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How to drive back doubt and dark
Rod Dreher Diary
September 09, 2024
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How To Drive Back Doubt And Darkness

Thoughts For Christians Who Are Struggling With Scandal And Defeat

Sep 8
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Me in Jerusalem, at the Holy Fire ceremony in 2022, one week after learning that my marriage was over. Why am I so joyful? Read on…

Another weekend post from me! I have some things I want to say that I don’t want to get lost in the more news-oriented posts I make during the week. Thanks for your indulgence.

I just returned from church, where I spent some time praying for friends and others who are scandalized by the failure of churches and Christian institutions. The big news in Hungary this weekend is that a 38-year-old Catholic priest who made a name for himself as a right-wing culture warrior, and who had even been invited to bless Prime Minister Orban’s office, was suspended by his bishop. Why? It is reported that he had multiple gay lovers, and even that gay porn videos featuring him performing are available online. This priest had even in the past denounced homosexuality and liberalism. If the charges are true, then it’s hard to imagine a more thorough hypocrite.

Naturally Orban’s political enemies are seizing on this to attack him, but it’s hard to see how the government should have known this about the priest, when his own bishop apparently did not. But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is that at a time when Christianity is fast-shrinking in Hungary, the churches are often their own enemy. The country’s president, a Calvinist, was forced to resign earlier this year because she pardoned a well-connected Calvinist imprisoned for aiding and abetting a pedophile. She pardoned him at the request of the country’s Reformed bishop, who also suffered disgrace from it. And now this big Catholic scandal.

From America magazine:

Hungary is a Catholic country with a strong Protestant presence, but in its latest census, published late last year, a majority of Hungarians, 57 percent, failed to declare an affiliation in any faith tradition: Forty percent did not answer the question about affiliation at all, and 17 percent declared “no religion” after being asked which church they belonged to. The census outcome marks the first time that religious identity has fallen below 50 percent in Hungary.

The Catholic Church in Hungary saw the steepest loss of membership, dropping 30 percent since the last census in 2011. Now 1.1 million fewer Hungarians identify as Catholics than 10 years ago. The contemporary decline reflects a long-term trend. Two decades ago, over half of Hungarians identified as Catholic; today only 28 percent do.

I passed on the gay porn priest news to a devoutly Catholic friend here yesterday. Her response: “Our church is a corpse.” She explained that she meant in Hungary, and in much of Europe.

I prayed for her this morning at liturgy, and for brothers and sisters in Christ like her. And I prayed for a close Orthodox friend who has ceased attending the liturgy out of anger at certain gross and undeniable failures of the Orthodox clergy in his life. When this guy told me that this summer, he found he couldn’t bring himself to go to liturgy anymore, I responded with the usual arguments about how the sins of the priests do not negate the truths proclaimed by the Church. And then I realized that these were exactly the same things that Catholics trying to keep me from leaving the Catholic Church said in my great crisis almost twenty years ago.

I realized in that moment that these logical arguments are as useless to my Orthodox friend in his suffering as they had been to me as a Catholic in crisis. This is a matter of the heart, not the head. The rage and the pain I suffered those many years ago from the corruption in the Catholic institution made it emotionally and psychologically impossible even to deal with those arguments.

Though the failures of the priests in my friend’s case are objectively speaking not nearly as serious as the sins of the Catholic hierarchy and clergy that drove me from Catholicism, that’s not how it feels to him. I know a lot about what he’s been through in recent years, and the idea of saying, “Cheer up! At least our priests aren’t molesting kids!” is insulting. My friend really was failed in a very, very painful way, and tells me that he simply can’t bear standing in church on Sunday with all this weighing on him.

So I pray, and listen, and help as much as he will let me. What else can I do, or any of us do? I did tell him that I came out of the crisis of faith that cost me my Catholicism with the conviction that I should never, ever put the institutional Church and its clergy on a pedestal. What that has meant in practice is that I have learned not to expect anything from the Orthodox clergy, or any clergy. I hate it. It should not be that way. But having been severely burned once by my trust, I can’t let that happen again. So when I hear of corruption in the Orthodox Church — in the news, or in the lives of individual believers — of course I hate it, but it does not shake my faith. I learned that the sins of the priests don’t negate the truths of the faith, just like my Catholic friends back in the day said.

What changed in me? Aside from having thrown down the idolization of the institutional church, that is? Simply this: I had to learn to be enchanted as a Christian. I wouldn’t have put it that way before this morning, but that is the secret to keeping the faith in a time of radical disillusionment with our religious institutions. (I bold printed it)

I don’t bring that angle into my forthcoming book Living In Wonder, because frankly, it hadn’t really occurred to me. But boy, did it make itself clear today in prayer.

I had been thinking this morning, as I stood in church praying, that the Benedict Option is looking better and better as a strategy for coping amid the collapse of church authority. That is, if we Christians, whatever our confession, are going to keep the faith through this long dark winter, we are going to have to take more responsibility in our personal lives, our family lives, and in our local church community. When church leaders fail, we have to disciple ourselves. For that matter, when they succeed, we still have to disciple ourselves, because the pressures from post-Christian, even anti-Christian, culture are immense. If you read The Benedict Option, you will see that it’s about building resilience where you are, not escaping; I say in the opening chapter that there is no escape anymore. We are simply going to have to get through this. We cannot wait to be rescued. We have to build the arks, and start rowing.

Standing in church this morning in prayer, I reflected on how much I had learned over the years of living as an Orthodox Christian, about enchantment. By “enchantment,” I mean becoming aware, not just as a matter of an idea in your head, but in your heart and in your bones, that God is, as we Orthodox pray, “everywhere present, and filling all things.” Here we are all standing around in this hot, humid church this morning in prayer, while all around us, angels have gathered — really and truly gathered. That awareness changes everything.

It’s not just an Orthodox thing. You longtime readers might recall my story about going to Catholic mass in Dallas when my son Lucas was a young toddler. He hadn’t yet learned how to talk. He was being squirmy, so I took him into the church foyer, separated from the nave by large panes of glass. I held Lucas while mass was going on. Suddenly, he sat bolt upright in my arms, pointed his right finger at a space to the side of the altar, and said, “Angel!” His finger tracked whatever he was seeing, and he kept saying, “Angel! Angel!” Then he put his head back on my shoulder, and tried to sleep.

I believe that little boy saw an angel.

I also believe now that if I had spent more time cultivating my awareness of angels (which I used as a symbol for the general mystical awareness of the presence of God), my faith would have been stronger as a Catholic. But I didn’t: I thought it was sufficient to have mastered the propositional arguments for the faith. I’m not sure why my Orthodox friend is having the crisis that he is, given how much Orthodoxy stresses conversion of the heart, and mystical awareness, but I suspect it’s because his faith is mostly a cerebral thing for him (he is very intellectual, and has more of an engineer’s mindset than an artist’s). As I try to bring him back to liturgical worship, I’m going to need to think and pray hard about how to reach him where he is.

After church, I met a new friend, an American who just moved to Budapest with her family for a temporary job assignment. She is a churchgoing Catholic and a conservative, younger than I am (but aren’t they all these days?), and we got to talking about the situation in our home country, and in the world. As we traded stories about our lives, and shared our deep concerns about the civilizational crisis of the West — it always does me good to meet new people and to be able to say, “You see it too, huh?” — I told her about The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies. She hadn’t heard about the books or their arguments, but as I laid them out briefly, she nodded along, and added occasions when she had seen the same things I talk about in the books.

She also said that she is only a Catholic now by the grace of God, because her parents had been so demoralized by church scandals that they didn’t raise her in the Church. She had a strong re-conversion in adulthood. We talked about the complacency among American Christians. She said, “I think a lot of us don’t understand how fast everything can change.”

I told her the story of Father Kolakovic, and how he had to battle the same thing among Slovak Catholics in the 1940s. So many of the older ones did not want to see what was coming, and were not prepared for the advent of Communism, and its persecution of the Church.

Walking home a few minutes ago from our conversation, thinking about it and about my experience in church this morning, I felt more convinced than ever that Living In Wonder, though I didn’t intend it as the final part of a trilogy on how to be faithfully Christian in this post-Christian world, that’s exactly what it is. In the end, re-enchanting ourselves as Christians — that is, adopting the mindset and the practices that help us to see and feel the presence of God, his saints, and his angels — is the bottom line of holding on through hard times. Even when the clergy and the institutions fail, and fail badly, if we not only know in our heads, but feel in our bones, the truths of our faith, we can hold on. But if not, well, it’s going to be very hard. In my own life, I have lived this out, and I hope that I can convey that in the book to readers.

Yesterday I listened to an episode of The Exorcist Files, the excellent podcast featuring Father Carlos Martins, an American Catholic exorcist. It’s pretty scary, but what I like about it is that Father Carlos uses these real-life stories from his experiences to educate listeners about the realities of spiritual warfare. One thing he talked about in the episode I listened to is why the demons have special hatred for the Virgin Mary. This is something my own confessor, Father Nectarios, an Orthodox exorcist, has discussed with me as well. There is something about Mary (sorry) that riles the demons up. It seems clear that because she, in her humility and purity, is the absolute opposite of the demons, in their filth and their pride. Plus, she is not a goddess, but was and is one of us: a non-divine human being who epitomizes the pinnacle of what human beings who surrender radically to God can become. Listening to these stories, in both the podcast and in conversations with my confessor, teaches me something about the realities of the world of the spirit. I gained some new insights into why Catholics and Orthodox regard Mary with such honor. Even the demons, who hate God, know that she is special among God’s creatures.

See, this is the kind of everyday knowledge that we Christians, whatever our confession, need to be building into our faith. You might not be able, because of your Protestant convictions, to regard Mary as we from the older traditions do, but it is still valuable to ponder why exorcists report that demons despise her with special hatred. What does that tell us about the role of humility and purity in the Christian life? We have so much to learn, and so many opportunities to learn. But we cannot be deceived by thinking that this is a matter of mastering our catechism. We have to open ourselves up to the power of God in everyday life.

In Living In Wonder, I end by talking about how, the day before Palm Sunday in 2022, on the eve of traveling from Budapest to Jerusalem for Orthodox Holy Week, I learned via an email from my wife that she had filed for divorce, bringing the ten-year painful struggle to keep our marriage together to an end. We had never spoken of divorce before. I got on the plane for Jerusalem the next morning a total wreck. Arriving in the Old City, I dropped my bags in my hotel, made my way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and up the stairs into the chapel built over Golgotha (really), fell on my face, and begged Jesus for His mercy. That’s how the most extraordinary week of my life began — a week full of signs and wonders.

That photo up above was taken at the ceremony of the miracle of the Holy Fire, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Saturday afternoon. I went to it skeptical that the miracle was real. I found out it was! That joy you see on my face is the joy of a man who only one week earlier had learned that life as he knew it had been destroyed — but he had literally just put his hand through the fire, over and over, and had not been burned. Our God is an awesome God! He would take care of me, and see me through this. I returned to Budapest so filled with joy, even though the worst was yet to come.

Here’s where the Living In Wonder narrative picks up from that point:

After that Easter journey, I began to look even more intently for signs of God’s presence and love everywhere. When I would experience hardship—something serious or something trivial—I now framed it as an opportunity to grow closer to him. And I practiced the presence of God by talking to him throughout the day more often than before.

I noticed, too, that the things I had learned about focused attention, particularly the strategies from Orthodox priests about refusing logismoi, any bad or distracting thoughts, helped me avoid being drawn again into the trap of nostalgia for a lost golden past. Whenever I was tempted to feel anger or self-pity, I thought about Saint Galgano in Luca Daum’s drawing and compelled myself to stay focused on Christ. God has not abandoned me, I would tell myself. This is all happening as a test of faith.

There are people who would say, “If God is real, why didn’t he save your marriage? Why does he let children die? Why do the wicked prosper and the just suffer?” This is the wrong approach. My friend Marco Sermarini, whose bereavement of his wife did nothing to dim his bright shining joy, says that the existence of suffering in the world calls us to perform “the spiritual exercise of wonder.”

“If you read the book of Job, there is a question recurring, ‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?’ and so forth,” says Marco. “I think this is a program, not just something random.”

This is an important point. It is true that we can’t force the awesome and wonderful to manifest themselves to us; the best we can do is to keep ourselves in a state of watchful waiting. But it is also true that we can practice wonder, in the sense that we can meet our doubts with an exercise of faith in the unfathomable mysteries of God, who is all good. When the tide of the Holy Spirit seems to have gone out, we have a responsibility to trust that it will return in time. Having seen the wonder of God once, we practice it in our prayers, our prostrations, and our liturgies of the everyday. That’s how we make it real and ever present.

How do we begin to live out Christian enchantment? If you are not a believer, or if you are a weak one, start by accepting that the contemporary story about how Christianity is a thing of the past, whose claims cannot be believed by modern people, is just one take among many. If you believe the secular materialist narrative, you are saying that the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived, and the majority of people alive today, are wrong. It is possible that you are right—but the odds are not in your favor. Shouldn’t you at least consider that you are wrong?

Then you can face seriously the task of changing your mind to become more open to the reality of God and the presence of mystery, meaning, and miracle in this world. True, God cannot be commanded to show himself, but that does not relieve us from the responsibility to open ourselves to him. After all, you will never find if you don’t first seek. You will never experience re-enchantment without metanoia—a radical change of mind. Iain McGilchrist explains how and why the left-brain vision that made the modern world is a distortion of the truth—and why those who seek the truth must not abandon it but rather should balance it with the intuitive way of knowing from the brain’s right hemisphere.

This is not a matter of accepting an illusion because it might make you feel better. This is about learning to see the truth, to access the really real, which has been denied to you by the flawed way of perception the modern world has falsely claimed is the whole truth. The harder we cling to the modern idea that the material world is nothing more than stuff that we are free to manipulate, the more difficult it will be to experience a resonant sense of connection with it.

Because the way we pay attention to the world has a lot to do with what we perceive, you can endeavor to shed distractions in life that get in the way of focus. And you can take on prayer disciplines that help still the mind, cleanse the nous, and repair the fragmented attention that makes it hard to relate to God.

Then lean, and lean hard, into beauty. Beauty—the moral beauty of good and holy people and the aesthetic beauty of art, music, and architecture, as well as the natural world—is a portal through which enchantment passes to us. Stop thinking of it as merely something admirable or decorative. True beauty reveals to us something of God’s nature, and truth. It shows us that the world has meaning and that we are part of that world. Beauty offers us those moments of epiphany in which the fundamental unity and purpose of the world appear to us. It is also a bridge to the world of the transcendent and ultimately to God.

Cultivate a real appreciation for beauty by reading, listening to, and looking at works of art, music, and architecture that have stood the test of time. Go out into nature and see and feel it for meaning. Read the lives of the saints and meditate on the lives of holy people in our world today. The beauty present in all of these people, places, and things is a sign telling us all where we need to go if we want to live.

Take stories of miracles and encounters with the numinous seriously. Don’t be credulous; not every miracle story is true. But many of them are. You might not experience one, and if not, that doesn’t mean you are unworthy. Still, they really do happen to people, even today. This fact should humble us all and remind us that anything is possible. None of us knows if a miracle awaits us, but we have the responsibility to prepare ourselves for that possibility. We don’t want to be the kind of people who, when confronted by a miracle, react with fear or reflexive disbelief because we don’t want to change our lives.

You can also educate yourself about the realities of the dark side—of black magic and the occult. Modern secularists and rationalist Christians laugh, but demonic possession is real. If you’ve seen it, you don’t need convincing. Demons can work apparent miracles, too, for the sake of deceiving us. Remember that occultists want false enchantment—that is, to experience and access the power of the spirit world—but only for the sake of learning to control it, to compel demons to do things for them. This is the way of destruction. More and more people are choosing it. You must learn why it is evil and turn away from it in all its forms—psychedelics, occult practices, all of it.

It is frankly depressing to look at the state of the churches today and to take stock of the overall quality of leadership, both clerical and lay. Don’t despair! God is raising up new voices to show his people the way forward. It will not do to complain about the very real failures of religious leaders and claim that as an excuse to abandon the faith. This is cowardice. How can you be sure that God won’t use you to rally believers to repentance and return to a true and living faith, as he has done so often in ages past with other ordinary men and women?

To summarize: We Christians have a mission to focus our attention on Christ and to create the conditions for the flow of divine energy—of grace—to purify the eyes of our hearts so that we can see the holiness all around us and share in the life of God. To accomplish this, we have to learn how to sacrifice, die to ourselves, and fix our personal swords, as symbols of our will, into the stone of God as an act of faithful obedience.

We have to learn how to direct our attention rightly, pray more effectively, and reestablish resonance with the world beyond our heads. We have to discover how to open our eyes to beauty and allow it to work its magic on us, drawing us into a deeper relationship with reality.

We have to learn about the frightening facts of spiritual warfare and dark enchantment and turn from its enticements. And we have to seek out the community of wise and faithful men and women with whom to share the pilgrim’s journey.

We can’t force enchantment to happen, but we can certainly do all of these things to prepare ourselves for it—even in the face of a world that says they are impossible and that offers us instead the false enchantments of sex, money, fame, technology, and even the occult. The means to do this are part of our past and part of our present. They can be part of our future, if we want them enough to make life-changing sacrifices. There is no other way. The more control you want to have over your life, the less enchantment you will experience. As Jesus said, “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matt. 16:25).

That is a summary of Living In Wonder, but the whole book is full of stories and details and practical advice for how to do this. I needed today — praying for my scandalized friends in church, and that conversation over coffee — to get myself into the headspace of talking about Christian re-enchantment as a survival skill for believers trying to hold on through this civilizational crisis. I’m going to be giving a speech on this topic at the upcoming Touchstone conference in Chicago later this month. But you’d better believe that when the book comes out on October 22, I’m going to be preaching this gospel of joy.

I told my coffee conversation partner this morning the amazing story of how the Lord sent angels to revive the flagging faith of prisoner Alexander Ogorodnikov. God is doing things like this for us all the time, but often we don’t have eyes to see it. I look at that image of my face above, filled with grace and awe at the goodness of the Lord, and I realize that the darkness of the loss of my marriage could not extinguish the holy fire in my hand, and the light that Holy Week had rekindled in my heart. The miserable failures of the clergy cannot touch you if you are enchanted, in a Christian way. Let’s go! Christ has overcome the world!

I’m making this post free to the whole list today. Please share it with anyone you know who is struggling in the faith, and who needs encouragement. I can barely wait for the book to come out, so we can talk more in depth in this space about signs, wonders, miracles, and the light that cannot be comprehended or snuffed out by the darkness visible. In the book, I tell a story about a New York Catholic businessman whose wife was possessed; an ancestor had made a pact with the devil, which brought the evil onto her. She was eventually delivered after much prayer, thanks to the help of an exorcist. The struggle brought both of them much closer to God. The businessman told me that he and his wife had been ordinary mass-going conservative Catholics prior to this horrific experience, but this taught them both that there is another dimension of reality. He said that now when he walks down the streets of Manhattan, he realizes that there are intense spiritual battles going on unseen all around him.

But he also knows how to achieve victory. That’s what I want to share with readers in this new book. We are like the great French general Marshal Foch in World War I. He sent this message back to headquarters: “My center is giving way, my right flank is retreating, situation excellent, I attack!”

  

Don’t forget to pre-order the book; the new Living In Wonder website Zondervan has created for the book has lots of links to book dealers. If you would like to pre-order a copy signed by me, you can do so exclusively through Eighth Day Books.

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John Vervaeke and the meaning crisis.
Rod Dreher's Substack
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John Vervaeke & The Meaning Crisis

What I'm Learning From Engaging The Thought Of The Cognitive Scientist

Jul 11
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John Vervaeke

I’m in Germany at a conference. On the plane here, I started reading a terrific book, Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, by John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro. I’ve been wanting for a long time to get into Vervaeke (pron. “ver-VAY-kee”), a University of Toronto cognitive scientist who is part of Jordan Peterson World, but I just don’t have time to listen to podcasts, which is how he presents most of his public work.

If you do, here’s a treasure trove: a link to video presentations of Vervaeke’s lectures on the Meaning Crisis. The book I bought seems to be a distillation of the first twenty-five episodes (a second volume is coming). Vervaeke is not a Christian, by the way. He is interested in Buddhism, not as a religion, it seems, but as an approach to cognition. His work is filled with useful insights — so much so that I don’t think I’ll be able to wait for the final book, presenting his Meaning Crisis lectures in written form (the form in which I best learn). Looks like I have my next thing to listen to on my daily walks. Here’s what I’m getting from the book so far:

The Meaning Crisis, in Vervaeke’s view, amounts to this:

… the decentering of human life from its cosmic significance, a decline in our sense of purpose, and a sensation of having lost the soul that gave earlier human societies their adaptiveness and vitality. It seems we are left with a feeling of having lost our place in the world along with a sense of who we are and what we ought to do with ourselves.

People today — those without dead souls — are grasping for meaning, trying to find their way out of the dark wood of despair.

There is a pattern to all of these efforts, a certain hunger in the human spirit, a depth of need that has not been fully understood. When we begin to recognize this need as a feature of our spiritual condition, we can begin to piece together a unifying account for why all of this is happening. Each of these movements is responding to a crisis of meaning, a disorienting sense that we have forgotten some essential dimension to reality and lost our relationship to what is good, true, and beautiful. This crisis has deprived us of something essential at the center of our lives. It has been described in many ways by many thoughtful people across time, but we might think of it quite simply as a famine of the spirit, an existential illness that has taken shape in the human brain, body, culture, and soul.

Vervaeke describes the search for meaning as the search for wisdom:

Wisdom is ultimately about how to generate and enhance this meaning. Wisdom is about realizing. This means that cultivating wisdom generates realization in both senses of the word: becoming aware and making real. Wisdom is about realizing meaning in life in a profound way.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting for me. My next book is (broadly) going to be about pilgrimage as a journey for meaning — specifically, a journey to recover God, and, in the narrative I plan, a way of seeing our civilizational inheritance as a material bearer and mediator of meaning and divinity. (Note: not divinity itself — that would be idol-worship — but as a mediator of God’s presence.) Vervaeke:

It may sound high-minded and mystical, but self-transcendence is an essential need for human beings. It performs core functions for our cognition. For instance, deep connections exist between meaning, wisdom and altered states of consciousness (ASC). Throughout our history, human beings have consistently sought ways to alter the quality of our conscious experience by manipulating our physiology and behavior.

Prayer, then — and not just petitions to God, but deeper, more mystical ways of prayer, like the Jesus Prayer in the Orthodox tradition. And pilgrimage: those 20,000 young people walking for sixty miles across the plains of Beauce to Chartres this past June were “praying with their bodies” — seeking to know the Lord through participation in Him.

Vervaeke says a true mystical experience is transformative. After you’ve had one — and you accept it as real — you know you can’t be the same person.

These are awakening experiences, wherein people return from the mystical experience feeling it was somehow more real than reality. They feel a compelling need to change their world and themselves to fit that new reality.

… When people use this word “meaning,” it is a metaphor. They mean that the way life becomes significant is somehow analogous to the way a sentence has semantic meaning. The pieces fit together in some way that impacts our cognition and connects us to the real world.

He goes on:

When words become a sentence, we no longer see the words, but see through them. They become transparent and give us access to participate in reality, allowing us a chance to grasp it, to have contact with it. We have to unpack this metaphor. Why do we use it, and what does it reveal when we talk about the meaning of our lives? How is it that some of the most meaningful experiences people have are precisely the ones that are completely ineffable to them, that they cannot put into words?

For Christians, the material manifestations of the experience of Christ — liturgies, prayers, hymns, church buildings, pilgrimages, and so forth — are metaphors, of a sort. A “metaphor” is an analogy, a kind of bridge. It comes from the Greek word meaning “transference.” The culture we create from our common experience of God serves as a bridge that allows us to have access, however imperfectly, to the “real world” of the divine. It is what allows transcendence — again, imperfectly — to be immanent. Vervaeke says that “metaphor is a way of reaching into the world so it seems to reach back.”

For the cognitive scientist Vervaeke, culture is necessary for knowing:

Your cognition is very participatory; you partake in large, distributed networks of cognition. Before the internet networked computers together, culture networked brains together to provide some of our most powerful problem-solving abilities. This is how human beings responded to an impossible predicament. They formed a social network. These networks were managed with a form of pattern-oriented activity that became so fundamental to human culture that its influence pervades nearly all of our behavior. We call it ritual.

Ritual is guiding your interaction without you noticing. It is the groundwater beneath these cultural forms. If you dig into your own behavior, social or otherwise, you will find it. Even when our interactions seem empty, they continue to convey—and convey us through—these patterns of meaning. In the minutest of gestures, in the smallest of small talk, ancient rituals are at work.

… Ritual trains your ability to regulate your emotion and to undertake a process called decentering: adopting a non-egoic perspective by redirecting your attention to something real outside of you.

It all began in the distant past, with shamans as the bridge between the transcendent and the immanent.

The shamanic integration of flow with altered states of consciousness (ASC), the insight and refinement of intuition, the capacity for metaphorical thought—all of these expanded human cognition by making it much more creative, capable of reading patterns and generating connections between different scales and categories of the world. This allowed our ancestors to gather the world together and unite different parts of experience to create working models of reality as well as the structures that seemed to exist beneath us, around us, and within us. These symbolic unities, or mythologies, gave us a new kind of agency in the world and an idea of who we were within it. This was the beginning of what we would later call a worldview.

You can see where he’s going with this — and where I, the Christian writer with a newfound, post-Chartres interest in the power of Christian culture, am going with this.

“Myth,” as Vervaeke uses it, is not something untrue, but rather a story, a metaphor that allows us to grasp transcendent realities, and order our lives according to those truths. Tolkien famously told C.S. Lewis that Christianity is “the myth that is true.” I believe that, certainly — but the point to take is that myths themselves, even if not true in the most literal sense, are crucial to human cognition and the forming of culture. Without building a sacred canopy (the term is Peter Berger’s) over ourselves and our societies, a canopy woven from myth, we are lost.

The Axial Age (from the 8th to the 3rd centuries, BC) was a period of profound shift in human consciousness, across many different civilizations. It was the period of the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, and the advent in the Far East of Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tzu, and Zarathustra. This caused what Vervaeke calls the “great disembedding,” in which humanity became conscious of itself as somehow separate from the cosmos. He became aware of a transcendent world beyond this one.

In the great disembedding, one world became two. The everyday world was that of the untrained mind, a world beset by self-deception, self-destruction, illusion, violence, and chaos. To live in this world was to be out of touch with reality. The real world lay behind this world of illusion. This was how the trained mind, the wise mind, saw the world.

In the two-worlds mythology, wisdom is not the acquisition of power or prosperity. It is the emancipation from a lesser reality. The axial hero did not want to conquer the everyday world. He wanted to be transformed out of it.

In the two-worlds mythology, meaning was not just about connectedness as it was in the continuous cosmos but specifically connectedness to the real world. This also changed the idea of the self. In the continuous cosmos, you were defined largely by how you fit into the world. In the two-worlds mythology, you were defined more by self-transcendence, how you transformed and grew as a person.

More:

The two-worlds Mythology is a mythological form of thinking that allows us to articulate and train the psychotechnologies of the Axial Revolution, the projects of self-transcendence and wisdom. It took the meaning-making of the shaman and refined it into a more precise way of cultivating human cognition. However, this mythology is failing us now. The scientific worldview, with its materialist and physicalist metaphysics, is gradually eroding the Axial project.

This is one of the great problems of the Meaning Crisis. Since the shaman, human beings have depended on mythology for meaning-making. It has become inseparable from humanness itself. The Axial worldview still holds up our idea of the sovereign person, the individual who has agency, freedom, and responsibility. However, a mythology must be livable in order to perform its function.

The scientific-materialist worldview makes it impossible for the Axial Age way of thinking — obviously, Christianity is part of this — to be sustained. This, says Vervaeke, is why we are having a Meaning Crisis: being human, as we have understood it for over 2,000 years, requires living by myths that connect us to a world of transcendence that we intuit is really there. The Axial Age way of thinking is deeply embedded in our psyches. But the modern way of thinking denies flat-out that there is anything transcending this world.

In 2015, the formerly Christian writer Damon Linker wrote a powerful essay challenging the complacent optimism of the New Atheists, saying that Nietzsche understood better than them the terror implied by the death of God. Linker wrote:

If atheism is true, it is far from being good news. Learning that we're alone in the universe, that no one hears or answers our prayers, that humanity is entirely the product of random events, that we have no more intrinsic dignity than non-human and even non-animate clumps of matter, that we face certain annihilation in death, that our sufferings are ultimately pointless, that our lives and loves do not at all matter in a larger sense, that those who commit horrific evils and elude human punishment get away with their crimes scot free — all of this (and much more) is utterly tragic.

Back to Vervaeke:

The meaning of a mythology is like an atmosphere, and it gives oxygen to our idea of humanness. This atmospheric property of meaning—symbolized by the shaman’s soulfight—refers to human “spirit,” the idea that something about human beings is not confined to body and world but also extends beyond it.

When this symbolic reality begins to decline, it is like the thinning or pollution of that atmosphere. Our meaning-making is asphyxiated, and we are barred from accessing the spirit of soulflight. Human beings become homeless in the universe, as though the soil from which we have grown meaning, and grown ourselves, is no longer fertile.

As Nietzsche famously observed, if we live only for the next world, and the next world is taken from us, precious little is left for the project of meaning, and the consequences are nihilism and profound self-destruction⁠. We do not want to lose all that we gained through the great disembedding, but how do we live with this legacy when we can no longer inhabit its worldview? To begin answering this question, we must gain a fuller understanding of what this world bequeathed us.

(My next book is going to take up in part that highlighted line.)

Vervaeke continues:

To retrace the steps of the Axial Revolution, I will begin in ancient Israel. It is difficult for many modern people to fathom the scope of influence of the Bible—not just for practicing Jews and Christians but for all who grew up and live in the West. Biblical illiteracy has been steadily rising in tandem with our secularization, and this a thwarting problem for our culture—not because people should be Christians or Jews but because failure to grasp the grammar of the Bible is also the failure to grasp the grammar of your own cognition.

You may well profess to be an atheist and disbelieve the doctrines of these traditions. However, this kind of belief—in other words, the propositional belief—is irrelevant in this context. I am not referring to what you profess but how you think and behave. Defining belief only by creed and proposition is analogous to defining the democratic sensibility by whether or not you cast a ballot on voting day; you still participate, however unconsciously, in the ethics, rituals and institutions that structure this form of society.

… The mythology of the Judeo-Christian heritage, for instance, has become an invisible architecture for our thinking, a meaning we live in, furnish, and refurnish over time. One of the psychotechnological inventions that undergirds this architecture appears so obvious that we do not stop to consider its novelty: the understanding of time as a cosmic narrative, as a story. All cultures tell stories, and we will unpack the cognitive science of story in later chapters.

Yet the Continuous Cosmos [of the pre-Axial Age] was not a story. It was a cycle. The story has a beginning, a crucial turning point that forces a crisis and leads the protagonist to act, and a resolution. There is a direction to a story. There is a purpose to it.

Yes. I believe it was MacIntyre who said that we cannot know what to do until we understand what story in which we are a part. The scientific-materialist worldview denies that there is a story at all. Here, according to Vervaeke, is the breakthrough that came to us through Hebraic monotheism:

As with most historical transitions, the cross-fade from continuous cosmos to Axial mythology was gradual rather than immediate. You can detect many aspects of a Bronze Age god in the Old Testament, but He becomes more Axial as He becomes the force of progress, the idea that history, when directed to its proper course, is moving closer to its purpose, gathering together across time, perfecting and refining, becoming more real.

This gathering is happening on a cosmic scale but also on an individual scale, and God becomes the correspondence between these scales, whose revelations collapse together— like the character and the world of a narrative—when the narrative reaches a pivotal turning point. The turning point of the story is called kairos.

In common parlance, kairos refers to a critical or opportune moment, an opening in time that allows us to see, access or intervene in something that was once invisible or obscure. In the two-worlds mythology, kairos is a revelation of the real world from within the mirage.

Kairos requires a shamanic synonymy of knowing and participating. This synonymy is captured in the idea of Da’ath, an ancient term for knowing, used in the Bible to refer to sexual intercourse (e.g., Adam knew his wife Eve). Modern Westerners may find this confusing; we do not often use sex as a metaphor for knowledge. Yet many cultures do.

Moses receiving the Law on Sinai was a kairos moment. For Christians, the Incarnation was the kairos moment of all kairos moments.

The sexual metaphor is a rich one, and we should not shrink from it out of prudery. When one has sex — or, I should say, unites with someone one loves, as distinct from merely mating like animals — one opens a bridge in the most intimate way possible with another soul. One ceases to be oneself, but unites with another, knows the other through unsurpassably intimate participation in the other, and is changed by it. One might even produce new life from it.

When the Christian scripture calls Christ the Bridegroom and the Church the Bride, this is the way of knowing implied by that metaphor.

Vervaeke:

The identity relationship between knowing and participating is a fundamental Axial idea, and it is central to understanding the religious nature of the ancients and their symbolic way of experiencing the world. “Knowing” is not the apprehension of facts, seen dispassionately from the outside. It is nothing you could acquire from a distance. You know something by assuming its identity, by becoming it. Your becoming it somehow changes it, reveals it, makes it real.

When you are making love with someone, you are participating in them, identifying with them, empathizing and resonating with them. You are changing them as they are changing you, and this process of change rises—forgive me the pun—to a climax, after a turning point and before the resolution. You may begin to see why, in so many religious traditions, sexuality is a perennial symbol for our sacred union with reality. Da’ath describes our participatory knowing in the course of its unfolding.

This idea of knowing is critical for our project because it changes the way we interpret religious ideas of faith and belief. In ancient Israel, faith did not mean having incredible beliefs without evidence. That is a recent, very modern idea. Faith was Da’ath. It described this symbolic relationship you had with the world and with your existence. It was your sense of living in this reciprocal realization.

Do you see the Chartres pilgrimage with different eyes now? Do you see all the various manifestations of Christian culture, beginning with the early Church, and extending through history to our own time, in a different way? You should. The idea that faith is about nothing more than assenting to propositions is a modern one, and one that leads to disenchantment.

In the Orthodox Christian faith, “sin” is understood not as the breaking of the moral law, in a legal sense, but rather more as “missing the mark” — of living in disharmony with what is Really Real. Vervaeke thinks something similar:

This kind of language returns us to the idea of sin, but our biblical illiteracy inhibits us; we are tempted to understand sin as doing something immoral, committing a particular act of transgression. This is much more a symptom than a definition. Sin is better understood as being in a distorted relationship with reality. It is the misdirection of love and attention.

Recall the archery analogy that sources the term’s meaning; you cannot shoot for where your eye tells you to look. If you do, you will miss the bull’s-eye. The true arrow is guided by Da’ath, the kind of knowing that conforms the attention of the archer with the proper target. The archer and her target seem to share the same body, the same identity. Their craft is a movement toward connectedness and participation. When she lands the target, it becomes real to her. She stakes herself in its reality. She is binding herself to the world and the world to herself. One way of understanding sin is as the failure to effect that binding.

In 2022, when I visited the medieval Orthodox monasteries in northern Romania, I noticed at the base of one of the painted churches images of kings. The monk guiding me told me that those are the pre-Christian Greek philosophers who opened the way, conceptually, for Christ.

  

Vervaeke writes about them at length, saying at one point, “If you were to put Western Civilization on two feet, one foot would be the Bible, and the other would be the works of Plato.” Here’s an excerpt.

Pythagoras’s cosmos anticipated the relationship between beauty, order, and realness that would become essential to the Greek philosophical tradition. When people report awakening experiences, they often rediscover these Pythagorean affinities. They suddenly perceive the world as a cosmos, and their perception of order and coherence is suffused with beauty.

The notion of cosmos created a powerful model for how we understood meaning and wisdom—what a self was, how it perceived and grew, how we fit into the universe, and how we made contact with reality. It draws a striking contrast with the modern worldview.

A cosmos is not the same thing as a universe. A cosmos is a universe suffused with order, pattern, and meaning — with logos. I didn’t fully understand the meaning of the opening of the Gospel of John (“"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."). What does it mean to say that God was the word, and that Jesus of Nazareth was the incarnate Word? Finally someone explained to me that translating the Greek word “logos,” which John used, as “word” is limiting. Yes, “logos” means “word,” but it means far more than that. It means “reason.” It means “ordering principle.” To call God the Logos means that one of His properties is that He is the ordering principle of all of reality. To call Jesus the Logos is to say that the ordering principle of all reality manifested as a man.

Back to Vervaeke’s discussion of Plato:

Notice the role of participatory knowing in the “virtuous circle” above. Contact with reality is dependent on my self-transformation. I am not a passive observer forming true beliefs. I am implicated in my observations. The appearance of the world is a consequence of my framing, and I have to change myself to see the world more clearly. When I do, the world itself seems to change, and it places a demand on me to change myself. As I transform, the world discloses more of itself. This is the dynamic of participatory knowing. It is a reciprocal opening between me and my environment. I am not just changing my mind or knowing with my mind. I am knowing with my whole self, my whole identity, and all the machinery of my cognition.

The related quests for reality, inner harmony, self-knowledge, and transformation are explored deeply in Plato’s Republic. The quest is dramatized in the Myth of the Cave, perhaps the most famous passage in the history of Western philosophy.

I’m running out of the allotted space in this newsletter, so I won’t retell the Myth of the Cave, which most of you no doubt know — but if not, or if you need a refresher, follow the link. More Vervaeke:

Remember: these myths remain popular because they are not stories from the past. They are dramatic recreations of the perennial patterns we face as human beings, like the disharmony we experience in the parts of our psyche, the problem of being trapped in illusion and being out of touch with reality.

In this vision, reason and spirituality are not opposed. They are inseparably bound together. Plato paired the Socratic project (ordering the psyche to overcome self-deception) with the Pythagorean one (the soulflight of self-transcendence and transformation of consciousness). From this marriage, he discovered a way to depict this radical transformation. His depiction is so entrancing that it became a constant refrain throughout the West.

This is why the truest Christianity is a journey towards what we Orthodox call theosis, or unity with God, in which we achieve perfect harmony with Him, while remaining ourselves. Dante writes about this process in the Paradiso. He invented a word, transumanar, to describe the process — but he very much does not mean what Silicon Valley means by transhuman. He means that we become most fully human by becoming transhuman — that is, gradually changed and perfected by radical, ongoing communion with the Holy Spirit.

Vervaeke on logos:

As I mentioned in previous chapters, this word is among the most translated—and mistranslated—words in all of philosophy. It has to do with the order and arrangement of these real patterns, the concentering formula that fits everything together, integrates it with mind, and makes it intelligible to our comprehension. The research shows that our grasp of logos is intuitive, but not something we can define or express. We know it by conforming to it, by becoming like it, by matching the pattern of our cognition to the pattern of its disclosure, and entering into that reciprocal realization with it.

You see here why in the Christian view, conforming to the Logos — Christ — requires creating patterns of meaning through which the Logos is disclosed. We have to build a Christian culture so that our lifelong journey, both individually and collectively, to theosis can be effected. Rieff said that in the Christian era, Christians knew generally how to live because the answer to “What am I to do?” was “Do as the Saviour did.” We created all the structures and artefacts of Christian culture in an effort to order the material world to Christlikeness, and to create for ourselves immanent patterns of cognition that help us flesh-and-blood humans to do as St. Paul commanded: to put on the mind of Christ.

This aligns with Vervaeke here:

Plato provided us with the paradigm-changing insight that a connection exists between our conformity to reality and the necessity of self-transformation. As we track patterns in the world, we can reflectively internalize these patterns to better understand and harmonize ourselves. The inward transformation allows us to refine our grasp on reality, to awaken from illusion, and draw ourselves closer to what is most real.

That is as far as I got in the Vervaeke book yesterday. It is incredibly helpful to me as a plot out my next book (again, I will tell you all about it once I have a publisher’s agreement). But I think you can see where I’m going with it. Going to that Chartres pilgrimage really changed me. I hope I can publish this book inspired by it. You know, sometimes people ask me how I get ideas for my books. The honest answer is I just wait for them, and they appear. Well, this one appeared in a big way at Chartres, through the young people who walked that walk, and, of course, through the glorious cathedral itself. The second time in my life!

If you like all the stuff in today’s newsletter, please come to the Midwestuary Conference in Chicago on August 22-24! Vervaeke will be there, as will Jonathan Pageau (his frequent online conversation partner), Paul VanderKlay, and my fine self.

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Inaugural Mass homily of Pope Leo the XIV with some commentary by yours truly
Signs of Hope

Good day all,

      My thoughts on the Holy Father's homily in bold print.  I see many signs of hopefulness in his homily and I am praying greater clarity and unity from Pope Leo.  The world will reject his clarity since it likes spiritual ambiguity and moral relativism, but I am hoping for a less divisive Pope than Francis.  - Fr. Tom

Dear Brother Cardinals, Brother Bishops and Priests, Distinguished Authorities and Members of the Diplomatic Corps, and those who traveled here for the Jubilee of Confraternities, Brothers and Sisters:

I greet all of you with a heart full of gratitude at the beginning of the ministry that has been entrusted to me. St. Augustine wrote: “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions, I: 1,1).

In these days, we have experienced intense emotions. The death of Pope Francis filled our hearts with sadness. In those difficult hours, we felt like the crowds that the Gospel says were “like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). Yet on Easter Sunday, we received his final blessing and, in the light of the Resurrection, we experienced the days that followed in the certainty that the Lord never abandons his people, but gathers them when they are scattered and guards them “as a shepherd guards his flock” (Jeremiah 31:10).

In this spirit of faith, the College of Cardinals met for the conclave. Coming from different backgrounds and experiences, we placed in God’s hands our desire to elect the new Successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, a shepherd capable of preserving the rich heritage of the Christian faith and, at the same time, looking to the future, in order to confront the questions, concerns and challenges of today’s world.   I never got the impression that Pope Francis considered it a rich heritage, but often just an interpretation and exposition of the faith for a given time and culture.  I am probably too harsh on the past Pope, but he was not one known for clarity.  I am hoping that the use of the word heritage indicates a more positive few of the past as a treasury of faith to be preserved rather than a liability to be dismissed.

Accompanied by your prayers, we could feel the working of the Holy Spirit, who was able to bring us into harmony, like musical instruments, so that our heartstrings could vibrate in a single melody. I was chosen, without any merit of my own, and now, with fear and trembling, I come to you as a brother, who desires to be the servant of your faith and your joy, walking with you on the path of God’s love, for he wants us all to be united in one family. The Holy Father uses phrase from St. Clement of Rome (Pope #3) and seems to borrow some additional imagery from St. Augustine like he did in his opening remarks.

Love and unity: These are the two dimensions of the mission entrusted to Peter by Jesus. We see this in today’s Gospel, which takes us to the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus began the mission he received from the Father: to be a “fisher” of humanity in order to draw it up from the waters of evil and death. Walking along the shore, he had called Peter and the other first disciples to be, like him, “fishers of men.” 

Now, after the Resurrection, it is up to them to carry on this mission, to cast their nets again and again, to bring the hope of the Gospel into the “waters” of the world, to sail the seas of life so that all may experience God’s embrace. Pope Benedict used the image of sailing the seas of life at the dawn of the digital age after his election as Pope.  I suspect Pope Francis might have as well, but when you stop paying too much attention you miss little details.  I prayed for Pope Francis his entire pontificate, but I didn’t give him much active attention.

How can Peter carry out this task? The Gospel tells us that it is possible only because his own life was touched by the infinite and unconditional love of God, even in the hour of his failure and denial. For this reason, when Jesus addresses Peter, the Gospel uses the Greek verb agapáo, which refers to the love that God has for us, to the offering of himself without reserve and without calculation. Whereas the verb used in Peter’s response describes the love of friendship that we have for one another.

Consequently, when Jesus asks Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:16), he is referring to the love of the Father. It is as if Jesus said to him, “Only if you have known and experienced this love of God, which never fails, will you be able to feed my lambs. Only in the love of God the Father will you be able to love your brothers and sisters with that same ‘more,’ that is, by offering your life for your brothers and sisters.”

Peter is thus entrusted with the task of “loving more” and giving his life for the flock. The ministry of Peter is distinguished precisely by this self-sacrificing love, because the Church of Rome presides in charity, and its true authority is the charity of Christ. It is never a question of capturing others by force, by religious propaganda, or by means of power. Instead, it is always and only a question of loving as Jesus did.  The 21st chapter of John is so rich. It is one of my favorite passages to reflect upon.  It is how God heals us of our sins.  It is both a healing moment and a recommissioning of sorts.  Jesus can’t have Peter moping through life as a the denier, Jesus is calling him to shepherd the flock.

The Apostle Peter himself tells us that Jesus “is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, and has become the cornerstone” (Acts 4:11). Moreover, if the rock is Christ, Peter must shepherd the flock without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him (cf. 1 Peter 5:3). On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters and to walk alongside them, for all of us are “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5), called through our baptism to build God’s house in fraternal communion, in the harmony of the Spirit, in the coexistence of diversity. In the words of St. Augustine: “The Church consists of all those who are in harmony with their
brothers and sisters and who love their neighbour” (Sermons 359, 9).

Brothers and sisters, I would like that our first great desire be for a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world. In our time, we still see too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference, and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest. 

For our part, we want to be a small leaven of unity, communion and fraternity within the world. We want to say to the world, with humility and joy: Look to Christ! Come closer to him! Welcome his word that enlightens and consoles! Listen to his offer of love and become his one family: In the one Christ, we are one. This is the path to follow together, among ourselves, but also with our sister Christian churches, with those who follow other religious paths, with those who are searching for God, with all women and men of goodwill, in order to build a new world where peace reigns! Look to Christ! Pope Leo goes right into the invitation to listen and reflect upon the word of God. The invitation is unity through conversion.

This is the missionary spirit that must animate us; not closing ourselves off in our small groups, nor feeling superior to the world. We are called to offer God’s love to everyone, in order to achieve that unity that does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people. The church is always missionary. Conversion to Christ does not annihilate all differences, but rather is a process of refinement, keeping what can be of service to the Gospel and losing what is opposed to it or hinders it. Getting rid of sin is just the beginning, putting on the mind and heart of Christ is the challenge.  I pray for our new Holy Father that he may be faithful, courageous and genuinely kind.

Brothers and sisters, this is the hour for love! The heart of the Gospel is the love of God that makes us brothers and sisters. With my predecessor Leo XIII, we can ask ourselves today: If this criterion “were to prevail in the world, would not every conflict cease and peace return?” (Rerum Novarum, 21).

With the light and the strength of the Holy Spirit, let us build a Church founded on God’s love, a sign of unity, a missionary Church that opens its arms to the world, proclaims the word, allows itself to be made “restless” by history, and becomes a leaven of harmony for humanity. Together, as one people, as brothers and sisters, let us walk towards God and love one another. Surprisingly short homily, bishops can often go on forever.

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Practice Gratitude - A reprint and expanded post
Gratitude changes everything

Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Wednesday Friends & Refugees, Early Birds and Later Dayers, Conversants and Lurkers, Phamily & Misfits, ADD Irregulars, WSN Curators, and Curmudgeons!  Today's reflection is one of my favorite ones from the past.  David Whyte's wonderful book Consolations - The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.  It is a treasure trove of reflection on the gift of language and the power of words.  His reflection on gratitude is outstanding.

GRATITUDE is not a passive response to something we have been given; gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event; it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege, that we are miraculously part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the colour blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full, miraculous essentiality of the colour blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully the beauty of a daughter’s face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participant and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort; this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.

Paying attention- LOVE IT. One of my most frequent reminders in my preaching. We get more out of life by paying attention and not simply existing. a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life. The gifted nature of life- hold on to that thought, the gifted nature of life makes all the difference in what we think about our story.

that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege - EVERY SINGLE PERSON IS PRIVILEGED - some more than others, but every single one of us. A personal philosophy built on the dialectic of privilege & victimology will lead to legions of unhappy and resentful souls, and not because they lack privilege, but because they lack the appreciation of the gift of living. To focus on what you lack will never help you discover what you possess and what is unique about you. To be a someone amongst all other someones - welcome to LIFE, Digital Neighbor. 😁 The people I love the most and care for the least are still someone amongst someones. It is not always easy to remember that when thinking ill of those you care for the least.

We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort; this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Amen.

Thank you all for allowing me to sit and share at your table.  I have been so blessed by the people God or fate has placed on my life path and I have been delighted that these digital paths have opened up my horizon so wonderfully.  I greatly appreciate the personal sharing, the cultural commentary, the political ranting and wrangling, and above all the shared laughter and memes.

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