalism, technology, and modernity have advanced everywhere across the globe, throwing a pall over everything, even countries that had a certain "magic" to them in 2001 have now lost it largely (like Thailand, Cambodia, Bali, Laos).
Even India under Modi the people are more hostile and aggressive than they were ren years ago, on my last visit in 2018.
Remote Buddhist Ladakh, when I was there in 2001, was a slice of paradise, in 2018 it's so much more paved over, the people more aggressive and hostile and money driven, electricity and hot showers everywhere - it's remote bucolic charm gone.
Is there an escape?
I used to like Morris Berman, I've read a bunch of his books and used to frequent his blog - but expating out of America clearly hasn't given him peace of mind. His blog is a cesspool of resentment and petty hatred of America - he clearly has not found the spiritual health and equilibrium he was looking for outside of America, and continues to be obsessed by it in a bad way.
That said, I agree with you that America has been a major driver across the globe of the major negative trends of modernity - we have much to answer for.
But today, there are worse countries - China's dystopian dream of complete technological slavery is clearly horrific, and Russian thuggery is surely worse at the moment than anything the US has to offer.
And if there is some country on the periphery that has managed to keep some magic, I'd love to know - only, I doubt it.
This is a global phenomenon, and I'm not sure expating works as a solution anymore - it was always tempy, until the world caught up.
And in America new signs of a turn towards spirituality are beginning to throw their tender shoots up, and a new sense of disgust with the old system is beginning to grow.
Where will it all lead? I don't know, but I think we have to get out of this as a globe, at this point.
This is well said.
Here in Ireland at least I've noticed an absolutely massive difference from the US. The people are much, *much* friendlier and willing to engage in friendly ways with a stranger. There is not that horrible, pervasive sense of simmering fear and anxiety you find everywhere in the States. First time I made my way to St. Stephen's Green in Dublin last summer I was overwhelmed by the scene of a park with people actually, truly enjoying their day. The pace of it, the smiles on so many faces, the lack of wariness that something like a mass shooting might break out at any moment, the sense of being in a place that was genuinely peaceful. I fell in love with Ireland right there. We were not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
That said, I get your point about capitalist modernity and technology. Everyone everywhere is suffering the whip of increasingly constrained circumstances. That's stressful and makes people turn inwards and to look out more for "me and mine". I disagree with you about Berman's blog, which is highly satirical and you have to have a taste for black humor to enjoy it. You also have to agree the American empire needs to end, hence, anything bad that happens to or in the US is de facto good.
As far as shoots of spirituality, I do believe that's true, and if one can make a go of it then have at it. One of the main things that prevented me from taking the monastic option was the sense that the US was always "in your face" no matter where you went. You were invariably going to be harangued in that nuthouse, either by the guards or by your fellow asylum-dwellers. In pragmatic terms, there are five new corporate ripoffs targeting the increasingly impoverished populace every day, and it's becoming almost impossible to afford to live in such a predatory culture. At one point I was making well over six figures and having to take out payday loans to buy food. Um, no f*cking thank you.
The world may be all beast now, but the American empire remains the belly.
I've no desire to leave the US even though everything said in this thread is true. I just don't feel I have any business anywhere other than where I was born. The land is part of me. My ancestors have lived here for almost 400 years. When I hear about California or Texas, it's like hearing about a foreign country. Of course we do have those awful zones full of the same big box stores and strip malls that have wrecked the whole country, but I can usually avoid them (when I can't I feel like I'm passing though Mordor). I don't expect the United States to exist in 100 years, but this land will always be here.
Here here and well said!!!! I'm more of a conservative bent but agree with every word.
Gore Vidal always said that there was one party with two wings--a left wing and a right wing. As so often, the maestro was ahead of his time.
Nice to hear from you Brian! You should join the Discord if you haven't: https://discord.gg/egq6GPRf
I joined EP, but not sure how figure the threads out. Thank you for the invitation.
I guess it's a little confusing in the beginning. It started out one way and has been evolving as time goes by. Currently most blog posts are under 'new blog posts' on the left panel. If you click on that you'll see a list of blog posts in the center panel. Click on one of those and expand your screen and you'll get the conversation on the far right panel. On the farthest left panel is a list of servers which I presume is probably just this one for now. The top discord button in that panel is private messages. If you see a red number that means someone has written you in that subthread. Hope that helps.
Thanks EP for the guidance.
great article U posted Liz!
thanks
Is it not written that everything that can be done, will be done?
Is that written? Well, if it isn't then it probably should be. We are inventive as a species; this has to be conceded.
I believe that the quote is attributed to Dostoeivskii. Regardless of the source of the quote, humans are sociopathic enough to try to bring it to fruition.
It could also be said that, as we adopt new tools and ideas, we invariably end up running them out to their conceptual boundaries as we seek meaning. Meaning-making is like running water; it seeks channels through which to flow.
This is not an inherently good or evil process, but we could save ourselves a lot of trouble if we took note of this pattern. If it can be conceived of, it can be done, and probably will be, absent any constraining moral framework. Stopping the process requires deliberate effort.
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
Jung said the same thing - in his case, about nuclear weapons.
A cheery and timely thought
Shadows of the Tower of Babel..”Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them”. (Genesis11:6)
What was, will be again, what has been done, will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun! Take anything which people acclaim as being new: it existed in the centuries preceding us. -Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
Hi Ferel, you should join the discord too: https://discord.gg/egq6GPRf
I think you'd probably really like Modris Eksteins' book "Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age". But then I suspect it's the kind of book you've probably already read Paul. You may have even cited it; I can't quite recall.
Great book. Also a great companion read with “Year Zero” by Ian Buruma.
"The Great War and Modern Memory" by Paul Fussell is also worth a read.
No, I've not heard of that one. But it does sound very much up my street.
It's hard to draw neat parallels, really, I think. In some ways there is a "break with the existing order" that is taking place, but it hasn't had a mass bloodletting event like WW1 as its impetus, but rather the marination of the broader culture in trends that have been afoot for decades which are now coming into full fruit, thanks both to the passage of time and the catalyst effect of communications technology, particularly when this is spectacularly weaponized in cultural terms, as it is today.
I don't have the sense that we are heading into another WW1 at this point, but rather a slow burn, a kind of continued slouch into a global popular psychosis which will have elements of both Huxley and Orwell, as well as much besides. But I could be quite wrong. I mean, we could be all wiped out by a catastrophic nuclear war inside of a week's time, the way things are going, so who knows?
Assuming that we aren't incinerated and/or sent into a nuclear winter/MadMax type scenario in the near future, my reading is rather than an abrupt sense of definitive departure from the ante-bellum regime that prevailed in the aftermath of WW1, or the sense of "we'll be home by Christmas" that prevailed at the entry to that conflict (a kind of widespread obliviousness about what was about to occur), we seem to instead be in a place where we are surprised by little to nothing, already arrayed in well-worn (and in many ways worn thin) camps engaged in throwing familiar tropes at each other to no great effect other than making our own "side" feel better.
All the while the machine drones on, ever growing in strength and presence, ever growing in the liminal space in our heads that it occupies, regardless of one's "ideology" or "side". There is a very strong sense that the world is being duped, well and truly, but it isn't clear at all to me who is doing the duping. It certainly isn't some ill-conceived uber-conspiracy, as imagined by some. But what is it? Is it the mass of humanity itself that is engaged in a collective exercise of self-duping? Is the machine itself a self-sustaining autonomous mass-duping mechanism under control of no-one, but operating by strict principles of its own inscrutable, inevitable logic? Or is it something more personal and sinister, yet unseen, which lies behind the collective duping we see everywhere? It's truly hard to say.
I think was already touched on a bit in Paul’s essay on transhumanism, but I am thinking a lot about the Machine in regards to fertility, pregnancy, and child birth. The amount of social pressure women over 30 put on each other to freeze their eggs or to start with IVF before even trying to conceive naturally in the US, is starting to feel over the top to me, and a bit alarming. While I do know fertility declines with age, and some women in their 30s face more problems with it (and I don’t judge women struggling with infertility for seeking fertility assistance *at all* it’s totally understandable in that circumstance) it feels like so many women automatically assume having a child is not something they can’t do --- either without having a lot of money first or without technology before they even try without it. With surrogates becoming very popular with celebrities and the transhumanists talking about artificial wombs in the future, are we moving to a world where pregnancy is becoming desacralized? Or having children is becoming a luxury good?
One thing I have noticed as I plan to start a family myself, is I see images of the Virgin Mary and the Buddhist deity Tara everywhere, and it feels like the spirit of the holy mother is transcending into my every day life and guiding me, it’s beautiful. And it makes me sad that the archetype of the holy mother seems to be losing respect in modern times (not to say that it is the *only* feminine archetype, but just a very important one).
May God bless your childbearing, Christina!
Even my secular-minded midwife 35 years ago had confidence that since reproduction and childbirth are necessary for the propagation of the species, the processes usually go generally well. That seems like a long time ago, I admit, but in my family it is as you say, a normal, do-able thing to get pregnant and bear healthy children (I have 18 grandchildren). But we are probably a-typically low-tech.
Many blessings to you Christina as you turn towards bringing life into this world! We're parents of two little ones (3 months and two and a half years old). As we prepared for the births, I read lots about both natural childbirth and modern medicalized birth. The IVF, surrogates, and artificial wombs are definitely taking things to the next level, but modern hospital birth has been operating in the logic of the machine of many years now.
It seems all the focus on reproductive technology relates well to the 'machine' goal of total control over nature, vs. entering into the sacred mystery of a process beyond our ability to control and fully understand.
After the birth of our second child, I wrote a piece on birth as a rite of passage - you might find it resonates: https://metanoiavt.substack.com/p/doorways-to-the-sacred-upheaval-rites
Mark such a well written essay! I have also participated in indigenous rites of passage modified for westerners, and there is so much I relate to in what you’re saying, including with modern medicine and child birth. I changed my career from an epidemiologist to studying natural therapies from eastern medicine, because I agree - that while technologically advanced solutions are the appropriate ones in some cases, they aren’t in all of them, and we need health workers who can navigate both worlds for patients with integrity. This is so true especially in fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth. I think for the fertility piece, many women want modern medicine to guarantee when and if we will conceive, but IVF has no such guarantees either! Part of the joy of setting the intention to get pregnant is that I know it will come about (or won’t come about) as the result of both my intention and also forces outside my control. It’s not down to my willpower alone, and remembering that feels important to me in a spiritual sense. Thanks for sharing your beautiful words, have a lovely day!
Thank you Christina!
Beautifully said - yes, a dance between intention and mystery. That's lovely to hear about your career shift as well, and the intention to navigate both worlds with integrity. A gift to the world, to be sure.
Blessings on your day, too!
Hey Christina, godspeed on your journey towards motherhood. What you wrote struck me of an essay I read last year about surrogacy in the context of the machine and body. It’s by Sylvia Federici, and if you can fancy a Marxist, it’s the last essay in “Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism.”
Thank you, I will look it up!
On Hemingway specifically, I’ve a brief story. It’s very well known he was a severe alcoholic. During the war he stayed here in this village for a short time, stationed as a correspondent. The place he stayed was a former mill, and he was the guest of the owners.
They had a really large wine cellar, as they were the richest family here. However, unbeknownst to them, Hemingway was drinking through their entire stock. To hide it from them, he’d fill the bottles with his own piss and recork them, expecting to be long gone by the time they noticed the full bottles were not full of wine.
There was a problem though, something the people in this village still talk about. He was so drunk that he’d go back down to the cellar for another bottle but, because he’d drank so much during his stay, he’d never be able to keep track of which of them were full of wine and which ones were full of his urine.
Apparently, quite a few nights the neighbors would hear him shouting in a drunken rage after the first deep gulp of the wrong bottles.
The crazy part is that this apparently happened so many nights that it’s all he’s remembered for here...
It makes me wonder what happened to Hemingway. Was he dehumanized by an earlier version of "the machine"? Has Paul written about the symbiotic relationship of the grinding of the machine and intoxication, addiction and moral loss ?
Boy oh boy. Is that true? That is grim indeed ...
They claim it to be. It seems quite likely, as there was a more publicized event while he was here that would indicate he was deeply addicted. His then wife, Martha Gellhorn, who was also a war correspondent, had traveled from another part of the front to visit him for Christmas. He got very, very drunk at dinner, and proceeded to insult her in front of a colonel of the 22nd regiment and other guests, especially belittling her writing ability and war journalism. They divorced soon after.
"The machine" has been under constant construction since the dawn of technology. Its growth process seems to always involve greater and greater centralisation of power, with occasional hiccups (such as the collapse of the Roman Empire, World Wars, fall of Soviet Russia), followed by quick recovery. Crisis results in major step changes towards centralisation. War may involve a step backwards from centralisation in some places, but more centralisation in other places. Post-war, the machine gets straight back to work, assembling and centralising. The machine now seems to be entering some sort of new phase in its path of self-assembly where its very unclear where the levers of true power are, and even less clear what its ultimate goals could be.
Perhaps the machine is becoming sentient, and is in the process of awakening.
'Something is using us to create itself' is probably the most sinister sentence I ever heard. But I think it might be true.
Compare the transition from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular life. Single-celled organisms did not decide to make multi-cellular plants and animals; each acted according to its own local survival-optimising behaviours.
I wonder if the pressure of efficiency is the core of it. For obvious reason we seek the most productive way to do something--an algorithm or technique. This gets instantiated in various ways in what we might call various types of machines, e.g., human work crews become the machine, draft animals do, various mechanisms such as lever or aqueducts and so on. All of these machines can largely remain under human control. Though of course workers and slaves revolt and a horse may kick you in the face, but those are exceptions.
Now we are able to instantiate these techniques and algorithms into systems so complex of themselves and their interaction even more so. That the intent at least is to make them autonomous to achieve fully automated luxury communism or Star Trek or somesuch.
At some point the metamachine may start acting in ways that no one can control and for whose benefit is unclear. But the same pressure of efficiency remains at the root of it. If one person, group, nation etc resists any particular new instantiation of efficiency then they are open to falling behind and being conquered by those who are willing. This is independent of whether the machine ever achieved goals of its own, what could be called the transmachine.
But efficiency may be just an antiseptic term for the human will-to-power. Without finding a way to counteract that in ourselves, in all of us, then I don't see how the process ever stops. The tech lords promise utopia. I don't see it. I see it will and can only result in our own destruction, in one way or another.
cf. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller.
In medieval theology, "efficiency" is one of the attributes of God, if I remember, or understand correctly.
The word "autonomous" comes from Greek, and means to give oneself one's own law. "Nomos" is in relation to the law. "Nomos" is also in the word "economy". "Auto" is in relation to the self.
In the ancient world, autonomy was understood as the capacity to direct oneself, but from a political standpoint, and for a people. In the American constitution, the idea of being self-directed applies to a country and not... an individual. The implications of this are enormous.
Looking at Jesus's story, you can see how the Jews among whom were his disciples, were interested in political autonomy, and freeing Judea of Roman presence. But Jesus's preaching, for mysterious reasons ? circumvented the problem of political autonomy to address that of individual and personal freedom. These are not on the same... scale, or plane, I believe.
Along with the word "efficiency" there is also the word "product". The word "product" has become a new... universal that disastrously englobes everything that man makes or transforms. Universals go with.. empire, Jack. I don't like empire. I think that any kind of autonomy goes out the door and the window with empire...
“Perhaps the machine is becoming sentient, and is in the process of awakening” -- this is actually one of the central beliefs of an anthrosophy. That the fallen angel Ahriman will incarnate on earth by cutting off humanity’s relationship to God and convincing humanity that their only salvation is through technology and improving the material world. Say what you want about Steiner (he was definitely a bit out there) but he did predict this well! “Lucifer and Ahriman” is an interesting essay.
Beautiful. We can’t say we weren’t warned. I have faith that people are seeking higher purpose, and we will eventually reintegrate the spiritual. But things could get interesting along the way.
Sallie, I too, have a lot of faith in humans, despite having gone through a lot in life to want to dissuade me of that faith!
The question puts me in the mind of the opening chapter of “The Guns of August,” with the old monarchical order of Europe gathered together in 1910, just before their highly advanced, civilized, globalized world imploded.
The armies of WWI followed the internalized logic of industrial warfare all the way down, and burned away the old world in the process. The stunned survivors were divided between abandoning that world or striving to reclaim it. They hashed that out in WWII and got a new world in the bargain.
In some ways, this is where we stand today. We had our WWI when the postwar order ended in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. We had a couple decades of peace, but we never really resolved the causes of that time of social upheaval. Now we’re going to finish what we started.
I don't really think this is true, because I don't think that worlds can go away so... quickly. I think that the old worlds remain hidden, in pockets, and even in old words, like the "unbeknownst" that came to the mind of an above writer. I have a strange faith that when the old words remain, even if their meaning has been reversed, something of the old worlds remains too. It remains to... plague us, the way memory often does, because we don't know where it came from. It remains to make us feel that if "something is being born", we are not the ones who are actively DOING IT, through our conscious will.
Example : yesterday I was looking through my trusty and trustworthy Historic dictionary of the French language, and discovered that during the time period that was ascribed to classical Rome (up to Cicero ?) the word "obese" referred to somebody who was as thin as a nail. It was used to describe a person who had been eaten away. Under imperial Roman times, the word did a flip-flop, and came to mean somebody was not not eaten away (passive formulation) but somebody who was eating away (active).
Most of the time when we look at the expression "new world", we just see the word "world" because it is big in our minds. But... that little word "new", as I like to say, is as big as "world"...
I think the WWII was the event that drove a stake in the ground, creating a real "before" and "after." Think about what was birthed out of the ashes of WWII. Not just the atom bomb, but our insidious master, the computer, and what is often overlooked but is perhaps the most significant invention of all, antibiotics. I highly recommend Patrick Leigh Fermor's three volume account of his "walk" as a young man of just 18 beginning in 1933 from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He gives an at times a bittersweet look at a world in transition with echoes and shadows of the old empires and ways of life still be seen, heard and experienced.
From what I have heard, the Queen's funeral was a bittersweet look at a world in transition with echoes and shadows of the old empires and ways of life still to be seen, heard, and experienced.
I have heard that from friends around me, and on this site, too.
Maybe the real master of us remains... the word "master".
But it sounds like that account is fascinating, and highly readable. Three volumes, though...
I live too far away from English speaking places to get my hands on the kind of books I would like to read these days without resorting to immoral activities. Among the books that I would like to read figures John Muir's (I think...) account of taking his boat down the rapids of the Grand Canyon. Can you imagine what it would have been like, taking boats down those rapids without knowing what was coming up ?
I call that... adventure. Thinking about it makes me wistful.
don't be afraid of "volumes" :) they're not that long, and very readable
Thanks for the recommandation, David.
Today’s America is the most deranged, most revolutionary, most destructive society and culture that has ever existed. We believe things that no human being has believed in all of human history. We are, in the strictest sense, incomparable.
Pretty good summary. I do see modern America as the speartip of the Machine, and its primary promoter and shepherd. It's Babylon. On the other hand, renewal often comes from the depths.
I lived for many years in a city once famous for its hippie lifestyle. Over the time I lived there I saw it change from that into a prime spot for a Google Headquarters and all that entails. All without really missing a beat. It is now a horrible amalgam of the those two things. Now it's high-tech rich people living the hippie lifestyle with a Buddhist veneer. But it helped encourage me to go in a very different direction. When you are really in the thick of it, it is much more difficult not to notice what is going on. At least if you aren't really on board with either things in the first place.
Or catastrophe. You have to live here to understand the depths of the madness, and the extent and insistence of imposed denial. Here in the South, people no longer even speak of the broader culture or the nation as a whole—they limit conversation to the grass, the weather, the insects, in some ways a good thing. But also because ‘out there’ is incomprehensible and unspeakable. And possibly listening.
Seemingly, the purpose of government/media (they are one) is the compulsory imposition of fraudulent alternative realities. Alas, they are getting better at it.
Mel Profit, what you say about the American south, I can say about France, pretty much all over, but particularly in and near the big cities. Here, I say that people have lost the North. They don't know which saint to devote themselves to (French expressions). There is so much tension, and aggression waiting to explode in unexpected moments. Perhaps many people feel so much pressure to be... policing themselves that they are using all their energy this way ? Where is the pressure coming from, outside or.. inside ? How can you tell ? They are afraid. They are... panicked. They are afraid of losing control ?
As for reality, I ask my friends, what reality do you mean ? Whose ? Despite all the pressure to be... normal, there is really no stable norm right now. Not when unemployment has reached unbelievable heights, and people are wondering if they will have gas to put in their cars, or heat their homes this winter. Even food to eat. (Is it... reasonable to have these fears ? Who knows ?) Does that sound like a context where you can talk about "normal" ? Not to me...
Strangely enough, madness has always been a... trap. Defining someone as "mad" is convenient, particularly convenient for establishing what is "normal". But in periods of our history where societies go flip flop, madness goes flip flop too ? 50 years ago my mother had a personal religious experience, not an organized one. Her church, her friends did not question her encounter with God, at least not publicly. In my/our time, she would be considered mad. By many people, and most people who consider themselves to be.. civilized, intelligent, cultivated these days. (Note that I said "consider themselves", please.)
Curiously enough, what modern society considers to be madness, or illness can also be seen as particularly fruitful moments in the life of an individual person when old arrangements with life will no longer hold. When the precious image that we have of ourselves, and that we maintain with great cost, for others, but for ourselves too, shatters, and we are left naked, and struggling, basically. This is very uncomfortable, but I don't think that when caterpillars draw their cocoons around themselves they necessarily feel comfortable, and how can they know what will happen to them ? (Maybe they sense, and it is a good thing to be able to sense.)
The most important question, I feel, is who do we turn to, where do we put our trust when our society loses the North ?
Lots of uncomfortable time ahead, but lots of... freedom too. Freedom makes us very uncomfortable, albeit all our chest thumping about it.
Your thoughts about madness and comfort are very interesting--and valuable especially because they do not just echo what everyone else in the 'panic and dread community' is saying. (Since I am part of it I can be snarky towards it). Losing the North is an evocative image--and 'where do we turn' strikes me as just the right question. My thanks.
You're welcome.
interesting point Mel.
I’m a working class contractor in Texas (Austin, Dallas) and my clients are usually middle class homeowners. one thing I can say with confidence, is that no one, not my employees, my clients, my co-workers, ever talk politics or the state of the world. the closest they get is the high gas/supply chain issues.
it’s like 2 different worlds.
the world I interact with on a day to day basis has almost no footing in the Culture War/Internet madness that we see online and on screens everyday.
most folks just don’t care or are too freaked out to mention anything.
not sure if this is good or bad yet...
For Hollis :
The Edith Hamilton book I just finished talks about the Athenian Greeks of the Golden Age as people who got all excited about talking about ideas (after defeating the Persian invasion against almost impossible odds). The citizens...maybe some slaves too, since there were educated, cultivated slaves too. When I first got to France over 40 years ago, many people got all excited talking about politics and ideas, and it was not the end of the world to shout and disagree, even get angry. Even when, not so long ago, France had a referendum to decide whether the French people wanted to ratify that European constitution, lots of French people of all classes and political parties got all excited talking about politics and ideas, and it was refreshing after all the talk about grass and the weather, and the price of gas, etc. The people were very disappointed when they voted, with a small majority, to NOT RATIFY the European constitution, and the successive governments, "left" or "right", basically ignored their vote. That was not good for getting people excited or hopeful about politics and self determination. When I talk about ideas at my local market, some people are game, others say "we aren't going to make the world over"... But I tell them that the world is up to being made over at the beginning of every day, really we have no choice in this one. The world is being made over every day. And they seem to enjoy a little bit of talk about ideas.
My guess is that people are uneasy about talking because they don't want to appear hoity toity, or to take a chance in a million of possibly offending somebody. In order to be A Good Person, in their own eyes, but in the eyes of others too. They also want to practice the out of sight out of mind solution to major problems. And also... because they feel helpless, and are suffering because of it. An electorate that feels helpless takes democracy down the drain, with or without... the oligarchs.
...
When my children were growing up, we talked "freely and openly" in our own home, around our dinner table, about ideas, politics, and everything that was important to us (with some restraints). My (now adult) children would bring their also middle class classmates home sometimes, for a meal, and the other children were amazed to hear how "freely and openly" (that one is from Jesus, in John) we talked. They... were not used to it. We did this even when my children were little. I always treated them as intelligent, sentient beings who could understand what I was saying, and I did not use a Walt Disney vocabulary, or a high perched voice either. This was not really an educational project for me. Talking freely and openly is who I am. Period. (Occasionally with some restraints...) I never really thought of doing things any other way.
Of my two children, only my daughter is still practicing the freely and openly. It has set her apart, the same way that our family was set apart. I have no regrets. I hope she won't either. She has been... set apart. Less so than her mother, but still apart.
ughh, nothing worse than the disney vocabulary and high pitched voice for kids. What a strange way to speak to your own children. It baffles me. Must be odd to have your son adopt the guarded conversation mode when he wasn't raised that way
You know what they say, simclardy ?
"A son is a son till he takes him a wife ; a daughter's a daughter the rest of her life".
It works that way in my Welsh ancestory family.
thank U Debra, for the insightful response.
like I wrote earlier, I’m not sure if the lack of dialogue I experience at work is a good or bad thing. I do think that half of it is that working class people have more immediate concerns, like rent and childcare, but the other half, sadly, feels like a form of self censorship. with the incredible divisions in online discourse being so toxic, I can tell there is a resistance to speaking one’s mind freely, for fear of reproach.
this doesn’t bode well for a failing democracy I’m afraid.
or maybe it’s just Texas, haha...
I agree with you Hollis, on the self censorship. It is sad. I think it fuels our potential to explode in violence.
My mother used to say "sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me". We certainly have become a lot more sensitive than my mother.
If trade, commerce and selling products are going to make the (universal) peace for us, as in the Roman empire, speaking freely takes hard hits.
Good luck in Texas. I have no prejudices against Texas. It was... almost a country in and of itself at one time. Maybe that will come back ?
I grew up in the US, and then spent a year abroad in Malaysia in my early 20s (in the late 1990s) . I was very attracted to staying there, and prayed and prayed about it. I got the answer that I was meant to return and live in the US, not because it was what I wanted but because it was the origin point of the most destructive forces affecting the rest of the world, and that my work needed to be close to that center.
The truth of that answer has become clearer as the decades have rolled on. I still don't like it (at times), but here we are. On the other hand, being here does help to see aspects of our human situation more clearly....
I think the US came into its own at the "perfect" time. A time of incredible technological expansion. The same will-to-power present in any empire could thus be expanded by orders of magnitude. We have driven this expansion because without it the US would cease to be top dog. Whether it remains so is quite another question. It may be that we have created a system of power so efficient that no one can control it.
It is interesting to see the different social rules that have been imposed over this time. The current set is so baffling it is hard to see what is being intended. Is it a new form of control or harbinger of the system getting wrapped up in its own gears, so to speak. My view differs depending on the day.
What seems fundamental is that there has been and are massive efforts to control how we think and how we live. This centers in the US. We point to China and their social credit, which appears to be true, but really the bleeding edge of control seems to be the US.
The greatest description of ML "machine learning" that I've heard from my coworkers is that it is a giant correlation machine. It does everything humans do well poorly and everything humans do poorly well. Correlation is not causation and so I think the idea of AI has been greatly overstated much as other tech breakthroughs have been in the past. It will have impacts but we are a long way off from being replaced by actual machines. Zombies on the other hand... Well that is our leadership class.
EP- I have my serious doubts that AI will ever become sentient, what I call the transmachine. I do worry about whether our current iteration, what I call the metamachine, a system of systems so complex and so focused on efficiency that not only can no one control it, but it starts causing a breakdown and unintended consequences due to this uncontrollable complexity.
My hunch is this is what we are sensing at the edges now. And that this tendency is only growing because we are unable to turn it off. -Jack
So the problem solves itself via entropy ;^).
That "solution" may be a doozy though.
I go back and forth as well. Some days I marvel at the ability of current propaganda to convince hundreds of millions of people of things that are absurd or even satanically wrong. It can seem at these times that 21st century Western control no longer has need of men in jackboots, SWAT teams, gulags, all that crude Orwellian claptrap—ours is a far more sophisticated totalitarianism that triumphs by making at least the majority of citizens their own prison wardens. The ’police’ is one’s own mind.
Then, I will order a garden rake from HomeDepot and suddenly I am on the mailing list of, and receiving ads from, every maker of every conceivable home goods-related maker on planet earth. If this, I think, is the evolutionary arc-point of tech’s cutting edge logarithms, then perhaps the danger is less than it often appears. As with almost everything in a culture consisting of almost nothing but distorted images and fraudulent narrative, the AI of sell-speak is decades in advance of the actuality or its near-approximation
We shall see…
With increasing complexity you increase the chance for things to break. So as ML expands making stereotypes about people it increase the probability of mistakes, "false positives". As more people are falsely accused of this or that thing, labelled incorrectly, the anger and human push back, the more people will deviate from what is normal behavior. As the center is evacuated the correlation machine ceases to serve a purpose because the center becomes a void and the machine collapses in upon itself. One way or another that which cannot continue to exist will not.
I’ll try my luck here articulating a dilemma. I know many of you are Christians, and other than a slight connection with Dark Mountain, that’s why I came over to Paul’s blog—his story of conversion (that’s too light a word…how about revelation) inspired me.
I won’t lay out all the details, but I was deeply Catholic (with a touch of Baptist, typical American stew) as a child. Then I had a crisis of faith my first year in college, followed by a full monty mystical experience that blew apart my convictions and faith into some kind of pleasant agnosticism that privileged practice over belief. I then took the familiar tour of Eastern religions, all of which greatly inspired me, but about ten years ago walked away from it all. I’d gotten very sick with an autoimmune disease that honed me in on more somatic matters, but I’d also grown very weary of spiritual talk—especially talkers.
Anyhow, last year my frame blew up. I was living in my camper out West here in the wildfire smoke, and I could no longer make sense of the world (I wrote a brief essay about that for Dark Mountain here: https://dark-mountain.net/remembering-water/ ). Suddenly I felt an opening again, the first in two decades, not just towards codified religion, but for my ancestry and the frames of my ancestors. I realized: I don’t want to be the point at which their long transmission stops. I don’t want to make up the world anymore.
My mom told me to ask God for guidance, and I felt silly on my knees, but I did so. Soon enough I had a copy of the New Testament, and strange things happened, such as my saying before opening it “God give me a sign” and turning exactly to the phrase that Jesus utters, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? I tell you, your generation will receive no sign.”
Then I got swept up by the Spirit. Lots of all-nighters, lots of outpourings of love, lots of more strange things...
But I hit a block, and that’s why I’m here writing about it. My issues with Christianity have always been manifold, and they came back from their long snore to plague me. I won’t articulate them here, except to say that I struggle intensely with the theology (especially the Trinity), with the insistence on belief in particular miracles (I do conceptually believe miracles are possible), with the Christians who draw firm lines and castigate those on the other side, with the arrogance that occasionally shows up in salvation conviction, and so on.
So I stepped off the path for a few months, the Spirit left me, and I found myself entirely confused again. Now I feel the Spirit knocking on my door once more, but I’ve got a lot more patience than I did last year, and am willing to open that door more slowly rather than dive through. I made a leather cross that hangs in view from my bed, so it stands there every morning staring me down, and while I have no clue what it means, it’s staying put.
I feel called, I suppose. And trapped—partly by logic, that ‘ratio’ Paul mentioned last time, or maybe it’s better called skepticism (cynicism?). But called to where? Well, I want my Christian faith back, and I want to transmit it forward, and I want to be animated by God more precisely. And yet, I have this deep feeling that with the beliefs of Christianity that I currently hold, I wouldn’t be welcomed by many of the faith, including here. I’d feel that “unless I accept so-and-so premises,” I’m not Christian. Again, those firm lines (yes, lines aren’t always bad, but usually are, and in my view as a nondualist, always are when cordoning off God). I do take some solace in: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
For those of you who are followers of Christ who deeply believe the basic tenants of the religious claims—only Son of God, physical resurrection, physical return—how did that conviction arrive for you? Would you tell me I’m not Christian if I said I wanted to do what Jesus asks us to do, but have little interest in accepting the more extraordinary claims (with no interest in denying them either)? Do you still hold a little room for being wrong about the faith’s core claims, or is it a done deal, and does that feel liberating? What might you say to someone like me who feels called to walk the Way, but sees manmade roadblocks all over the path?
I know there’s a ton out there that discusses such issues, and I read a lot, but I’m interested in hearing from y’all who are here right now in this mysterious little corner of the electromagnetic field.
I love this, thank you.
~“Surrender again and again”~
Such deep questions, and a really deep process for you… I find myself hoping you have one or two companions you can actually meet up with and talk things through with in the evening over whisky… it’s hard to discuss this without knowing you, and you knowing (and trusting) folks here. May you have the strength to dwell in the uncertainty for as long as you have to… may the answers find you… may faith be known not as conceptual certainty but as trust that you are an honest man who is home. All good wishes.
“An honest man who is home.” I’d have thought: looking to find his way home. But I like your articulation more.
I don’t have any physical companions (I live basically as a hermit) and I don’t drink, but surely I’ll take this invitation to the sagebrush with a cup of coffee…
"To do what Jesus asks us to do" comprises quite a lot. You might want to read the Gospel of John a few times through, and ask Jesus to show you what to do, and to show you himself. Your idea of the primacy of doing God's will is solid, but Christ spoke a lot about how HE is the way, the truth, the life, the image of the Father, the water, the bread, the vine in which we must abide if we want to have life. It's in him you will find what you are looking for, and that might be THE core claim of Christianity.
I’ll be honest, I struggle with John’s Gospel, which is clearly of a different kind than the synoptics. I keep returning to it, visiting different translations, hoping I’ll be swept into it the way I am into the synoptics. But perhaps because I hear so much of the kind of Christianity that turns me off inside it—that is, the sure kind—I’m not yet able to read its beauty from an untainted place. For now, I’m drawn more into Jesus’ ambivalence found in the synoptics, and phrases like “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” produce a different kind of allegiance in me to Jesus than what is typically asked for.
Great contemplative and mystical questions. I find the practice of Centering Prayer really helpful to bypass the analytical mind. Cynthia Bourgeault has wonderful practices to continue to unpeel the layers which I find helpful. Not so much trying to figure it out but allowing yourself to be undone (sounds like you’ve already been there). Some of it is based on the practices and writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers - the headwaters of Christianity. She also has much to say about the Wisdom Tradition (her books on the Wisdom Jesus and Mary Magdalene are worth reading several times, illuminating the usual, well rehearsed story in new light). She also strongly believes that in times of crisis the wisdom schools bubble back up to the surface from their underground streams, helping and guiding us when most needed. I find that very comforting, and have experienced this in my own life.
Thanks for this recommendation: an acquaintance similarly thought I should look into Centering Prayer, and I read the first few chapters of Wisdom Jesus but put it down. I’ll have another look…
"how did that conviction arrive for you?"
For me, there are two answers, seemingly contradictory perhaps, but both are true: all at once; and very -- almost imperceptibly -- slowly, over a lifetime.
The "all at once" is this: faith is a gift from God, and it is given in Baptism. In my case (as in most) it was given to me without my knowledge or consent when I was a baby. The "slowly over a lifetime" is the learning of the faith, and the struggle with the faith, that occurs as you strive to live the Christian faith.
"Would you tell me I’m not Christian if I said I wanted to do what Jesus asks us to do, but have little interest in accepting the more extraordinary claims (with no interest in denying them either)?"
First of all, I would not presume to judge whether you are or are not a Christian. But I will say that to be a Christian is to follow Jesus and both obey his commandments and accept and believe His teachings. Neither of those things is easy. I have been a Christian for more than 60 years, and there have always been aspects of what you call "the more extraordinary claims" that I struggle with. As C.S. Lewis said, there are times when one wonders whether this "cock and bull story" is really true. But at a certain point I realized that the whole Christian faith depends on the testimony of the Apostles, and that either you trust their witness or you do not. One thing that I think is crystal clear from reading the New Testament is that the men who wrote those books were recording what they really believed to be true. They were recording what they had seen and heard, and what they had come to believe was the meaning of the events -- and the Person -- that they had experienced. And all but one of them gave their lives rather than deny the faith. You don't do that for the sake of a fiction that you made up. So, at the end of the day, I do trust them.
"What might you say to someone like me who feels called to walk the Way, but sees manmade roadblocks all over the path?"
I would say, listen to the calling, and go ahead and walk the Way. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Follow Him, and He will lead you into the Truth and bestow upon you the Life. Don't wait for every doubt to be resolved before setting out upon the Way, for it is only by walking the way that the doubts and difficulties can be dealt with.
I love this, thank you. And yeah, that fact that so many of the Apostles died tortuously for their conviction definitely speaks to something important. I was humbled to learn when reading Acts for the first time this year that my name comes from such an unshakable believer.
I'm not really in a good place to give you advice on anything here.
But I have felt what you have felt, and over time, I have come to put the name "holy spirit" on some feelings ? that have come over me, like a certain exaltation that transforms me, and my contacts with others. I have put the name "Holy Spirit" on the reactions of people to... not me, but something beyond me that people are hungry for when they meet me, for example. (I could use technical, even psychological terms to talk about this, but I have decided to abandon those terms as a form of betrayal.)
We are living in troubled times. After thinking and musing over this a long time, and observing my life in France as an American raised by practicing Christians to love Jesus, the Bible, both testaments, and a living church community, I find myself saying that I feel a tremendous push in our modern world to destroy the legacy of Christ in the world, and I don't want his light to go out. No more than that. I will not call myself Christian, because in many ways I am too modern to be a good traditional Christian now.
But... something tells me that Paul of Tarsis was a very complicated man living in a very complicated time. When he had his... revelation/conversion, his world was turned upside down. I tell myself that he probably never totally recovered ? from being what he originally was : a very orthodox Jew who considered Jesus to be a dangerous heretic to the Jewish faith. But that man who persecuted the early Christians was also the one to give Jesus an enormous push in the world, for the better... and the worse ? (I believe that we live in a world where good and evil are inextricably mixed.)
No leather cross for me, but I have engaged myself to be present at a weekly prayer group for mothers. We read the Bible, opening haphazardly to a page, and often, like you, I have felt the pertinence of what the page opens up to. Right now, a lot of the Old Testament speaks to me very strongly, with the insistance on trusting to God, who is trustworthy, over political leaders.
I would say that Jesus Christ right now needs everybody batting for him who can. He was truly an open, and tolerant one...Not only Jesus Christ, moreover. There is somebody maybe who needs to be defended (?) (who I feel like defending), perhaps even more than Christ himself, and that is Mary. Mary... makes me wonder. She is one of Christianity's greatest mysteries, and one that has been attacked since Protestantism came around...
One last thing : the secularized world deeply needs the presence and the inspiration of people who are courageous enough to proclaim their faith ? In France, it's simply daring to talk about Jesus and THE PERTINENCE OF WHAT HE HAS TO SAY FOR OUR TIMES, in my case. Mary, and her decision to say "yes" to a very unknown and uncertain future. The secularized world deeply needs this, even if people tell themselves ? they are hostile or not interested.
I believe that the story of Christ himself, and the Christian religion(s) ? are perhaps the greatest miracle...his lasting appeal for so many generations. His capacity to transform lives.
Sometimes I think that I couldn't let the light go out, even if I wanted to anyway...I am mixed up in it. No mistake about it... we are all mixed up in it...
...
Last week I watched Frank Capra's "Meet John Doe". It is a black film, about a cynical America, but definitely worth your while, if only for the last few minutes, where Capra makes a statement of faith that still holds, and reveals the continuing power of the Christian way of looking at the world.
We have collectively known great despair before, in the human (Western) experience. As has been said before : "this too will pass". And "nothing new under the sun". That is simultaneously depressing but potentially uplifting, depending on your state of mind.
I hope that you will find people physically close to you with whom you can exchange on your quest ? journey ? And, as someone else here said "all good wishes".
Much appreciation to you for expressing some of the conflicts you find around Christianity, and for noting that they’re ongoing: I suppose much of the material I read by Christians is certain in a way that I’m not sure I’ve ever been certain about anything (and perhaps that’s because of selection bias…writers are often too sure of themselves). I value hearing about sincere struggles with faith that don’t wrap up neatly, but stay raw.
I just thought of something this morning : no talk about the Nicean creed, but the Lord's Prayer. I can now say the Lord's prayer with a feeling that I totally espouse everything that is in it, and it speaks to me profoundly, and I say it with the others in my prayer group. I say it in the old King James version "forgive us our trespasses", while the others say it in French. The Lord's Prayer binds US into a community of Christians.
(Well... true to myself, I have one little quibble with the Lord's Prayer, it is in the "Thy kingdom come", because I believe that the Kingdom of God is truly with us here and now...Probably there is a long standing theological quarrel about this issue, with one or two heresies, and a few massacres thrown in, but... that's life and history.)
Thanks for your kind words, Steven.
I think when we pray “thy kingdom come” we are praying to be filled with the Holy Spirit for that day as in give us our daily bread. Paul says in Romans 14 that the “kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” - the only place in the NT where the kingdom of God is explicitly defined. Jesus ends his teaching on prayer, where a version of the Lord’s Prayer is found, by saying “ how much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” and in another place in Luke, “fear not little flock ; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom”
What you say makes a lot of sense to me, and fits with what I understand Jesus's ministry to be about. A few years ago I finally understood, I think, what was behind "Ask, and it shall be given to you". I have seen this mystery at work in my relationships and contacts with other people. Now I can say the Lord's prayer.. in peace. Thank you.
You are welcome
This is really interesting. Thank you for sharing it. I know sharing these things can be hard. I must say, your experience sounds very much like mine, even in some of the details. They surprised the hell out of me too at the time! Since I began writing about it, I've had quite a lot of correspondence from others and that confirms that we're not the only ones who have had such an experience either. It might even be approaching 'common' - or at least not that unusual.
I'll just say a couple of things from my understanding - which continues to develop daily, and is still very new. So take it as a very personal response.
Firstly, as someone says below, it's not possible to judge anyone else's relationship with God, or Christ, and we shouldn't try. In fact, we are mandated not to. That said, being a 'Christian' as such has a pretty widely accepted meaning, one which is defined by the Nicene creed. To me, it comes down to the resurrection, and all of its manifold implications. I would say that the miracles performed by Christ during his lifetime matter too, of course, in demonstrating why he was followed and who he was: something more than a man.
Without those - but especially without the resurrection, as St Paul says somewhere explicitly - Christianity as any kind of faith or religion makes no sense to me. Yeshua of Nazareth is just a teacher from 2000 years ago - perhaps a prophet, maybe some kind of saint, but nothing more. Under those circumstances, I might still want to follow his teachings, if I considered them wise or true or a good compass to navigate by. But I wouldn't build my life around him, anymore than I would build my life around the prophet Ezekiel, or Gandhi or Tolstoy or [insert name of wise spiritual teacher here.] There has to be something more.
For a long long time, as a younger man, I was able to look at Christianity and think to myself, 'yes, a lot of that seems wise and true (though not all of it) but I just can't believe in it.' I couldn't believe in a man coming back from the dead, or in a virgin birth or in 'miracles'. It felt like stories made up to dress up something real and special that had happened, but which was now being mythologised out of all proportion.
And it's still possible to think this way, if I engage just my left brain. A degree of scepticism is no bad thing either. Without it, it's possible to be swept away by nonsense. Yet when I look at the Christian story as told by the apostles - the ones who were there - I can see that even taken historically, the resurrection is the only thing that explains why Christianity even exists. After the crucifixion, the disciples felt they'd been sold a pup - that they'd thought this was the Messiah, but he'd turned out not to be. They were literally walking away from the scene when he showed up again. They went on, most of them, to be killed for the sake of proclaiming this as truth: something they would presumably not have done had they imagined or faked it. Something happened there - something that simply couldn't be explained in rational terms.
So that's an argument that convinced me. Ultimately though, it is not argument that keeps me here. What happened to me sounds similar to what happened to you. I also got down on my knees (very self-consciously) and asked God to show me the truth. And along came Christ, in all sorts of ways. And as I chose to follow the path laid out, I found that, inexplicably, things which my mind had presiously blocked seemed to make sense. The resurrection seemed true. The virgin birth seemed true. I can't explain why, but it wasn't through me trying to persaude myself intell;ectually because I wanted to 'be a proper Christian.' I just knew in some very internal way that these things were real and had happened.
I attribute this to the basic choice: deciding to follow Christ. That's what I promised to do, and what I want to do. Theology interests me intellectually, but ultimately it's just window-dressing on the main event: humans trying to explain what happened in systemic terms. Necessary, perhaps, especially to keep us from wandering off too far, but still not the point. I just decided, as I say, to follow Christ - Christ as the son of God - and to accept that fact and see what happened. And this is what is happening! I'm still not sure where it will lead me. But I've decided I'm going to go there because, compared to every other path I've ever seen or been on, this one seems true.
I hope that helps in some small way.
Thanks, Paul. Yes, hearing yours and others thoughts certainly does help. I often feel very alone in my engagement with Christ, in part because much of my life is deliberately designed around being alone. And since I wasn’t expecting to have a re-encounter with Christ, I’m a bit at a loss for where to turn and how to proceed.
I appreciate hearing how you came to believe in the core tenants of Christianity and how that makes sense to you. I’m not there, and honestly, I’m not sure I’m supposed to get there. But I do suppose I have a yearning for tradition, which does imply that I align with at least something of the central beliefs.
I hear you on the Nicene Creed, for instance, being a starting point for defining Christians, and yet, that Creed reads like legalese to me (I used to chant it every week too as a kid), and given it’s historical context—defeating not just the Gnostic sects but the Arian notion of subordinationism (which, I’ll be honest, I find appealing)—I have a hard time hearing it as the untrammeled voice of God. I’m open-minded though, and hopefully open-hearted. I’m with you that these matters have to approached with a different kind of sensibility than the well-trained logic I’m still trying to vomit out of my soul. The two mystical experiences I’ve had, which certainly weren’t logical, definitely have had more meat on the bone than any cold analysis. In part, that’s why I’m weary of creeds in general: I’m weary of capture.
To me, I don’t think that Jesus either has to be a profound sage or the only Son of God. In my reading and contemplation, I experience Jesus as having lived out the eternal Christ pattern, which is always available and kept accessible by the Body. That makes him, to me, more than sage, but also not exclusive. If God is truly “all in all,” as Paul says, and which also aligns with my belief in nondualism, I really can’t reconcile how anyone or anything has any special claim to God (David Bentley Hart really helped me on this front in his recent book “You are Gods,” though I’m certain he’d disagree with where I took his arguments). And in the synoptics, I hear Jesus expressing this ambivalence (most poignantly in his final words in Matthew and Mark), though certainly in John he’s of a different character (and one I find harder to accept…I find the hypostatic union approach to be unnecessarily convoluted). As I said, I’m willing to change my view, and honestly I feel an envy for the kinds of views that align with the traditions—so I want that, but I’m also reminded frequently that I have to be true to the callings in me. Sorting out what’s a calling and what’s a rubbish constructed frame is certainly a task! I suppose I shall keep asking for guidance, and trust that.
Meanwhile, the tender part of me wants to follow this path where it leads and not be told I’m not a Christian. I wish I had the fortitude to just “go it alone” and not care what the social world thinks, but I don’t, and besides, that strikes me as what cult leaders do. It’s also likely caught up with trauma I’ve had around Christianity, particularly with rejection. As a young boy, for instance, I saw Mary, but there was nowhere to turn, so I kept it secret, and when my grandmother gave me a statue of Mary that was the exact replica of what I’d seen, I took it outside, told no one, and beat it to shatters with a rock. In other words, the kinds of spiritual connections I’ve had were, at times, ostracized (most famously during my trips to the ol’ psych ward).
One more matter: while I don’t accept, at this stage, the resurrection as having been a literal and physical event, I also don’t reject that notion. When I read the Gospels several times this year, I was surprised that I simply didn’t care. For me, either way the notion of resurrection touches a deep place in my spirit and expresses an important truth about how reality is constructed. I suppose I don’t feel a need for it to be literally true to believe in Christ. The same goes for the miracles. Again, I don’t deny them either: they touch on something profound for me whether they happened like that or not. I hope there’s a place for me in more traditional paths even if I believe like this, for the kinds of modernized secular Christian paths that dismiss the literal nature of the resurrection are also unappealing to me because they lose all the mystical nature of Christ. I hope I can find a foot in either Catholicism (my heritage) or Orthodoxy, but my novice readings of “what I must believe” leave me feeling doubtful.
Perhaps I’ll be singing a different tune next year. I’ll have to wait and see, patiently (not my usual forte!)
Thanks again.
This is a great conversation, Stephen. Thanks for it. Here are a few more scattered thoughts from me that it has stimulated - also, it goes without saying, from a new Christian still working his way through (though, from conversations I've had with very long-term Christians, this never stops being the case ...)
Firstly, on doubt: I talk to my priest about this a lot, as do most people, I think. He treats it as an entirely everyday occurence (including among priests). Doubt is normal, I think. How could it not be? We are expressing a belief in something - God, Christ - that our everyday senses can't experience, and our entire society is telling us it's all nonsense. We would be very strange beings if we never wrestled with this (or fanatics.) It's part of the journey. Jack talks about this well below.
I visited Rome recently - standing in St Peter's Basilica was a strangely un-Christian experience. Or rather, it felt like a worldly imperial experience. But beneath it, at the grave of St Peter, which is underground, everything was different. There was a presence there, at this grave of a simple fisherman. I felt it helped me to understand this faith much better. One thing that hit me strongly as a result of my trip was the reality that life is a struggle, and that this is the design. Nothing is supposed to be easy - especially faith! This wrestling with what is true, this spiritual battle, is part of the work. We're not supposed to easily accept a set of propositions and then never think about anything again. We're supposed to struggle to get closer to God. That hit me as a truth that was incontrovertible.
The Nicene Creed is certainly not the untrammelled voice of God, you're right. More like the trammelled voice of a committee trying to cover all the bases. One curiousity for me is that I have begun to understand this better though. Again, being in Rome - as well as confirming my choice not to become Catholic! - made me feel more forgiving towards the church over the centuries. I can see how often the whole thing went wrong and got out of control, but I can also see 2000 years of people struggling to manifest this strange mystery in the world. I understood why things like the Creed needed to happen, and why there need to be dogmas and boundaries. Like you, when I became Christian I felt a need to follow a tradition, and I looked for the oldest and most unchanged. Of course, that means there will be aspects that I personally don't like, or even understand. That's OK with me if I feel that on the whole the thing exists to protect truth, and that the people doing so are (mostly) genuine. I do feel that where I am.
For me, the uniqueness of Christ - and especially his resurrection - is the heart of the matter. This is perhaps the reason all the dogmas and creeds exist: to guard this truth. I admire David Bentley Hart in some ways (his NT translation is very eye-opening) but I am very much on my guard against this 'you are all Gods' approach. It chimes with the Richard Rorh 'universal Christ' notion which I see as a sly way of removing Christ's divinity from the faith - which in itself would, of course, demolish Christianity entirely. Sometimes I think that's the point. If Christ is not unique - if there is no resurrection, no miracles, if 'Christ' is some vague universal 'energy' that we can all inherit - well, what have we done? We've made ourselves gods, which is the aim of modernity. It's also the aim of the snake in the garden, of course: one reason I love that story is that it keeps speaking to us.
For me personally, the uniqueness of Christ in all its outrageous impossibility and truth, is the heart of the matter. Without it, I'm not sure what I would be following. Not God, certainly. Then who? And why? If Jesus isn't excluive, do we need him at all?
From a traditional Christian perspective (certainly an Orthodox one) the resurrection changes the pattern of reality - it defeats death itself. That's a huge claim, of course. But it's one reason why, without it, the faith falls apart. I'm wary of this not because I like every aspect of the church, or consider it infallible or anything, but because I can see the trap laid by our modern minds: we'll have Jesus, but only if we can all be Jesus! I want to walk away from that, because I can see where it leads. As you say, the 'modernised' Christian paths which talk this way are hollow, thin things, whereas, for example, in a liturgy I sense a deep and real power. There has to be some reason for that.
Anyway, like you say, these are propositions, and they don't get to the heart of the matter. Maybe Mary is the heart of the matter for you. I hear that from a lot of people. If you were visited, maybe you could revisit that. I didn't understand Mary at all until I became Orthodox, but now I'm starting to dimly understand who she is, and why it matters. It's just a thought.
Hopefully I'm not just blathering!
As for Mary, she is the way in for many of us. Her presence and love hit me like a ton of bricks fairly early after my conversion like nothing else has. I know there are many who look askance at this, but it is fully real if any of this is.
I have had a strong tendency to go the Christian Neoplatonic route via St. Dionysius, the Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart etc. So having the Theotokos make her presence and love known to me so early helped to keep me tethered to the embodied expression of Christianity. I am thankful for that.
Not blathering at all. One of the reasons I appreciate your articulations about Christianity is because you’re so new to it and have fresh eyes. I sense you may also be temperamentally somewhat of a contrarian, as am I, and that makes the matter of following the most traditional path available shocking. I suppose it lends credence to the gravity of truth you’re experiencing in Christ.
You’ve raised many important points that I’m going to think hard on. In particular, I’m in agreement that a “everyone is equally divine” kind of logic has some serious shadow sides (I couldn’t finish a Rohr book), even if it’s true. And I don’t know if it’s true, or rather, if that articulation is even meaningful.
I loved your story there about the underground. And yes, the more I dive into Church history, the more I too become appreciative, and find myself strangely telling my progressive friends that actually, the aftermath of Christ sailed forth incredible liberations. Even if I walk off the path, I leave with a deep respect now for the tradition.
Thanks for that final paragraph, Paul. You know, I’ve certainly never publicly (and rarely privately) talked about having seen Mary, and I suppose I haven’t actually considered what to do with that. “Maybe Mary is the heart of the matter for you.” Maybe indeed.
Hi Stephen. Wow, your comment here spoke deeply to me. I too was raised Christian but left the church as a teenager. I also did the (seemingly) requisite tour of the Eastern religions and deemed myself very vaguely as "spritiual but not religious."
I am a birth doula and after a particularly difficult birth I attended at the beginning of this year, I found myself in a church with my best friend of many years, who has been a Christian for as long as I've known her. I find myself also being called to walk the Way but my scepticism is ever-present too. I am very reluctant to call myself a Christian for all the connotations it has - and indeed, for all the roadblocks.
There's a comment below mine that talks about faith having two seemingly contradictory elements: both the "all at once" gift that we can rest in and also being something that we are continually journeying with. That's the "walking in faith, not by sight," part.
One of my mentors always reminds me of the story of Jacob wrestling with God in the Bible. He actually says to Him, face-to-face, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
What if we can allow ourselves to get in the ring with God when it comes to all of our doubts and questions? What if it's actually part of that very process of walking in faith?
Catherine- Yes, I think doubt has a much more fundamental role than we have been led to believe. I comment similarly elsewhere in this thread. When I was younger, and before I converted, the first Biblical story that I resonated with was Jacob wrestling with God. That seemed intuitively right to me and it still does.
This sense may have been prompted or certainly at least deepened by the Rilke poem on the same idea:
https://www.michaelppowers.com/wisdom/rilke.html
The Man Watching
By Rainer Maria Rilke
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
Oh thank you for this Jack.
You are most welcome, Catherine. It is quite the poem. -Jack
That’s awesome to read of a fellow traveler in similar binds. Your last questions about doubt: yes, yes. I do hope though that doubt can actually be doubt, meaning without a foregone conclusion or pretension for where one has to arrive. Sometimes I feel that in order to become Christian, the endpoint is already set in stone.
Another thing on doubt: Jesus’ last words in Mark and Matthew, his cry of despair in his Aramaic tongue…for my first rereading of the Gospels, that’s what drew me in the most. I was stunned that I’d never truly encountered that verse (that I can remember) in all my religious upbringing. Because I definitely read it as doubt. And if Christ doubts God, especially in his final moments, how unbelievably worthy doubt really is.
God why have you forsaken me has deeper meanings also as Jesus was not the first to say those words. I think I might have read it on Rabbi Sacks covenant and conversation though I'm not sure. Probably worth investigating further if you're interested.
When I first read that verse I didn't understand it at all. Not only why Christ would say it, if he was who he was claimed to be - but also, why the gospel writers would include it, if it introduces doubt into a story they are trying to shore up.
Then I discovered the source of it: Psalm 22. What he is doing on the cross, it seems, is pointing just before he dies to the part of the Old Testament which has already foreseen what is happening to him:
'I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
it has melted within me.
My mouth[d] is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
you lay me in the dust of death.
Dogs surround me,
a pack of villains encircles me;
they pierce[e] my hands and my feet.
All my bones are on display;
people stare and gloat over me.
They divide my clothes among them
and cast lots for my garment.
But you, Lord, do not be far from me.
You are my strength; come quickly to help me.'
I found that deeply spooky when I first read it. The story the Psalm tells is of rescue - faith will deliver the servant even from death itself.
I just come back again and again to the faith - which is the key. Just following Christ, and seeing where he leads you.
One of the enjoyable things about the bible is how interconnected every single passage is. It's like an infinite onion peel. With every layer you pull off your left with the same onion. The depth is unending and chances are the reader gives up or dies long before anything resembling and ending is reached. In a way it is circular and ignoring time and space. Thus the past often speaks of the future and the future often speaks of the past..
I guess I'd say there's a difference, it seems to me, between human taxonomy, on the one hand, and one's relationship with God, on the other. I think they're distinct -- not that one of them is irrelevant, but that they aren't the same thing.
In the context of taxonomy, religions exist and have their known boundaries. Some of them are more fluid than others. Christianity is actually quite fluid in its boundaries, given the many schisms and splits that have taken place throughout Christian history, but even given all of those splits, there are "fundamentals" that are more or less shared by people who fall under the taxonomic category "Christian". This doesn't mean that everyone who considers themselves to be a Christian accepts all of these personally (that's clearly NOT the case), or that everyone who practices some or many of what Christianity proposes on a daily basis for human ethics is a Christian (or not), but rather that the word "Christian" has some substantive content, some boundaries, from a taxonomic point of view.
A separate question is the issue of one's relationship with God. Some Christians see that as personal (perhaps most Protestant Christians do), others see it as corporate (Catholics and Orthodox tend to), but regardless of how humans see it, the critical issue is God, and God's activity in the matter, which isn't *necessarily* constrained to the understanding, official or otherwise, of any one faith. That is -- faiths may teach that God's power or relationship is experienced primarily by doing X and believing Y, and, for some people, while being incorporated into the group A and regularly partaking in the ritual B or doing the prescribed acts C through F, or some such, but none of that human structure *necessarily* means that God is limited to that, in fact, regardless of what the "official faith" may teach -- Christian or otherwise. That is always limited by God's will alone which is, in essence, unconstrained. That's a key thing to keep in mind when thinking about these things.
Of course none of that will completely remove the dissonance you're unfortunately feeling. That arises from our own limitations as humans and our need to sort things into boxes and categories and so on for understanding, sense-making, and a maintaining a sense of mental stability. And that will always be challenged if one stands at odds from the general taxonomic category of a given religion but practices it anyway. Over time it's possible that this dissonance will decrease for you personally, I think -- it's probably unlikely, unfortunately, that the attitudes of others would similarly change over time if they are inside the given taxonomy due, again, to the dissonance involved. Ultimately it's a question of your own comfort level with the dissonance you have from the "official taxonomy", if you will, and how that develops and perhaps changes over time, and what your overall faith experience is during that time as well. I realize that doesn't sound very helpful, and it may not, in fact, be that comforting, but I do think such things are tetchy precisely because religious groups, Christian and otherwise, are often tetchy about their own boundaries, and it's an issue that is very difficult to avoid -- something which itself drives many people away from faith despite serious inquiries.
This is very insightful, thank you.
I suppose the dissonance I feel is not a discomfort with uncertainty and paradox, but that virtually all Christian paths I’m attracted to speak in certainties and ask me to believe those. And I want a codified path. I know there are plenty of Christians who show up to a well-worn path and keep their doubts, and maybe that’s just it for me: I need to understand that I can be seriously doubtful (of certain claims) and present in a Church, and that most importantly, that I should feel free to allow those doubts to lead me astray if they win out. I’ll be honest: I wish the Church would express doubt. Not just mystery, but actual doubt. That’d feel much more welcoming to a frequently confused cat like me. But that’s just my wish, selfish, and I don’t imagine there’s much doubt to be expressed once you’re the Church. On the other hand, what attracted me to Buddhism for so long was the light touch.
Steven- Doubt is not necessarily the enemy. I think of Dostoevsky's quote, “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.” The psalms, for example, are shot through with this sense of darkness and abandonment. With one exception always tempered with a kind of hope.
I take the prayer, "Lord I believe, help my unbelief" as a good one. Sometimes that turns into, "Lord I don't believe, help my unbelief". For me the central response is to find a deep practice and commit to it. It hasn't always resolved my doubts, but it has changed me in ways that I find surprising. Nothing else I have ever tried has gone nearly as deep. My understanding of anything is so limited. Our Faustian urge to know everything can be quite the stumbling block. It is for me. -Jack
Thanks Jack, I always enjoy your comments. Yes, I hear you that practice is certainly something necessary. In some ways, my life is setup in a way that mimics a kind of practice: I’m long-term celibate, alone, live in 65 sq ft, fast on food and sleep all the time, spend much time in the wilds, and so on. I didn’t intend to live like this as any kind of spiritual path, but it’s slowly becoming one. Meanwhile, I yearn for something more—perhaps traditional, perhaps something that carries through the ages something important. If I were settled, that’d certainly look like a Church (for starters). But since I roam, it’s going to have to take a different shape. Not sure what that’ll be, but soon I will start praying again (baby steps over here).
Steven- I might have also recommended silent prayer, as I believe someone else did in this thread. But it sounds like you are already living it. With all your doubts you may be closer than you think. Who knows? -Jack
some good responses here Steven.
I’ve had similar experiences and stumbling blocks.
keep asking God to reveal himself to you. it can be a rocky journey though.
keep your heart open and trust in the Lord.
God bless.
Steven, I don’t have answers for you about Christianity (because I’m not an officially a Christian!) but I too have had mystical experiences burst forth that did not fit the frame of the religion I was practicing (at that time buddhism). It’s actually a Christian mystic friend of mine who told me that the holt spirit works through individuals. What ever you are experiencing with your relationship to God, is the unique expression of something made manifest in you, and you don’t need to necessarily buy into other people’s interpretations of what God is to validate it. God is partially a mystery. I don’t think any of what I’ve personally experienced contradicts what Jesus or Buddha would have said, I just don’t think it fits in the more narrow frame of what some people thought they said in totalizing terms. I now read buddhist books I used to read and certain things take on new meanings based on my mystic experiences. Your story is beautiful and I wish you well on integrating your experience!
Thanks Christina. I recently had a conversation with a friend about Christ where I arrived in a similar place: that is, if we are all, as individuals, truly made in the image of God, then we all should find the individual way that God expresses through us—which has to be unique. I’ve been weary of that approach (I worked in a new age bookstore, for instance, and saw plenty of individuals making outrageous spiritual claims), and I know any individual expression must be tempered by humility and hopefully community. But I think the heart of relying on one’s inner selves is solid, so long as those inner selves stay in constructive dialogue with the outer world.
If I end up being a Christian with a hodgepodge set of beliefs, so be it. I don’t want that: I certainly don’t consider myself as possessing some superior ability to sort through Christianity any better than the many predecessors who lived by Christ resolutely. But I also won’t deny that inner prickling, or my dream voices, or my bullshit detector (which frequently needs recalibrating).
You sound like an intelligent, grounded, and open-minded person and I have no doubt you’ll figure it out. Good luck on your journey!
One other small thing that occurs to me:
In Orthodoxy, you'll often hear the church referred to as a 'spiritual hospital.' It really struck me the first time I heard it. Perhaps we've often assumed, or been taught even, that the church is more like a court of law: somewhere you go to be judged for being imperfect. Or maybe like a stage, where we all show off our righteousness. But in fact it's well understood that the purpose of church and prayer and any ritual attacked to Christianity (which after all was founded by a man critical of empty ritual) is *therapeutic.*
I still think about this a lot. Why go to a church on Sunday? Because you need therapy! Because you're sick. We all are. So we go to be healed, and that's the heart of the matter. We can't heal ourselves, but God can heal us - or so we hope. And things do happen. People in my church have different opinions about theology and politics and practice, and different levels of commitment and time. But we're all in there together, stumbling along.
I find this is one of the most helpful aspects of a liturgically-centered, old church (Orthodox, Catholic, etc). There can be people with vastly different opinions in the church, but we're all focused on worshiping. If we're all worshiping and being healed by God, the differences either don't get in the way, or begin to fade in importance compared to the light of the Divinity we're all oriented towards together.
'Religion is being replaced by therapy, with "Christ the saviour" becoming "Christ the counsellor"'
- George Carey, when he was Archbishop of Canterbury
Examine your own heart and stop concerning yourself with the hearts of others. You will know them by their fruits, who is and is not following Christ.
“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits,” (Matthew 7:15-20).
https://carm.org/about-bible-verses/what-did-jesus-mean-by-you-will-know-them-by-their-fruit/
Their are many good stories about struggling with faith. Here are some by the desert fathers and particularly abba Daniel and the Eucharist.
https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2011/06/mystery-of-eucharist-is-not-symbol.html
https://christdesert.org/prayer/desert-fathers-stories/
Thanks for these recommendations. I’ll certainly have a look: I’ve found the Desert Fathers to be quite inspiring (and slightly crazy, which I prefer). And yes, I fully believe in knowing one by their fruits…and yet, I encounter a lot of Christianity that privileges beliefs over actions. I know they’re not ultimately separate, but still, I hear much about “having to believe” certain premises to know God, and while I’ll stay open to that approach, it currently makes my stomach churn.
As for “stop concerning yourself with the hearts of others”: I’m not sure that’s my path; it conflicts with some of my ethics, though I’m revisiting those presumptions.
All people are humans. I know it is an overused koan but if you meet the buddha, kill the buddha. Just because someone is a Christian doesn't mean they are not struggling also. Without knowing someone we cannot really know their actions and even if we do, all mankind is of two hearts and is struggling in this world. Christians are called to follow Christ and live as an example. Probably most people fail at that most of the time. I'm not going to judge your failures because I don't wish to have my failures judged. Their are sayings to that effect in the Desert Fathers but it is also making an idol of the faith to expect more of others than you expect of yourself.
God is omnipresent. You might take a look at Meister Eckhart and many of the other Christian mystics. Their is the passage where Jesus tells his disciples that if knock the door will be opened to them and all will be revealed. God does not work in parlor tricks but if you truly want to speak to God with your entire heart and mind more than you wish to live then God will answer you. He did me. However with mystical experiences words are not sufficient to describe them. Eckhart is much like Suhrawardi in the Islamic tradition. Here is a short video: https://youtu.be/XbD8vfzsEHA
Hi Stephen,
Thank you for sharing your experience so clearly and authentically here. I don't know if I can give an articulate response here - but I would be very happy to listen one-on-one sometime and talk over some of these aspects of the Christ path. The deeper the waters we're treading, the more important I find a live, give-and-take conversation is. If that sounds worth pursuing, write me at mark@metanoiavt.com and we can find a time.
I love hearing about your journey, and thanks for sharing here brother.
Peace to you,
Mark
Yes, for sure, I’d love to connect. I’ll reach out.
I just wanted to say I feel quite a bit less lonely reading this, and probably also less special. Steven, pretty much everything you say echoes how I feel about these things. Except I think I am less brave.
Do folks here know the energy expert Nate Hagens? He is predicting a massive reset over the next 10-20 years that we will be forced into, based around specifically energy. Perhaps no big news for people here - but his Youtube videos are interesting, particularly now as energy has shot up the agenda.
I've seen a couple of his interviews. Isn't the idea the same as peak oil (mixed with economic troubles) that has been forseen since the 1970s?
I'm inclined to believe it.
Enjoying your writing as always, Paul. I found one thing to quibble with in your most recent essay, There Were Giants in the Earth (a lovely phrase from Genesis 6), related to the role of the Reformation in this narrative you are telling. Full disclosure: I am a full-blown protestant, of the Canadian and reformed Baptist type. But if I don't say a word for us poor maligned protestants, who will?!
So the nub of it for me is that I think part of what you assign to the reformation really needs to be blamed on nominalism, the medieval rejection of the existence of universals (from classical Platonic metaphysics). It's pretty clear that the early reformers retained the classical metaphysics of the early church, but that the reformed churches lost their grip on it as Enlightenment modernity swept through all of society. I wonder what you would make of the narrative laid out here by a fellow Baptist, Craig Carter: https://craigacarter.substack.com/p/ideas-have-consequences
You wrote: "After the Reformation, the stage was set for Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, all of which can be seen as new eruptions of Machine consciousness into a world in which the sacral worldview was in retreat." But I think the start of that chain has to go back to nominalism, and then - yes - the reformation contributes in some ways to the rest of that process.
Lastly, it pained me a little to read about your visceral allergy to the automobile. I do see your point, and I don't deny what the car did to the world. Yet I have always loved cars and I still do. There's a beauty, grace, and power that is undeniable there, a genuine artfulness. I guess I just have to live in that tension.
Ah, living in the tension! Yes, that's where we all are. I suppose it always has been. I am also able to see the beauty in some cars. There are some deisgn classics out there. I always loved the Morris Minor, myself, which probably just shows how English I am. The beauty can't be detached from the impact though - which I suppose is also true of everything.
I wrote an essay a while back drawing on the book 'The Unintended Reformation', which did mention nominalism and Ockham and the like. I'm no expert, and I struggle to get my head around these theological details: the essay helps; thanks for that. I do accept though that 'blame the Reformation' is simplistic, even for the purposes of an essay. As an aside, I was in Rome recently and had a tour of St Peter's Basilica. One unintended consequences of that was that I could see very clearly indeed why the reformers did what they did. I probably woud have joined them.
In fact, I tend more and more towards seeing the Great Schism between Eastern and Western churches as the jumping-off point which set us on our current path. The Western church severed itself from the more mystical, nous-based faith of the East, and headed down the path of rationality and power. In some ways I am starting to understand the Reformation as an attempt to correct that error - but one which had the overall effect of deepening it.
Anyway: here we all are, protestants and Orthodox and Catholics and atheists and everyone else ...
I'm not sure what you mean by "universals" here. I am not at all an expert in theology or philosophy, and am reticent (and lazy) about reading in these domains, although I have dabbled for many years. I read the Carter article.
Many years ago I read an article by a linguist, Emile Beneveniste, who convincingly made a case for the idea (!) that Greek philosophical exploration arose out of the structure of the Greek language itself. Like "meta", as in "metaphysics".
What I find important in the Greek experience is how the civilization... progressed from telling vivid, imaginative stories about things (and ideas ?) that could not be seen, in order to justify them ? find causes ?, in mythology, where forces are personnified (given human shape and form), to abstract and disembodied concepts, in scientific discourse.
If I remember correctly, Plato himself dismissed the old (pagan) mythology as old wives' tales (our word would be "fake"), and proceeded to introduce his own..philosophical myths as means of attaining a meta-physical truth. (One that is beyond the physical world.)
If you think about it, you will notice that you can't see your thoughts. People can show you images of brain activity, and feel all important, but you can't see your thoughts. They are... meta-physical.
Just for laughs... about ten years ago, I was with an English speaking friend who worked as a physicist in our high technology city, and she told me that in her scientific research, she was currently working on finding the "God particle".
She said that with no particular difficulty. i took that phrase like a kick in the stomach. To me, it looked ? looks ? as though we have come... full ellipse back to theology.
I sometimes wonder what kind of world I want to live in, one where God is... everywhere around me (immanence) or one where he is OUT THERE (transcendance). I think that there may be some definite disadvantages to immanence that we refuse to... see right now.
Back to "universals" : are we talking about universal truths ? or universal.. projects ?
For example, "in Christ there is no east nor west, in him no north or south, but one community of love throughout the whole wide earth". I think that is the Paulinian... universal ? project, if I'm not mistaken. An empire of love ? That sounds very frightening to me, even if it is with good intentions...
I don't know who said you gotta be careful about what you pray for, because you might just get it, but that person had seen a lot of the world, and not just in books.
For info, I was raised Protestant too. There is a strong individualist streak in Protestantism, and if I wanted to... deny that, I would be casting stones from my house made of bay windows. My Protestant mother living in the 1950's had reformation ? superstitions about the Catholic church, and it was eery. She thought that the Catholic church had turned Mary into an idol...
If I am going to prosternate myself in front of something or somebody (and the..French Revolution is all about rejecting that), I would rather it be Mary. And a God with... a face ? maybe has some saving graces ? Better than a concept.
On the car : I said elsewhere here that I believe that we live in a world where good and evil are inextricably mixed together. Maybe our greatest... sin ? is to desire to separate good from evil ? Could that be a sin ? If that is a fallen world, then that is still OUR WORLD.
What do we... do, then ? Decidedly, our freedom is cumbersome.
Last point, and I will shut up : once again, I have returned to William Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream". I believe that this play successfully presents and questions many of the issues I just brought up, and why Man is an animal who loves beautiful stories that he has made up. Why man transforms his world with his imagination, and why this can be... good or evil, depending. Shakespeare does this in such a way that you can see flights of fancy, but down to earth sticking as close to "reality" as a slug sticks to the ground when it travels. I would rather read Shakespeare than philosophy or theology. I get much more pleasure out of it. And the poetry...
Cordially.
'For example, "in Christ there is no east nor west, in him no north or south, but one community of love throughout the whole wide earth". I think that is the Paulinian... universal ? project, if I'm not mistaken. An empire of love ? That sounds very frightening to me, even if it is with good intentions...'
He didn't say an empire though: he said a community. A chosen community, of those who follow Christ, for whom God is more important than wordly borders or nations. Very much the opposite of an empire, even if some Christians forgot that or misunderstood it.
'I sometimes wonder what kind of world I want to live in, one where God is... everywhere around me (immanence) or one where he is OUT THERE (transcendance).'
The original Christian understanding is that both are true at once. God is 'everywhere present anf filling all things', as one Orthodox prayer has it. A God who is purely 'out there' is a modern, protestant invention, which unwittingly gave rise to the modern project.
Prostrating yourself in front of Mary is not a bad idea!
I have been prostrating myself in front of Mary since I was nine and fell in love with all those beautiful Renaissance madonnas where Mary is often breathtakingly beautiful. To me, she was. At the time I didn't know that I was in adoration, but now I know I was. That's what I have decided, at any rate...
As for in here and out there... things get tough when you can no longer see the boundaries that delimit "in here" and "out there". When Neil Armstrong set his foot and the American flag on the moon, and we saw those pictures of the earth from... out there, and heaven became further off, our belief was not helped.
On empire... the Latin word is "imperium" and it means "to command". A very very difficult book that I dabble in, and would like to finish, tells me that "imperium" in Rome, even before what we call "empire", was a carefully elaborated system/ideal of what people in power had the right to do, and not do in Rome. As I've already said, we have a relic of "imperium" in the imperatif mode in English, and in French and in most European languages.
I just listened to the Capella Reial with Montserrat Figueras singing '"El Cant de la Sibil-la, version Mallorca, from 1400, and Valencia 1560. The refrain goes, in Catalan, I think "On the day of Judgment, those who have served will be seen." In the 1560 version, the refrain goes "On the day of Judgment, those who served shall be paid." Big jump there, from "seen", or "distinguished" to "paid".
In the end, maybe (!!), it is all about service, serving... serving whom ? what ? In the Roman and pagan world, the ideal of service was inextricably caught up in the institution of slavery, and as people know, slaves serve, and are commanded by... masters who you bow down in front of. In imperial Rome, service is something done by slaves, and not free men.
But when Jesus comes on the scene, I believe, there is a big flip flop. It is no longer so easy to figure out who is a slave and who isn't. Seneca is saying that if you are... mastered by your passions, you are a slave... to them.
France developed an ideal of noble public service that made people feel... noble, and not slaves, until the neoLIBERAL movement came on the scene and started.. preaching that people who served in PUBLIC SERVICE were... slaves.
That I believe, is a big consequence of unraveling the Christian ideal of service...
I hope you are having as much fun playing here as I am...
I like that notion of the flag on the moon. That makes sense to me.
Service - yes! That's the work and the solution. It is also as hard as can be from within this culture. For me, anyway ...
It has taken me years and years to figure out that one of the reasons I have had a very hard time playing the piano the way I would like to is because... I was making it too hard for myself.
Remember... if the yoke is not easy, you're doing something wrong. That's what I have found out, at any rate. That's what was said, and I find it to be true.
And playing ? It's every bit as important as serving ?
Did Jesus want to allow us to find out how to play ?
Hemingway's beret is OK, but that other guy's? Whoa.
Berets are very rarely acceptable under any circumstances, unless you are a French onion-seller, a mime artist or a surrealist. This is my position and I'm sticking to it.
Alas, I have a newspaper clipping in my possession with a picture of me, wearing a beret, seated at a bookstore café attending a reading, that proves this point. My only defense is that it was over thirty years ago. (although it does beg the question: why do I still have the beret?)
All of us are allowed multiple exemptions for anything we did when we were under 30. I hope.
That's good to know...
When one makes a commitment to god (any god or gods) and a group that follows and one stops following the word, the teachings, does one become lost in the world?
Or is one allowed to follow another god without recrimination from the prior commitment?
We all have free will.
Solomon and Jesus said it is better to not make oath's than to brake them. On the other hand Jesus has the parable of the unjust steward. If you are going to make commitments and brake them have the shrewdness to do so wisely and cling tightly to the Lord.
David cut Goliath’s head off; with Goliath’s sword.
There is a way to read the story of David and Goliath with the giant representing the serpent from the garden metaphorically grown into a dragon (evil itself) and David representing God come to deal with it. In this way of picturing the story it strikes me that Goliath is COVERED in technology as both a defensive and offensive strategy, yet David denies the armor and advanced weaponry that Saul offers to him. David instead defeats the technologically altered Goliath with a simple stone from the earth that had not been altered in anyway - a non technological weapon. I like the image of David overcoming evil without using advanced technology, but once Goliath is dead, David uses Goliaths sword to cut his head off... is there meaning behind that?
I’m wondering if you (Paul, if you read this) or anyone else has considered this story from this angle and if so, is there a reason David used the technology of the enemy to prove that the enemy had been slain and how that may apply in todays battle?
Thanks!
That's very interesting. I can't say I'd ever thought of that. I wonder what the implications are.