Why a Catholic Should Study Eastern Religion

How do I love God and not a product? This is a very important question for those of us who live in the modern West, we who are deprived of organic culture and saturated in a materialist outlook. Those who are not content with what the world gives them are unfortunately by necessity forced to ground themselves in something of their own choosing: religion, philosophy, lifestyle etc. The problem this creates in the Catholic realm is that of a devotion to certain positions (liberal, traditional), schools (Thomistic, Nouvelle Theologie), or forms of liturgical praxis. As long as one assents to certain propositions of a system they have all they need, what goes along with this is usually a strong sentimental attachment to things that accidentally go along with the system, anything else is suspect or downright anathema.

These points of view are elegantly marketed to us in the form of religious products, and it seems like we have to subscribe to one of these endlessly multiplying products in order to be a “good” Catholic. We are no longer just consumers of goods, but now ideas and lifestyles are advertised and consumed in the same manner. Every package seems to think that it’s got it all. I think this phenomenon is inevitable in our individually driven society, but it’s a view that I think can be broken out of slowly.

Chant in its Natural Environment

 

Religious chanting is an event, therefore the music only fully conveys its power in the context of the divine services they are appointed for. It is best heard by listening to those who really live within it, complete with all the mistakes, coughs, hoarseness, and movement around the choir.

Covid-19 and Advertising

Fuck that.

Billboards – and other forms of large scale intrusive advertising – are disturbing as is, but plastering the typical Covid-19 slogans and shibboleths on them makes things exponentially worse. Modern advertising is a form of psychological violence; it is no secret that the ads that populate the screens that dominate our daily lives have been meticulously designed by psychologists to have a powerful effect upon the viewer. Having lived in a digital environment my entire life there is no doubt that the images and slogans of advertising have had a profound impact on my psyche, it is only in the past few years that I’ve developed a healthy aversion to this sort of manipulation. Which brings me to the present situation of our sterilized world, I think one of the things that the Chinavirus situation can illuminate for us is the power that advertisements have over belief.

I’ve been inclined to think that the powerful nature of advertising is the most immediate cause of the Covid hysteria and resultant changes in way of life and worldview among the population. Here the slogans and advertising serve no other purpose but to implant a set of dogmatic beliefs into the masses, and it is astonishing how readily this has been assimilated. It’s like normal advertising but on the steroid of fear. And the new sterile way of viewing the world has been prioritized over what were once more fundamental concepts like family, religion, and social norms. Now our neighbours are the enemy if they profess a different creed. I suppose this is not the first time a new radical set of beliefs has been successfully implanted into the masses through media, but now it has been done so well that there is not even any real resistance to these ideas. In a detached, historical way of looking at things it is interesting to see this in action; but in reality it’s just fucking depressing. (A great analysis of the Covidian worldview is found here on Cosmos Crouched.)

Lastly, there is no doubt in my mind that slogans like “stay home” and “stay safe” do nothing but produce a pathetic society. Living in safety is no life at all. I can’t think of a lower goal for a society or an individual than simply being “safe.” A life worth living must be dangerous, nothing is more antithetical to the human spirit than sterility and confinement.  

Against Beer and Bacon Theology

What is Beer and Bacon Theology? Well it's certainly not a concise set of propositions, a coherent system, or thought of one man or specific group, it is instead based on a general inchoate mentality towards the use of base pleasures, specifically alcohol. The attitude I take issue with is one that I’ve personally encountered having been around very conscious Catholics and institutions for a few years now. The most concrete example I can think of is that of people who put a caricature of Chesterton and Belloc at the heart of their thinking; they seek to divinize the pleasures of food and especially drink, I term this view Beer and Bacon Theology, or, as a Catholic Answers article put it, Theology of the Bottle.

While I haven’t found anything these people say that is explicitly objectionable – their statements on the virtues of eating and drinking are always qualified by admonitions against drunkenness and excess – there is still something troubling to me about the way they approach alcohol, and the mentality that they are fostering amidst the Catholic culture. On the surface Beer and Bacon Theology seems to breed merely a pretentiousness surrounding drinking with its insistence on high quality and decorum, but deeper than that is something that seems to me truly disordered and corrosive to the culture.

A Thought

 A conversation doesn’t have to be about anything meaningful to be meaningful.

Beauty in the Spaces

 

Pancho and Lefty is a masterpiece of story-telling; it leaves all the work to the listener. The identity and relationship of the two men are left wonderfully vague, Townes only gives us the barest outline of a story that could last for pages upon pages. As a result, the mind populates these plain verses with images and feelings more vivid and powerful than if they had been displayed with the most dramatic lucidity.

This is a technique present in all good art, of any medium

There’s a peace in the touch of cold air

There’s a peace in the touch of cold air,

And boughs that brush upon the frozen glass,

Through it I stare into the naked wood,

And draw life from the breath of its long rest.

 

Nature now walks through this long dark passage

And all must yield to a silent repose

Under a grey sky and the falling snow,

To long last rise like the dawn of the morn.

A Summer's Twilight

The air hangs heavy on a summer’s twilight,
When all is wrapped in a blanket of heat;
When light falls down in a chorus of colour
And lustrou­s beams give way to long shadows.
 
For these briefs hours the cover is lifted,
And the earth exhales a sigh of relief;
The sweet taste of a cool breeze to savour,
A refreshment for limbs now released.
 
Do you hear what this night is singing?
What the soft sound of leaves is inviting?
The echo of a lonesome voice is calling
Away, away into the release of the night.
 
Clutched in a passive discontentment,
Anxious and burning to be free
Out where beauty and fear are one:
Familiar streets now clothed in mystery.
 
To disappear into the fading dusk:
The birth of many a youthful dream:
Wild eyes and a flash of flesh laid bare,
The suspense of obscure possibility.
 
And at every falling of the sun,
Here I stand alone and watching
The world become transfigured in sense

And flower with inscrutability.

On the untamed plains of the world

On the untamed plains of the world

There are creatures more keen and vital

Than we can conjure in verse or in dreams;

And among them dwells the bull that is Lord.

And his voice harrows the earth,

And men try to stop that dreadful sound:

From the South Sea to the wide open North,

But forever the fearsome billowing resounds.

How deep the blacks and dark the nights?

To know there are always shadows behind?

What is the depth that would confound

And silence your boundless discerning?

You fashion your words as a harness

And imagine your theories strong,

As a bridle and bit to fasten

Comely jaws which foam and quake,

Flowing with life and fecundity.

But what can wake you from your fantasy?

Can any man bear to know?

That nothing in earth or heaven can stop Him

From begetting strange and terrible children?