Diego Velázquez
Civilisation degrades and the environment with it. The power of technology has served to make the environment more than ever a mirror for the fallen content of our souls.
The World Soul becomes buried in materialistic orientations or in spiritualities that have profound incomprehension as to the Unfathomably Sublime Mystery of Calvary.
What is to be done?
The answer in the silence of my heart over years of searching struggle, has pointed ever more inescapably to the consistent, full-blooded defense, conservation and clarification of the Catholic tradition.
Consistency: it is something I want to explore here soon.
But my heart needs to probe still more deeply, before I know how to properly resume this weblog.
In the meantime, I am grateful for the exchanges happening in the comments sections. There is also more going up at the reviews and Kim’s weblog and a long, very personal piece from myself should soon be going up in the articles section.
4 Comments
Hi Roger –
saw your comment on my blog – alas, I never got around to reading the Meditation last summer but it has made it onto my list again for this summer. I would be very much interested in hearing more about the ways in which the book influenced your thinking.
Thank you for your kind interest, John. I appreciate it. I won’t say much more about the Meditations here, though. As I am in labour … i.e. an intense, crushing process of giving birth to a long article to appear here which should indicate much more concerning that which you raise.
Many of us look at the crisis of our culture and ask “What is to be done?” It is clear we need the moral oxygen (as you put it) of Christianity but how to be effective in our culture without having an entirely reactionary posture I wonder…
Edwin, it is always good to hear such questions, indicating real care for the world and non-sleep or complacency towards it!
The answers of course are vast, but the most creative ones stem from the deepest depths of prayer and contemplation we can find.
And I guess, being willing to live and suffer with these questions, as much as one can. I think if one does this, one also finds oneself in some kind of community … a community that involves listening to, reading, studying … those living and suffering with the same kinds of questions.
After my own search in these directions, I find my own community that I am listening to, reading, studying, includes at least two Giants of the Spirit, moral geniuses, who are living and suffering with these questions far more than I could ever know how to. And the views of these moral geniuses born out of such living and suffering do seem very “reactionary” to so many people. Maybe not “entirely reactionary” though.
The two giants I have in mind here are Valentin Tomberg and the Holy Father. I will just note that I have been studying the latter’s magnificent social encyclical just released, Caritas in Veritate, which can be found here. I am struck by both the burning heart of the Holy Father and the parallels in his social thinking to the Jurisprudence studies of Valentin Tomberg.
I intend to say something more considered at my weblog. In these comments, I feel a freedom to be more “off the cuff” …