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Rod Dreher on Vance and other things
February 17, 2025
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Vance Speech: A Rhetorical D-Day Landing

And: David Starkey, Unreformed; Letter From An Angry Soldier; Wheaton's Travails

Feb 17
 
 
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The Americans have landed!

Good morning from London, and the first day of the ARC conference. Big opening dinner for speakers and donors last night; as a speaker, I got to go. Was so, so great to see many old friends there, Ran into Jonathan Pageau last night standing around talking to folks after dinner (had to filter the party pic selfie; the original was even more orange, thanks to the lighting):

  

Just now, after breakfast, I walked out of the hotel restaurant, and there sat two of my favorite people in all the world, James Orr and Martin Shaw, kibitizing. Oh happy day! Oh happy next three days!

Everybody from this side of the pond last night was talking about the J.D. Vance speech, I only heard one negative comment, and that was from an eminent writer and speaker who thought Vance said the right thing, but delivered it too bumptiously. (My response: “There is no way to say what needs saying to these European elites without coming upside their collective head with it.”) Everybody else — and I mean everybody — was over the moon with joy. The basic attitude from the Brits and the Europeans I talked to last night was, “Finally, someone is going to shake our ruling class out of its complacency.”

I cannot say it often enough or strongly enough: if you are depending on the mainstream media to give you an accurate impression of how the speech was received in Europe, you are deceived. They will tell you how European officials, policymakers, and talking heads received it — but that’s not at all the same thing as how ordinary Europeans do. Matt Taibbi takes apart the way American elite journalists, and some UK and European ones, characterized the speech. The NYT, in particular, glommed on to the “Vance normalizes Nazis” line. Here’s Taibbi:

  

I watched the damn thing. You can too, right here — and I hope you will, so you can see and hear for yourself the difference between an event that happened, and the same event as filtered through the mainstream media.

More Taibbi:

Others, like Bertelsmann foundation analyst Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, suggested Vance’s speech was not correct. “The first third of the speech was littered with conspiracy theories, misinformation, and the demand that these misrepresentations be taken seriously,” she said. You’re going to hear a lot about what the BBC called “dangerous” misinformation, specifically Vance’s suggestion that prayer in one’s own home could violate U.K. “buffer zone” laws about abortion clinics. The Beeb claims it would only impact things that that “could be seen or heard from the zone, such as displaying posters or banners, or protesting in their garden.”

I have many thoughts about Vance’s speech, which I think will be remembered as a moment of grave importance, but the most crucial immediate observation is how it was received by other formerly influential American figures. It’s never been a secret that postwar Europe has a different attitude toward speech and even democracy. But we’ve never seen institutional America so open in its backing of overruled elections, censorship, and the use of intelligence mechanisms to cut off voter decisions. It’s all out in the open now.

These people have no credibility anymore. I don’t think they are intentionally lying at all. This is truly how they see the world. This is why Europe is in the awful state that it is: its ruling class, in country after country, and across borders, lives in a bubble.

I don’t remember if I posted this the other day, but an English expatriate friend and reader of this newsletter sent me this short-ish commentary by an American man, summing up where Britain went wrong. The Englishman said this is the best single explanation for the crisis that has gripped his homeland:

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In it are strong echoes of what the woke in power have done to America too, though the sickness is much further advanced in Britain. Similar stories can be told about the major countries of western Europe. The ARC conference is designed to come up with a better story, a life-giving story, to stimulate cultural and social recovery.

Listening to J.D.’s landmark speech, and assessing the hysterical negative reaction to it from the European leadership, I thought of that famous line by historian Arnold J. Toynbee: “Civilizations die by suicide, not from murder.”

This is what the prophetic French writer Renaud Camus has been trying for many years to say to his fellow Frenchmen. For his trouble, he has been roundly vilified by the ruling class, including the media. But he was right, and he is right, about the Great Replacement. It’s not even mostly about ethnic replacement. It’s about generations of postwar European political and cultural leadership wishing to erase all cultural particulars and cultural memory from the European mind, to replace it with a placeless, progressive, Houellebecqian pudding.

The distinguished German commentator Wolfgang Munchau is one of the few figures of his stature to understand what has happened. Excerpts:

Vance then repeated a threat he’d first made shortly after the American election — that any attempt to censor US-owned social media companies by the EU would lead to US disengagement from Nato. “I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people,” he said. “Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now… is one of our own making. If you are running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”

Europe was at a loss to respond. Its centrist governments are running out of ideas in the fight against the Right. They fear that uncontrolled free speech could turn into an existential threat to European integration. After all, the EU was never a bottom-up democratic project, and support for the euro was feeble from the outset. There was, for example, no majority in Germany in favour of the euro. This lack of popular support is what paralysed the EU during the sovereign debt crisis.

What sustains the EU is not a democratic mandate, but the mainstream media, academia, and think tanks — a blob of organisations that together exert indirect control over what gets discussed and published. You will not find editorials in German newspapers in support of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite the fact that this party now accounts for approximately 20% of popular support. The new Right-wing parties communicate through social media instead. This is why the EU is so focused on content moderation for social media, and it’s why we have seen a recent explosion of fact-checking units in broadcasting companies and media organisations.

But the Left is rarely subjected to such fact-checking. Quite a few members of the blob have abandoned X for the alternative Bluesky, which resembles the old Twitter. There, on a much smaller scale, the old echo chamber still works. There, users describe the Trump presidency as a coup d’état, and still think that Ukraine is winning the war. No one interrupts them — or checks any facts.

More:

The BBC described Vance’s speech “extraordinarily poorly judged”. And yet the intelligent way for the Brits and Europeans to respond to America’s new regime would be to stop hyperventilating and take matters into their own hands. …

There’s no denying that Trump is throwing Europe under the bus. Angela Merkel predicted this in 2018, when she gave an agitated speech in a Bavarian beer tent shortly after meeting with Trump. She said then that Europe needed to become less dependent on the US. But then she did nothing, as did everyone else. And so here we are, with EU leaders meeting to sit around yet another table. They are the Norma Desmonds of geopolitics — convinced that they are still the stars.

As I wrote the other day — and as many European fans of the Vance speech with whom I spoke last night agreed — the philosophical core of the vice president’s address was in these lines:

I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

That’s exactly right! Europe doesn’t know what it’s for, only what it’s against (namely, everything that came before, everything that is not progressive, that is not an expression of managerial liberalism. Along those lines, here is an interesting Free Press essay from the retired CIA analyst Martin Gurri, writing about masculinity. Excerpts:

Since the species climbed down from the trees, ideals of manhood, always and everywhere, have been bound up with physicality and struggle. Each man has been expected to be a protector—or provider, which amounts to the same thing. He is the defender of all that is sacred and good, the bearer of virile virtues—courage, strength, loyalty. Thus, the soldier protects the nation. The husband protects the wife; the father, his children.

In the end, physicality prevails.

In modern times, the question arises: What are men supposed to protect against? …

Sure — but another way of saying this is: what are men supposed to protect?

Gurri meditates on unfiltered masculinity, and the figure of the Hero. The Hero is messy. It is he who confronts the “Man-Beast,” the nihilistic and violent figure that is masculine energy unbound. Gurri:

The hero slays the monster and so restores the moral balance of society, but he is rarely a bringer of harmony or domesticity. He smolders with an excess of the manly virtues, which he must constantly put to the test. He runs into the burning tower, not away from it. He leaps on the live grenade rather than seek cover. In him, the urge to protect is an almost pathological condition, leading in some circumstances to terrible crimes. Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter so that the Achaean fleet could sail to conquer Troy. Romulus murdered his brother to ensure the foundation of Rome. James Bond leaves behind him a trail of corpses and forsaken beauties.

But the hero is indispensable. Let there be no question about that. A society deprived of heroic energy would lack the power of redemption and would soon be overrun by the Man-Beast. But the hero, by definition, is an exceptional man. He is the refutation of the democratic principle. He might be a model of certain virtues for all men to aspire to, but he is also a warning: Even the instinct to protect, central to manhood, can be deformed by a lack of conviviality.

The Hero became domesticated into the Gentleman — and this, says Gurri, was a good thing. More:

His ideal of manhood is to reduce, by personal effort, the wretchedness and cruelty of life—to push against the weight and wildness of nature until decency appears to be the default condition of the human race. He alone, the silent protector of civilization, stands between the Man-Beast and his prey.

Yet since mid-century, the Gentleman has become an object of contempt. Our culture has lost sight of the important distinction between the Gentleman — the civilized form of the Hero — and the Man-Beast. The Gentleman stood condemned as an archaism. Daniel Penny was a New York hero and gentleman who protected fellow subway riders by restraining a violent and insane black predator. Yet the state put him on trial, and the progressive cretins of Black Lives Matter turned him into a villain.

So, the Gentleman was sent away. Then, says Gurri:

In his place stood a slippery character, the technocrat, morally and sexually neutral but ready to rebuild society on a new basis. Instead of personal decency, we would get state-ordained welfare.

If you won’t have the Gentleman, you will get eventually the Man-Beast. And in that case, only the Hero will save you.

The core problem of contemporary Europe is that it rejected both the Hero and the Gentleman, and has accommodated itself to the welfare state and managed therapeutic liberalism. Result: No young man in Europe will fight for Brussels, or for a social and political order that believes in nothing higher than shopping, screwing, and DEI. It was possible for Europeans to live in denial about this as long as the United States military was willing to play the Heroes manning the front lines against the Soviet Man-Beast. In its long descent into decadence, Europe became entirely feminized, in the sense of preferring safety, care, and its own idea of compassion over all.

And it won’t even stand up for itself against the Man-Beasts it has invited to live within its borders: Muslim male fanatics who stab people in the UK and across Europe almost every day now. Its decadent leaders — Viktor Orban an honorable exception — won’t lift a finger to stop the madness (this happened over the weekend in Austria). When figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy try to do something meaningful, the ideologically charged courts stop them on “human rights” grounds. Pope Francis is eager for Europe to roll over and die for the sake of “compassion”. Doing something meaningful about this crisis would force Europe to reckon with the bankruptcy of its own progressivism. One gets the idea that most of its leadership class would sooner die than abandon its ideology and fight for the survival of its own civilization. The chairman of the Munich Security Conference cried like a baby over Vance’s speech!

C.S. Lewis saw it all coming many decades ago. In The Abolition Of Man, he wrote:

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Europe is now a Man Without A Chest. And the new government in Washington is telling the Continent: Man up, become the heroes of your own story. J.D. Vance’s speech was the rhetorical equivalent of the D-Day landing. Now European patriots are preparing to fight to save their civilization from the enemies within.

David Starkey, Irrepressible As Ever

  
David Starkey (photo quote Jeff Gilbert/Telegraph)

Here’s how Tim Stanley’s wonderful Telegraph interview with the irascible historian David Starkey begins:

“I am an impertinent old bugger,” says Dr David Starkey, “and I refuse to be shut up.” I meet him at his London flat, sit and brace myself for a delicious, dizzying chat with the historian once dubbed “the rudest man in Britain”. He speaks energetically and clearly, as if to the back of the class, in that “you need to know this” style he perfected on television.

The monarchy is “fading into irrelevance”, he discloses. The King is woke. William is “hopeless... Nature intended him to be the manager of a second-division football team.” (And he’d be “rather stretched at that”.) Much blame lies with the late Queen, who was “obsessed about the Commonwealth” and spent too much time “sucking up to African dictators”.

Between the gasps and laughs of every Starkey lecture shines a pertinent point. Britain was ruined by its elite; he thinks we need to undergo a “cultural restoration”. The theme has resonance in his own life.

“Impertinent old bugger” is funny because Starkey is gay. He is also infamously politically incorrect, which got him massively cancelled a few years ago for an unwise racist remark.

That happened in June 2020, during a silly podcast interview with pundit Darren Grimes; Starkey was asked about slavery and proactively – lazily – said that had it been as genocidal as some claim, the world wouldn’t be full of “so many damn blacks”. The slip was condemned. Organisations he’d worked with for years telephoned to give him five minutes to resign or be pushed.

He lost friends, his fellowship, his publisher, various honours and positions, and his literary agent, who, as fate would have it, was named Fairweather. The police opened an investigation, which they later dropped (Priti Patel, the home secretary at the time, advised the police to respect “freedom of speech”). It was “profoundly hurtful”, yet “mixed with the most wonderful farce. Three guesses what was happening on that day? I was having a new fridge-freezer delivered. My universe collapsed and I was surrounded by decaying piles of frozen food.”

He’d said such things before, so why on this occasion did he get the full Gulag treatment? He offers historical context: “This is 2020, the year of Covid-19, Black Lives Matter... George Floyd... The world went mad, and I was a very peripheral victim of it.” I sense we’re building up to the big question of what’s going wrong with Britain and how he proposes to fix it.

Well, it was an obnoxious remark — but then, as Stanley avers, this is how Starkey always rolled. His acidic judgments are part of what made him such a provocative and popular broadcaster and public intellectual. As I see it, this is why it was so great to see J.D. Vance push back hard at Rep. Ro Khanna a couple of weeks ago, when Khanna demanded that Vance seek the firing of a young DOGE Wunderkind who was discovered in the past to have made a racist remark about Indians (Vance’s wife Usha is Indian, and, of course, their children are half-Indian.) Vance obviously didn’t like what the kid had tweeted, but he said we have to quit driving otherwise talented people out of public life for stupid and ugly things they might have said.

What Vance did not say, but could have, is that for many years now the Left has not only tolerated figures from its side who say extremely bigoted things, but even valorized that bigotry. Seems to me Vance was simply arguing for common-sense tolerance: yes, when someone says something ugly, call them out on it — but don’t demonize them and make them unemployable. If we do that, we will deprive ourselves of the wisdom and talent of worthy people who are, like everybody else, flawed, but still worth having around.

Letter From A Fed-Up Soldier

A reader who is active duty in the US military, and who comes from a “very blue milieu,” socially and intellectually, writes to say that watching what wokeness has done to so many institutions of American life — including the armed forces — has driven him rightward.

“I am just at the absolute end of my patience with what the left has done to once-vital institutions that may or may not retain the capacity to sustain and transmit civilization,” he e-mails me. “I'm still center-left on some social issues, but my 'lived experience' has caused the scales to fall from my eyes regarding the postmodern, identitarian left.”

He gave me permission to share this with you, on the condition that I obscure certain identifying details, which I have done (I shared this with him first, to make sure it passed muster for protecting his identity. I know his name.)

Take the matter of women in combat.

Much of what I have to say here will be pretty familiar. A lot of it has simply been unsayable for the past decade or so, but that does not change the fact that it is true. Full gender integration only works if you accept the claim that men and women are completely interchangeable and that there are no fundamental differences between the sexes.

N. says that most people outside the military have no real idea of how physically intense the infantry is. The women he observes in his military life “get injured at much higher rates and are in an impossible situation because they do not want to draw attention to themselves but simply can't keep up.”

He goes on: “The cost of gender integration is not worth any benefit, and any benefit is entirely ideological.”

N. mentions that men in the military skew more conservative, the opposite is true for women, especially female officers. He mentions one unit that he knows in which a female was given the top NCO position. This person leapfrogged over more competent males, and has proven to be grossly incompetent. Her continued presence — she apparently is not being allowed to fail — is causing tremendous moral problems. “It’s terrible for morale and, frankly, the legitimacy of the command's authority,” N. says.

More broadly, says N., every time women are moved into combat infantry, “the level of drama and interpersonal conflict ramps up and creates distractions.” It is especially difficult for infantry members who are mothers.

Mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. When we are on deployment and doing lengthy field exercises, family and relationship issues back home are the single greatest drag on morale and focus. It's hard enough for guys, but it comes close to impossible for mothers with young children.

N. says you will hear from progressives that this is just the natural extension of the principle that led to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the subsequent normalization of gays in the military. N. believes that was the right thing to do.

There were all kinds of reasons why that was a bad law in terms of defense policy, but the biggest issue was that it didn't reflect reality. There were plenty of gay people already serving throughout the military without issue. To have the threat of career destruction hanging over them at all times wasn't fair or helpful. Repealing DADT did not force any kind of radical social change or reordering of things. It was a non-issue. If people have a problem with their gay colleagues, they usually just see past it and the whole thing is just a big whatever.

As N. sees it, the US armed forces have traditionally been a “true meritocracy.” In his part of the infantry, a large number of soldiers, even in leadership positions, are non-white — and are entirely deserving of their positions, because they are good at what they do. But now that the social engineers have gained control of the Pentagon, that’s all changed.

Mandating dishonesty is anathema to our culture. That was the problem with DADT. This brave new world of co-ed infantry units mandates dishonesty because we can't say what is obviously true: it doesn't work. The military has funded quite a bit of research into this, and every time the data come back to show that all-male infantry units are more effective and score better on every metric. For female inclusion, the best model would be all-female units (as the Israelis have in the IDF). Democrats will absolutely not allow that to happen. I have some thoughts on why that might be. It has something to do with the idea that anything with men alone is automatically suspect and by definition problematic. Women must be present to monitor, police, and change male culture.

This might be the most obvious, unsayable thing. Young men need challenging male environments to form them as strong, healthy men. There need to be spheres of life where women drill instructors are not yelling at young men to shape and form them. A great many young men join the Marine Corps, for example, specifically to find the one place left in society where they won't have to deal with that stuff. And there is nothing in the world wrong with that. How more obvious could it be that what American society is offering young men today simply is not working? The young men most at risk of deaths of despair need the Marine Corps a whole lot more than they need more sensitivity training or hectoring about toxic masculinity. The beauty of it is that this approach perfectly compliments war-fighting effectiveness. There's a good reason things have always been done this way and no good reason to radically change course.

What Is Wheaton College For?

Some of you will have heard of the controversy raging around Wheaton College, long the standard-bearer of Evangelical higher education. Recently the college issued an anodyne congratulation to Russ Vought, a Wheaton alumnus who just rose to a prominent position in the Trump administration. When progressive alumni screamed bloody murder, the school backed down. Daniel Davis writes in First Things:

The message to alumni in conservative politics could not have been more alienating. It also backfired. Within hours, U.S. senators and even Elon Musk were weighing in on X, expressing dismay at the school’s moral cowardice. Indeed, Wheaton’s actions revealed a moral sickness at the heart of how it makes decisions. Faced with a mob, Wheaton showed that it will quickly bow the knee and take the path of least resistance. As Mollie Hemingway aptly put it: If Wheaton folds this easily, “you have to wonder how well they’re preparing students for a hostile world that hates the Gospel.”

This lack of convictional courage explains much of Wheaton’s drift in recent years. While it is true that many faithful professors remain on campus—some of whom I cherish to this day—Wheaton as an institution has become unmoored. Its drift is twofold: The administration allows itself to be emotionally blackmailed by activists, and it refuses to explicitly orient the college against the most toxic ideologies of our time.

Davis goes on to cite several examples, concluding:

There’s much more. Yet beneath all of these trends is a sad undercurrent, described to me by one local pastor in the following way: Wheaton is not articulating the gospel. Instead, it is assuming the gospel, which always precedes losing the gospel.

When Billy Graham spoke at the dedication of Wheaton’s Billy Graham Center in 1980, he charged its leaders to maintain a zeal for the biblical gospel and a commitment to world evangelism. “If the leaders of a future generation take any other path,” he warned, “may they be, as the Apostle Paul said to the Galatians, accursed, because Ichabod [“without glory”] will be written on this place.”

Has the glory of God departed from Wheaton? Through weak and docile leadership, regrettably, it has.

Well, a group of alumni have launched For Wheaton, an initiative calling on the trustees of their alma mater to repent.

God has poured out tremendous blessings on many schools that have chosen a path of bold, broad-shouldered Christianity in this moment, regardless of where it places them on a political spectrum. In our time, the Gospel may be viewed as “conservative"; in other times, it has been “progressive.” So be it. Our world’s categories should be irrelevant to how we carry out our mission. Christian students and parents want a college that will shape them into the kinds of countercultural people who will walk boldly into the wind in the strength of Christ, wherever He leads them.

We, the undersigned, compelled by our love for Wheaton College, humbly ask that you take immediate action regarding (1) the state of the college, including the need for new leadership, (2) putting an end to the current DEI regime, (3) conducting an audit of every single faculty and staff member’s commitment to the Statement of Faith and Community Covenant, (4) evaluating the process for adjudicating claims of racism, sexism, and other forms of harassment, (5) affirming free speech and the importance of a vibrant competition of ideas on campus, and whatever else is necessary to ensure the drift toward worldliness is ended and replaced with a vigorous, fearless, joyful pursuit of the Lord.

Until such a time as significant changes have been made on these priorities, we are committed to one or more of the following actions:

  • Ceasing all financial support to the college.

  • Declining to recommend Wheaton to prospective students and their parents.

  • Sharing examples of institutional drift with friends, fellow parishioners, online audiences, or the press to ensure students and parents who are considering Wheaton are aware of the disconnect between what is advertised in the Statement of Faith and what is really happening on campus.

If you are a Wheaton alumnus or parent of a Wheaton student, I encourage you to read and sign the open letter.

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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

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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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