"See that you mend your ways, boy, or I will come back some dark night and cut off your head and let the crows peck your eyeballs out.” - Marshall Rooster Cogburn, in True Grit
Is it Dusk, or Dawn that we behold? Or both at once...?
We spent quite some while, walking through the Lord of the Rings, extracting what we could from the "old wineskins", learning how to make new ones, and enjoying the old vintage. Yet, as with all things in manifestation, by the time we "know" them, Change has moved on. In ordinary times, this happens too slowly to notice, and there is more continuity. In some times (our own), the progress is so swift as to give the opposite illusion - that there is nothing to be learned from the past.
Since I can't speak for you, dear reader, what have I learned? The Scouring of the Shire is coming up, but I'm saving that for its synchronicity with actual historical events. What can I recap, from all that has passed?
We have seen, beyond all doubt, that Evil does not Change, except to give us "brand new ways to love the same old BS". From age to age, it is hubris, blindness, and grasping that leads man's systems into wrack and ruin. It rebuilds Towers of Babel and Orthancs and Baradurs and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, yay, the sapphire towers of old Atlantis, only to behold them sink beneath the waves and the sands and the age-old stars. When this happens, God has "cast fire upon the earth, and behold, is it not kindled already?" The "stars in heaven" fall, and Judgement is executed.
Every judgement of God involves Mercy and the birth of the New - the birth of the chosen child. This was as true in Exodus, as it was in Bethlehem. However, the psychological component (the destruction of the old - in the extreme form, the death of the individual's body) is powerful and dramatic. It can take some pluck and skill to surf the chaos, and ride the wave into the shore.
In our day, we are watching (in real, slow motion "actual time") the death of the Kingdom of Man. What "system" is not on the chopping block, or hasn't been piled onto the bonfire? Industrial civilization, the age of Economic Expansion (since at least the end of the Ice Age), the Piscean religious outlook of Absolute Good versus Absolute Evil, the dominance of the Northern Hemisphere since Sumeria...the list grows longer every day.
The word Polycrisis seems to capture the essence nicely.
How can this best be said?
The position at The Squire is that "there was never a time when there was not Christianity - what we call that, in our day, was the form chosen for our time". During the Semitic period of the Church, before Christ, there were the faithful temple theologians. Paganism itself, as Chesterton pointed out in Everlasting Man, was a kind of pre-Evangelium and preparatio, for the coming of Christ. Scripture itself says, these things were not "done in a corner", for in the "fullness of time", Christ entered the world. Before that, was the revelation of Enoch. There was never a time, when the witness of God was not in the world.
Chesterton, like Christ, was fond of Roman soldiers...
So how should we then live? How can we tap into the hope, and joy, and peace of God, during "Dark Times", as these undoubtedly seem to be?
Schaeffer had premonitions, within the Church, of the changes that were coming...
Ironically, the first step is realistically acknowledging the situation the World is in. People resist this, but the way out, is further in. They resist it, because (so many times), the people who go "further in", do it in the strength of Man. They look at one little thing, and despair. Or build a contraption to escape it. But for those who begin to see the illusory nature of the Kingdoms of Man, and to see it clearly without despair or hatred, something else emerges out of the fog - something which pre-exists, deeply interfused, and which "cannot be stormed". They begin to see the outlines and the colors, of the Kingdom of God.
One has to see the "wounds of Man", first:
"Therefore in so far as the reason is deprived of its order to the true, there is the wound of ignorance; in so far as the will is deprived of its order of good, there is the wound of malice; in so far as the irascible is deprived of its order to the arduous, there is the wound of weakness; and in so far as the concupiscible is deprived of its order to the delectable, moderated by reason, there is the wound of concupiscence." (Thomas Aquinas, quoting Venerable Bede)
This is from a vantage point of Creation, Reality, Being, and (in a word), Love. Just as one can see Nature (still existent, ever stronger) behind the dark Satanic mills of our sprawling industrial wastelands, one can see God and His Love, ever greater, behind the Sin and the Wounds of Man.
The best things never change...
The Word is seen behind and through the World. The World's nothing, which was summoned out of by God, is a dark meontic abyss of Freedom. This meontic abyss is not pre-existent (alongside of God - that would be Manicheanism), but is created out of God Himself, in a self-wounding of Love. Hence, The Lamb That Was Slain Before the Foundations of the World. (Please consult Boris Mouravieff's Gnosis, for the esoteric Orthodox tradition on this). Christian Nihilism sees the World as a "Nothing" in order to behold the Something, which seen, one need "see" no more. This, by the way, was the Gospel of Dostoevsky!
I have someone I have corresponded with, who claims that Christians really are Nihilists, just like Nietzsche. To him, if he is reading this, I would say -
Our rulers are not so much evil, as they are small childish, petulant, spoiled children, who know nothing of these things, and whose every action is the opposite in some way, of what they should, and could be doing. Our rulers are brats.
This is the predicament of our era: Our Elite are the opposite of an Elite. Hence, the grave state of the World, and her pitiable challenges. Berating them, hating them, critiquing them - it is like yelling at the mists, or fighting the shadows. They are totally and literally irrelevant. Their every action and tiniest thought guarantees ever swifter downfall. There will be a changing of the Guard. The fastest way to accomplish that, is to ignore them completely, and begin building the world that will take the place of the one that is "passing away". Dear Reader, does this sound too hard, or too crazy? Where lies your calling, your vocation, in all of this? For we all have some real part to play. Others have said it well, even better-
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Here is a very normal person, noting that Repentance begins with Re-thinking. She puts it in homely, hobbit language. We need not "save the world", to save the world. We need only re-think what we think we know, at a deeper level:
“A higher grammar must reinstate the reality of speaking and listening people in the place of the nightmare of a speechless thinker who computes a speechless universe.” Modern philosophy has often slighted the factor of time—an omission which has had enormous and fatal consequences for our economic thinking. Time has been absorbed into space, and as “consumers” we give no thought for future generations nor of the time it took to form the fossil fuels we so insouciantly extract from the earth. Our technological devices have speeded up time to an unimaginable degree. It may be that the recovery or reclamation of time is has become our spiritual need of first order. By becoming aware of our speaking—of the grammatical “tenses”—we can begin to reclaim this essential part of our humanity. We cannot always afford to await the leisured overview of events, as M.E. Bradford once reminded us. Sometimes we have to act. And it is this moral duty, this leap from perception to action, which Rosenstock’s Cross of Reality highlights so clearly. As he writes in his book In the Cross of Reality: “Reality yields only to him who enters real time and real space, and makes his own participation an express presupposition of his thinking.” Link
Rethinking, at its deepest, is Re-imaging. Re-imagining. Re-conceiving. Man misconceived the world in the Fall, & must learn to recreate it, to cooperate with the Master Gardener. You can trust someone who came and crucified Himself, to open the path.
The path is open. Here is someone discussing his work on fixing his own microcosm. He may or may not be Christian - the Reality we both inhabit, is the same: One.
John Michael wrote, “You’re starting to find your way into an aspect of meditation that most teachers don’t talk about very often– its capacity to bring into consciousness self-defeating patterns that have been imprinted in you by your family and your society. (We don’t talk about it much because the people who make it their business to push such patterns on you get very hostile about having them removed.)”
The folks who push energy-draining patterns on us are so disinclined to their ever getting recognized and removed that they imprint them with whole suites of self-defending sub-patterns to keep them persistently locked in place. Not only do those folks themselves become decidedly testy out in the physical world once they realize that we are succeeding in escaping from their controlling grip, their parasitical patterns in the metaphysical world inside of us also become peevishly testy and belligerent. Apparently, hell hath no fury like a self-defeating pattern scorned. Currently, I’m finding it highly motivating to study the ever-changing effects as the most deeply embedded energy parasites within me begin learning from each new clearing technique that I take up. They are in no way interested in my shaking free of them, leaving them to then fend for themselves or starve to death. Fortunately, they grew quite lazy and complacent from so many decades of always having a free meal available on tap. The really deep, old ones forgot how to put up a decent fight for their place at the feeding trough, as they once knew how to do back when I was actively resisting their initial unwelcome imprint. Of course, I too became complacent after so many decades shambling around, weighted down by such a bloated ecosystem of energetic parasites. Discovering how easily magic could cause changes in consciousness simply by shedding off those energetic buggers was utterly thrilling. Discovering that they have their own intelligence and willpower, however slow it may have been to adapt to my newfound willpower, was then sobering. Now that each side has thrown its gauntlet into the other side’s ring, the game has become much more engaging and mystical. My goal is to stay more adaptive than the horde of parasites depleting me, so that I can continue methodically clearing them from me. Their goal is understandably to discover how to undermine any techniques I might use to do that by paying close attention each time that I do successfully manage to shed one of them. Playing opposite a worthy adversary will always be a blessing to be treasured, as boredom is then not in the cards! If I came here simply to learn, I certainly couldn’t have imagined a better teacher than all of my beloved and despised, cherished and resented, clung-to and discarded baggage. Coming into incarnation whole, only to then shatter apart so that growth can take place, as we slowly learn to put our broken selves back together again, certainly sounds like a microcosm of what the life force did when it created this gratuitously unnecessary game in the first place. Or was it actually unnecessary? Perhaps the only way to ever truly learn that our adversaries are our blessings, our failures are our teachers, and our disintegration is our healing involves breaking ourselves off from our wholeness, shattering apart into isolation from ourselves. Won’t the life force be so proud of us when we eventually discover how to put ourselves back together again, one scorned part at a time? Thank goodness she’s given us all of eternity to do it in!
We have all of Eternity to work on our self, but it's never too late, or too early to start, or continue, or finish. The Logos, the risen Christ, is calling us on.
Yet if you're waiting for the World to point you in the right direction, you are taking the traumatic, slow boat, and can expect to suffer even more than necessary. For those in charge of the burning dumpster fire that is our Modern World, will not help you with this Knowledge of God and the Self (H/T Keenan Williams) that lies at the heart of Christian repentance, Christian tradition, and Reality. You will not get help from the Dear Leaders. The Government is incapable of addressing the Polycrises impacting our World. They are out, busy tipping cows, and hunting snipe. And they "control Everything". Fine. Let them. They are clothed in rags, grasping at straws in desperation.
All of our heroes are going to be fine - except for the young white male who’s teeth were yanked out by the contemptible Egyptian-American and Bangladeshi-American script writers. You are welcome to take that as an emasculating metaphor about what the left wants to do to all young white men - de-fang that White Lion. Hollywood threw out 2500 years of accumulated Western mythology; starting at Year Zero, they have tried to reconstruct reality and it is all garbage. Leave the world behind, indeed. I’m certain Rumann Alam did not mean to be ironic. He certainly did not intend to write a farce. Probably not even understanding it, he projected his fear of white supremacists onto white tail deer. It is hard to be dumber than that. This is the sort of film for people who can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman, who think renewable energy is green and who think the climate change movement is about the health of the earth. This film is for people who aren’t able to see the fascist phantoms they freak themselves out about are actually themselves. This film is for people who are afraid of their own shadow. Link
What hope is there from this quarter? From the so-called Elite? They are filled with despising and loathing for the very things they should gratefully admire! There is no help or "Hope and Change" from the likes of them. They have only succeeded, through deep and cunning repression of their shadow, in summoning the very thing they hate. One can see that they are turning to Dust in the Wind.
There's a Crown lying in the Gutter...it will not stay there much longer.
But we can leave the troubles of the old World behind, in order to be of real use to it, later on, in the re-building. In order to do that, we need to take a serious look, deep within our own corners of the world, and unflinchingly penetrate to the darkest recesses of our own dark hearts, to see the dividing line between Good and Evil, there, and what falls in between, the Shadow.
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
TS Eliot, The Hollow Men (H/T, Joel Dietz)
David Bentley Hart does a fine job of theologically explicating where "we find ourself":
But we—while not ignoring how appalling such a condition is—should yet rejoice that modernity offers no religious comforts to those who would seek them. In this time of waiting, in this age marked only by the absence of faith in Christ, it is well that the modern soul should lack repose, piety, peace, or nobility, and should find the world outside the Church barren of spiritual rapture or mystery, and should discover no beautiful or terrible or merciful gods upon which to cast itself. With Christ came judgment into the world, a light of discrimination from which there is neither retreat nor sanctuary. And this means that, as a quite concrete historical condition, the only choice that remains for the children of post-Christian culture is not whom to serve, but whether to serve Him whom Christ has revealed or to serve nothing—the nothing. No third way lies open for us now, because—as all of us now know, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not—all things have been made subject to Him, all the thrones and dominions of the high places have been put beneath His feet, until the very end of the world, and—simply said—there is no other god.
The kataphatic presence and saturated "meaning" of the World (God in disguise) is stretched, on the cross, between the two apophatic poles of transcendent God and immanent Self. It was Christ that unified them, & so redeemed the blood price of "Middle Earth".
"The Kingdoms of this World are become the Kingdoms of the Christ."
Switch this around, and place apophaticism in the Middle, between the two kataphatic certainties of Immanuel Kant's "God, freedom/immortality of the soul" (this is Christian existentialism, what I have called, "Christian nihilism"). Now you have,
"My Kingdom is not of this world."
It is the God-man, or man-God, Christ, Who affirmed the fullness of the mysteries, and died on the cross to preserve and heal the wounds of Man. Only in Christianity does one find the fullness of the double denial, and double affirmation upheld. I will end with some thoughts from a recently deceased modern day prophet, whom the Christian World ignored in his time, but would do wise to re-consider, in the times ahead, for Schmemann saw quite well that Judgement begins in the House of God. But this isn't something to be avoided - it can be self-instituted and cooperated! For, it is a sign of God's Love towards His people, in calling us closer and closer to Himself, Who is the Fountain of all Being. In the end, only God is real. The mystery of the Christian Religion is, that it teaches that the "Two (Man and God) can become one flesh", though without confusion or mingling, without separation or division. There can be only One Being, though the Mystery of the Two, and the Mystery of the Three, are included. So it is, that Christianity was the fullest expression of that growing Mountain of Truth, the Kingdom of God. God's Judgement (Mountain) is also the Kingdom (Love). If one can love more strongly, one can see farther, and do more.
Here are his thoughts, which are cheerful and cynical all at once...in the times of head, his spirit is the spirit we will need, to work in the World, but not be of the World.
“Religion needs a temple, not the Church. The temple’s origin is religion. Thus in the Gospel: ‘I will destroy this temple. . . .’ The Church has a Christian origin. However, our Church has identified itself long ago with the ‘temple,’ has dissolved itself in the temple, and (this means) has returned to the pagan temple as its religious sanction. Protestantism was an attempt to save the faith, to purify it from its religious reduction. But the Protestants have paid a heavy price for denying eschatology and replacing it with personal individual salvation; and therefore, essentially, denying the Church. The greatest anachronism, on a natural level, was to be found in the Catholic Church. Catholicism was possible only while one was able to deny and limit the freedom of the person, the basic dogma of the new times. While trying to change its course, to merge with freedom, Catholicism simply collapsed, and I do not see how its revival could be possible (unless fascism can get hold of the human race and deny the explosive synthesis of freedom and the person).
“In spite of a friendly atmosphere, I strongly felt my Orthodox alienation from all the debates, from their very spirit. Orthodoxy is often imprisoned by evil and sin. The Christian West is imprisoned by heresies—not one of them, in the long run, goes unpunished.”
“I firmly believe,” he writes, “that Orthodoxy is Truth and Salvation and I shudder when I see what is being offered under the guise of Orthodoxy, what people seem to like in it, what they live for, what the most orthodox, the best people among them, see in Orthodoxy.”
“Since the Orthodox world was and is inevitably and even radically changing, we have to recognize, as the first symptom of the crisis, a deep schizophrenia which has slowly penetrated the Orthodox mentality: life in an unreal, nonexisting world, firmly affirmed as real and existing. Orthodox consciousness did not notice the fall of Byzantium, Peter the Great’s reforms, the Revolution; it did not notice the revolution of the mind, of science, of lifestyles, forms of life. . . . In brief, it did not notice history.”
“Orthodoxy refuses to recognize the fact of the collapse and the breakup of the Orthodox world; it has decided to live in its illusion; it has turned the Church into that illusion (yesterday we heard again and again about the ‘Patriarch of the great city of Antioch and of all the East’); it made the Church into a nonexistent world. I feel more and more strongly that I must devote the rest of my life to trying to dispel this illusion.”
“To change the atmosphere of Orthodoxy, one has to learn to look at oneself in perspective, to repent, and if needed, to accept change, conversion. In historic Orthodoxy, there is a total absence of criteria for self-criticism. Orthodoxy defined itself: against heresies, against the West, the East, the Turks, etc. Orthodoxy became woven with complexes of self-affirmation, an exaggerated triumphalism: To acknowledge errors is to destroy the foundations of true faith.” On December 23, 1976, after a series of difficult meetings at the seminary, Fr. Alexander writes: “My point of view is that a good half of our students are dangerous for the Church—their psychology, their tendencies, a sort of constant obsession with something. Orthodoxy takes on a different, ugly aspect, something important is missing, and the Orthodoxy that these students consciously or subconsciously favor is distorted, narrow, emotional—in the end, pseudo-Orthodoxy. Not only at the seminary, but everywhere, I acutely sense the spread of a strange Orthodoxy.”
What used to be an organic, natural style became stylization, spiritually weak, harmful. The main problem of Orthodoxy is the constraint due to style, and its inability to revise it; a prevalent absence of self-criticism, of checking the tradition of the elders by Tradition, by love of Truth. A growing idolatry.”