What Happens?

With warm gratitude to Bellator Dei for graphic.

What happens?

When life’s most profound and important matters … matters which all people variously name as beauty, morality, love, mystery and the Sacred …

Are no longer treated as such by the culture around us? Because they cannot be empirically proven and established as having anything beyond relative, subjective or private value?

What happens …

When, because of this, from the moment of our first breath, we are born into a world that only admits as uncontestably true, that which functions, that which has utilitarian value, that which submits to statistics and the ‘bottom line’?

What happens …

When, because of this, we live in a world, where the most toxic substances are ‘innocent till proven guilty’. Such that it took decades before we had amassed sufficient evidence to empirically prove that nicotine was dangerous. And we began to take countermeasures? To say nothing of countless other toxins – physical, psychological and spiritual – for which little or no empirical proof will ever come?

What happens …

When, because of this, we live in a world where children are bombarded from their earliest days by ‘harmless advertising’, though manufactured for the specific intent of transforming people into desire-ridden consumerists, if not mechanical, Pavlovian automatons? And few raise any word in protest, because after all, you can’t empirically prove that such brainwashing is harmful to the human spirit?

What happens …

When we human beings are profoundly effected, not only by what we consciously assimilate, but what we unconsciously absorb? And the culture proclaims the triumph of the utilitarian over beauty, depth and Mystery in a myriad of ways?

To take a single example, even the architecture a typical American child will absorb from her earliest days, proclaims the utilitarian, the functional, the uniform and monotonous. The rooms of the baby’s house will be formed by the same repetitive, rigid, lifeless, 90 degree angles, as will all the surrounding streets and buildings …

What happens …

When so much, so very, very, very much of all we absorb throughout our lives is predicated (consciously or not) on functionality, epistemological uncertainty, and a concomitant vacuum that allows rapacious mercantilists – and I don’t mean simply the nicotine merchants – to conquer our minds and hearts, and the minds and hearts of our children?

What happens …

That is, when so very, very, very much of the culture we absorb is not SACRAMENTAL?

These are questions that I hope can be explored through this weblog.

The Cor Jesu Sacratissimum is pierced. And the more we unite ourselves with the Cor Jesu Sacratissimum, the more pierced we become ourselves, even Lord, if it is so very, very little in comparison with Thy Heart …

And yet little by little, communion grows. When we eat this Bread and drink this Cup …

From Amazon US:

These books can also be found in our Amazon UK store here. The following titles also have Reviews at these links: (Puritan’s Empire) (Meditations on the Tarot) (When Corporations Rule the World).