Christians need a countercultural surge

A digital detox and even homeschooling should be on the family's agenda when the decision is made to get serious about God.

Coming out of a weekend where we give some of our time to look at life in a more deeply spiritual way, we generally feel challenged each week to work out in practical terms how we can develop a closer relationship with God, but it is a task that is hardly ever begun.

Here is part of a homily on the parable of the sower and the seed. The four different kinds of soil are taken to represent four kinds of responses to the Word of God which a person has received: 

The third kind is like the seed that falls among the briars and brambles. I would suggest that a very large number of us are touched by this category. Anxieties about many things and the lure of material goods can gradually choke off our commitment to the Gospel in its fullness.

Our witness becomes seriously compromised and “there is no yield”, that is, we make no real contribution to building the Kingdom and changing the world. We sit on the fence and try to have the best of both worlds; we try to serve God and mammon, which Jesus says is not possible. I am sure many of us have matter for reflection here.

Father Frank Doyle SJ (See in full here )

Let's say we did want to make an assessment of our life, our lifestyle, our mental stance in response to the sirens of the world. Following are possible steps to a change for good, responses to the distortions in our life from where peace and satisfaction really lie through an intimate relationship with God.

1. Assess whether mammon dominates our life. Oxford defines this term as "wealth as an evil influence or false object of worship and devotion. It was taken by medieval writers as the name of the devil of covetousness, and revived in this sense by John Milton". In Milton's Paradise Lost, Mammon, "the angel who in heaven is rapt in contemplation of the golden pavement [instead of God Himself], becomes in hell the active leader of those who seek out precious metals for the construction of Pandemonium", as Robert C Fox put it.

Further thoughts: Once captured by the spirit of mammon, we are tortured as if in hell by the desire for power, for status among our wider family or colleagues or school mates or neighbours. Such a life is as if cursed. Secondly, we need money and savings for our future, for health care, for supporting those in need, and for the children's education, but are we prepared to desist in our worship of and devotion to our income if it is to save our family?

2. All those worries that clog our thinking, that verge on tipping us into a constant anxiety, demand immediate attention as a family. We need to list problems and prioritise them so as to deal with them step by step. If we can't remedy a certain problem, we should reshape our life in an honest way to accommodate that issue. For example, if worry is generated by the rush to complete a tight schedule of events, then reduce the events to those that are most important. If we don't have the money to support our lifestyle... Have the whole family sign on to the family's new commitment. 

3. Also relating to priorities is renewing the family's commitment to praying together every day. For parents and older children, this will inevitably force a consideration of how time is spent, especially time online.

I enjoyed reading an account of one working mother after she and her husband decided that the family should have a digital detox. Every family will be different, but as to finding time to read the Bible, say the Rosary, to raise our mind to God, it must be the top priority of the day. The impact of screen time on our available time is huge. This is how the mother expressed her findings:

1.The kids don't crave screen time

2. I'm not as busy as I think I am

3. I've been missing out on sleep my body craves

4. The mental load of checking everything was gone

5. The kids haven't been getting my full attention

4. Be bold! We should take St. Augustine's saying as the truth to focus on in trying to loosen the grip of mammon:

To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; 

to seek Him the greatest adventure; 

to find Him, the greatest human achievement. 

This is where a move to homeschooling can transform the character of a family. The implications are immense but many parents are realising that the toxic nature of much of Western culture leaves no option but to save their children from the public system.

The Associated Press just today ran an article on the growth in home schooling in the United States, stating "the rate of households homeschooling their children rose to 11% by September 2020, more than doubling from 5.4% just six months earlier. Black households saw the largest jump; their homeschooling rate rose from 3.3% in the spring of 2020 to 16.1% in the fall." 

The article points out that the pandemic pushed the numbers higher through parents seeing the benefits to their children by guiding them through their lessons during lockdown periods. However, another element in the surge was that parents committed themselves to the challenge because of their religious beliefs.

The parents in one of those households, Arlena and Robert Brown of Austin, Texas, had three children in elementary school when the pandemic took hold. After experimenting with virtual learning, the couple opted to try homeschooling with a Catholic-oriented curriculum provided by Seton Home Study School, which serves about 16,000 students nationwide. [...] Robert Brown said: "And we wanted them to have very solid understanding of their faith.”

Heather Pray of Phoenix, Maryland, says homeschooling has been a major success for her 7-year-old son, Jackson, who has autism. [...] Pray is also homeschooling her daughter, Hayley, who’s going into 7th grade and had been attending a Christian school. “I had no idea how this was going to go — I just dove in headfirst,” said Pray. “I felt God was holding my hand.”

The Gonzalez family from Appomattox, Virginia – who are devout Catholics – opted to homeschool their three sons, ages 9, 13 and 15, after their Catholic school in Lynchburg closed in 2020 due to falling enrollment. They’re using the Catholic-focused curriculum from Seton Home Study School, which Jennifer Gonzalez, the boys’ mom, described as rigorous but well-organized. “My kids have just excelled,” she said. “We’re able to be home and be together.” 

 5.  Finally, as a family dedicated to the Christian adventure, we must strengthen ourselves to be countercultural. We must return always to the goal of our life, which applies together and individually. That is, to know, love and serve God, and to give Him glory. That goal is certainly not the ultimate focus of most societies these days. Therefore, we have to make our goal come alive in our lifestyle. Unfortunately, we have to prepare ourselves to suffer the repercussions of standing against the tide, like our Master.

Christians are different and distinguish themselves from worldly people who live with their selfish and self-centred values, contrary to the gospel of humility, dying to self, compassion, forgiveness and humble service.  This is the real challenge of being a Christian today, to have the courage to be identified as one.  What the world wants is for us to be identified with them.  The world wants us to absorb their worldly values so that we will not be a reproach to their self-centred lifestyle or be a conscience to society.

Today, the Christian message of freedom, marriage, sexuality, sanctity of life is being distorted, not just by unbelievers but even by false prophets from within our Church who want to please the world.

Why do some of us go through life without a sense of direction?  We just drift through life, trying to keep ourselves alive with some pleasures and luxuries in life.  But our life is meaningless.  We have no real purpose for our existence.  We work to keep ourselves alive and to make a living.  We might even appear to be active doing many things but without direction and coherence.  At the end of the day, we will be burnt-out with all sorts of activities, but achieve nothing substantial.

 - Archbishop Goh of Singapore (slightly edited)

Our countercultural stance is also necessitated by the loss of the Christian context in society. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the term sociologist of religion Christian Smith coined early this century to describe what he found to be the de facto religion of the overwhelming majority of young Americans. 

MTD, as a worldview, "is defined and driven by current culture more than by historic religious truths or a comprehensive and coherent doctrine" according to an new report. "This approach to spirituality asks little of its followers while providing the comfort, convenience, and community they long for."

 These are its main features:

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.

2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people [judged subjectively] go to heaven when they die. 

6. There are no absolute moral truths.

The hold this "fake Christianity" has over young Americans (younger than 50) concerns Dr. George Barna, director of research at the Cultural Research Center of Arizona Christian University. He says: 

The fact that a greater percentage of people who call themselves Christian draw from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism than draw from the Bible says a lot about the state of the Christian Church in America, in all of its manifestations.

Simply and objectively stated, Christianity in this nation is rotting from the inside out.

In the face of this, parents and all who have a sense of moral seriousness must act with urgency in a deliberate and countercultural way. Fortunately, the community of Christians who are stepping up to the plate to lead their section of Western society back to Christ is growing, and the resources, as with homeschooling, are extensive.

We know that God is with us. 

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Biblical scholarship perpetrates malpractice

Christ Preaching (La Petite Tombe), Rembrandt, circa 1652 (cropped)

The denial of the possibility of miracles has long been one of the main mental filters among biblical scholars in their wish to "demythologise" the gospels in particular, trapping generations of naive students in a world that is largely rationalistic and where God is "disappeared". Scholarship of the form criticism kind is welcome, but it's time academics' blinkers were removed so that all of us can come to know Jesus ever more deeply.

A typical example of the approach pervasive in academia is provided by the now depleted Jesus Seminar grouping of scholars as summarised here:

 According to the Seminar, Jesus was a mortal man born of two human parents, who did not perform nature miracles nor die as a substitute for sinners nor rise bodily from the dead. Sightings of a risen Jesus represented the visionary experiences of some of his disciples rather than physical encounters.   

Despite the common misuse of text criticism and its many categories, the Church values form criticism, especially the study of literary forms. The Vatican Council in 1965 explained its support:

For truth is expressed in a variety of ways, depending on whether a text is history of one kind or another, or whether its form is that of prophecy, poetry, or some other kind of speech.

And again:

Since God speaks in sacred scripture through a person in human fashion, the interpreter of scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate the meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.

For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of perceiving, speaking, and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the customs normally followed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another.

Key ideas expressed in these two paragraphs that are often ignored by those who see biblical scholarship as a purely "scientific" exercise are that interpretation should have the purpose of elucidating the key message of the text: "to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us", "the meaning the sacred writers really intended", and "what God wanted to manifest by means of their words".  

Two factors prevent many biblical scholars from striving toward that goal. The first is that scholars will take a book as a literary unit and examine it on that basis alone without seeing the Old Testament and the New Testament as one interlinked work. The second factor, referred to at the start, is that scholars are so focused on their one-dimensional study of texts that any belief in the supernatural and a personal God that a student has understandably evaporates.

Leading scholar Bart Ehrman states in his book Misquoting Jesus that his belief in the Bible’s truthfulness weakened the more he studied it. In the end it was not the source of God's truth but  “a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: Discrepancies, contradictions, errors, and different perspectives.” 

He now describes himself as an "agnostic" after long service as a Christian. He says he could not reconcile a loving God with the suffering and evil in the world. That he lost his faith is not to be unexpected, given his attitude to the Bible, says pastor and writer Randy Alcorn:

Ehrman emphasizes that even after coming to believe that parts of the Bible were untrue, he kept his faith. He seems to want the reader to suppose that disbelieving Scripture did not contribute to his loss of faith. But how could it do otherwise? Once we call some parts of the Bible false, on what basis do we judge other parts true?

We all trust something. When we abandon trust in God’s revelation, we replace it with trust in our own feelings, opinions, and preferences, or those of our friends and teachers—all of which can drift with popular culture, including academic culture.

Ehrman’s story should challenge us to come to the problem of evil and suf­fering with a Christian worldview rooted in a well-informed belief in the reliability and authority of God’s Word. If we vacillate on that conviction, we will first reinterpret the Bible, then outright reject it.

In examining Ehrman's desertion of his Christian heritage and in reviewing his book on evil and suffering called God's Problem, Alcorn states:

Most of God’s Problem consists of Ehrman’s critical examination of Scripture. He writes, “Given... that God had chosen the people of Israel to be in a special relationship with him—what were ancient Israelite thinkers to suppose when things did not go as planned or expected?... How were they to explain the fact that the people of God suffered from famine, drought, and pestilence?”

Ehrman surveys answers to these questions, including human free will; God’s anger at disobedient people; suffering as being redemptive; evil and suffering existing so God can make good out of them; suffering as encouraging humility and undermining pride; suffering as testing faith; evil and suffering as the work of Satan, which Christ will overcome in his return; and suffering and evil as a mystery.

Oddly, he thinks that because the Bible’s answers vary, this makes them contradictory. The idea that they supplement one another doesn’t seem to occur to him.

While Ehrman finds it troubling that the Bible approaches the issue in different ways, I find it reassuring. No single reason gives a sufficient explanation, but different threads of biblical insight, woven together, form a durable fabric.

I find the book’s subtitle ironic: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. The problem is not that the Bible fails to answer it; Ehrman himself documents that it offers multiple answers. He simply doesn’t believe them.

Ehrman states unproven premises reflecting his bias, then draws logical conclusions based on his faulty premises.

Ehrman summarizes, often accurately, the biblical teaching. Then he disagrees with it, usually citing no authority beyond his personal opinion. He seems to assume that any rational person would join him in rejecting Scripture’s claims. His faith in his own subjective understanding at times seems breathtaking. ...

Ehrman states, “If God tortures, maims and murders people just to see how they will react—to see if they will not blame him, when in fact he is to blame—then this does not seem to me to be a God worthy of worship.”  But murder is unjustified killing. Where does the Bible speak of God torturing people or killing people without justification? Where does it speak of him doing such things “just to see how they will react”?

Ehrman identifies with only one biblical book, Ecclesiastes, in determining his worldview; yet he totally ignores that book’s God-related teachings.

Ehrman writes: I have to admit that at the end of the day, I do have a biblical view of suffering. As it turns out, it is the view put forth in the book of Ecclesiastes. ... A lot of bad things happen. But life also brings good things.... And so we should enjoy life to the fullest, as much as we can, as long as we can. That’s what the author of Ecclesiastes thinks, and I agree.

Yet, forty times Ecclesiastes directly speaks of the God that Ehrman says doesn’t exist. I will summarize what Ecclesiastes says about God, not only for the benefit of its teaching, but to demonstrate the inaccuracy of Ehrman’s claims that this book supports his worldview.

According to Ecclesiastes, God is in Heaven (5:2), he is Creator (12:1) and the Maker of all things (11:5), he gave life to human beings (8:15; 9:9), he bestowed our spiritual nature (3:21; 12:7) and set eternity in our hearts (3:11). God plans the timing of all things, appointing the times for birth, planting, healing, building, joy, searching, keeping, mending, speaking, loving, and enjoying peace (3:1–8). God is sovereign over death, hate, war, and every evil. God providentially controls the sun’s rising and setting, the movements of wind, the flowing of rivers, and the evaporation of water (1:5–7). God is the Shepherd (12:11) who seeks people to fear him and tests us to show us we’re finite (3:14, 18). He gives us opportunity to enjoy food and work (2:24; 3:13; 5:18–20; 9:7). He gives us wisdom, knowledge, and happiness (2:26), and wealth, possessions, and honor (5:19; 6:2).

God hears and despises (5:2). He can be pleased (2:26; 7:26) and angered (5:2–6). He is good (2:24–26; 3:13; 5:18–19; 6:2) and holy (5:1–2). Though he may delay punishment of the wicked, God will surely bring it (8:13). 

Ecclesiastes says, “Be happy, young man, while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see.” These apparently hedonistic words continue immediately with more sobering ones: “But know that for all these things God will bring you to judgment” (11:9).

Ecclesiastes affirms that despite the apparent emptiness of life as viewed without an eternal perspective, the only answer to the meaning of life is to fear and obey the Creator God, preferably before life’s greatest hardships fall (see 12:1–3).   

So there's a case illustrating how a "naturalist" approach to the study of the Bible serves no one's interests. Naturalism as defined by Alvin Plantinga is "the thought that there is no such person as God, or anything like God. [It's a] worldview, a sort of total way of looking at ourselves and our world." [*]

Conflicts inevitably arise between Christian believers and scholars with a narrow "this world" viewpoint because those scholars make judgements based on only a partial evidence base, trying to isolate, for example, the historical Jesus from the biblical Jesus. However, Plantinga points out that "it doesn't follow that [the beliefs] are improbable from a Christian's complete evidence base". [*]

Whereas biblical scholarship had been a hallmark of the Church Fathers in the early Christian era, giving rise to the content of the beliefs (dogma) as the  Tradition (capital "t") of the Church, modern exegetes have as their origin the Protestant eruption in Germany especially. Scholars joined in Luther's rejection of dogma and Tradition and embarked upon their own "scientific revolution" in exploring the Bible. They began to use nothing as a reference other than the texts themselves.

After a century of this revolutionary style of biblical study, along came the German Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) who, himself, "vastly enlarged the understanding of early Christianity" though it's interesting to note how Britannica summarises his work in such a limited way, as opposed to the grand project: "Insisting that the simple message of Jesus had been obscured by Church dogma, he defined the essence of Christianity as love of God and neighbour", something a farm boy of the day might have said. 

The reason for this minimalist outcome was that he took as a key premise that "Christian faith and Greek philosophy were so closely intermingled that the resultant system included many beliefs and practices that were not authentically Christian" [See source].

By 1906, Albert Schweitzer, having compiled a history of the biblical research of the previous century, was compelled to write that the scientific search for Jesus had failed. He said: "We thought we really had him at last, and now he has passed by our age and gone back to being himself." [**]

But in the 20th Century, German Lutheran Rudolf Bultmann pushed on with radical "demythologisation", so that everything supernatural had to be removed from the Jesus of history. He believed this was necessary to evanglise "the modern world", especially the atheistic intellectual elite. Therefore, the redemption, resurrection, ascension and the Second Coming all had to be dispensed with. Christ became simply a prophet of "authentic existence", a stance which happened to be in accord with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Bultmann's colleague.

Bultmann's dismissal of Jesus' claims to divinity and all his supernatural "signs", to use John's term, that supported those claims meant his search for the historical Jesus failed: "I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, and are moreover fragmentary and often legendary..." [**]

Such conclusions were challenged even by Martin Dibelius, Bultmann's colleague in the foundation of form criticism:

It must be said quite emphatically that Bultmann's skepticism in all questions of historicity is not necessarily connected with form-critical criteria but with his conception of the nature of the primitive Christian community as well as his emphasis upon the difference between Palestinian and Hellenistic Christianity. [**]

The fault in Bultmann's work, and in all form criticism projects of the naturalistic kind,  is the ideology of the scholar imposed upon the work of  gospel writers. Not longer would it be accepted that the evangelists wrote works whose immediate audience were certain communities of believers, but who also had in mind the commission to spread to the ends of the earth the knowledge of God's action in the world through His divine son.

Oxford University scholar Eric Eve offers insight into the pitfall that many academics fall into:

He [Bultmann] seemed to know in advance that the historical Jesus was an eschatalogical prophet who issued a radical call to repentance, so that material that reflected such a radical immanent eschatology was most likely to be authentic: his method thus delivered the historical Jesus he expected to find.[***]

Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth was another who ask "Why bother?" when talking about studying the New Testament in particular, if the scholar simply applies a matrix on the work for the sake of a desired interpretation: 

How can we decide even before we have read the text what it acutally says, and what is only temporary imagery? And what happens if we use this alien criterion as an infallible instrument rather than as a provisional clue? Is not Bultmann's very concept of myth, the infallible criterion which dominates his hermeneutics, quite alien to the New Testament? Whether or not it is the contemporary fashion, as Bultman claims it is, the question is how it can be used to decide what belongs to the substance of the New Testament and what is merely outward imagery? [**] 

So we can take it that form criticism is a useful tool, as I have stated above, that scholars' presuppositions are natural and constructive as a "provisional clue", and that it is legitimate to use scientific methods to understand Christian scriptures to understand God's word better. However, scholars should display their skill by handling the material in a balanced manner:

Therefore, to understand the biblical truth in a truly comprehensive manner we must take the Bible for what it really is: the word of God in human language [italics in original]. The reader or hearer who ignores the human conditions of God's word remains on the outside of scripture by introducting arbitrary interpretations; the reader or hearer who does not recognise in the words of scripture the word of God also remains on the outer surface of the sacred book.[****]

I want to end this study of why Christians can be led astray when they follow some biblical scholars down the path of their unbalanced exegesis. The malpractice in the field starts with the often unstated exclusion of  the supernatural, and concludes with the view that little of historical value can be derived from the text so whatever that Church tradition has upheld must be at least suspect. 

First a word about the meaning of "myth", one of the literary genres used in the Bible. Myths are stories that have both fictional and nonfictional aspects. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is often used as an example: The story is false but it conveys several truths, such as "the importance of friendship, loyalty, trust, and continuing with a hopeless task because it is the right thing to do". [*****] To see the purpose of the tale otherwise would amount to a perverse interpretation. Let's use a case study:

 "Consider the myth of the Fall in Genesis 3:1-24. Adam and Eve had been told not to eat of the fruit of a certain treee in the garden of Eden. Eve was tempted by the serpent, deceived by it, ate some of the fruit, and Adam joined her for a bite. Perverse interpretations of this myth would be that this particular God wanted people to be stupid (that is, not acquire knowledge), or that the Bible teaches that God - being jealous - has an inferiority complex, or that women are the cause of everything that is wrong with the world, and so on.

"I consider these examples perverse interpretations because they are not based on an effort to discover what the author was trying to communicate. It may be that the author was anti-intellectual, narrow in his understanding of God, and a misogynist, but I do not think he was trying to communicate those aspects of his personality in telling us the myth. I think he was trying to say something about finding one's place in the universe and about recognising that the world could have been paradise if human beings had not tried to make themselves gods." [*****] 

In conclusion, it is heartbreaking to see the loss of faith among those who have undertaken biblical studies as part of their higher education. I think the right word for this circumstance is "malpractice". This is being perpetrated on young people who are in no condition to defend traditional beliefs, whereas the academics reap rewards of professorial status and the mutual admiration among colleagues in the field who "toe the line", as Ehrman phrased it. Scholars in this field need to remove their mental filters so that biblical exegesis can enter a new era of respect for the truth that God is communicating to us.

 [*] Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism, 2011, Oxford University Press.

[**] Quoted in Faith Comes From What Is Heard: An Introduction to Fundamental Theology, 2016, Lawrence Feingold,  Emmaus Academic. 

[***] Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition, 2014, Fortress Press.

[****] Armando J Levoratti How to Interpret the Bible, in The International Biblical Commentary, 1998, ed William R Farmer, Liturgical Press.

[*****] Michael D McGehee, God's Word Expressed in Human Words, 1991, Liturgical Press.

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Silence reveals the supernatural reality

'You begin to hear things that only silence can reveal to you'. Photo from Jamberoo Abbey

To live in a way that rejoices in silence rather than in noise is to live a life that is countercultural and radical, as my previous post demonstrates in making introductory remarks on the profundity of silence. 

So, that people are prepared to give up what is normal in all human cultures - a job, a family, and the ability to determine the details of their life - and commit to a life of near silence in a community that has as its centre deep communication with the one who is love, is firm evidence of the reality of the non-material world. 

Monks and contemplatives are not crazy. They tell us that the impact that the trained use of silence has on a person is profound. For good reason, silence remains part of the young set's practice of yoga and meditation.   

But this is where Christian monasticism is so different from that practised by Buddhists; its in its understanding that God is among us and is inviting us to develop an intimate relationship.

Monastic communities such as the Carthusians, Trappists, Carmelites and Benedictines, along with the Orthodox monastics, have existed for hundreds of years, with Anthony of Egypt offering his monastic rule to his desert companions, both men and women, before he died in 356. 

"Silence is not just an absence of noise," says Sister Hilda Scott, the abbess of 24 Benedictine nuns at Jamberoo Abbey in rural New South Wales, Australia. She continues:

You begin to hear things that only silence can reveal to you. You begin to hear the movement of your own heart. You begin to hear your own motivations.

Scott, who has lived there for 30 years, says:

[Silence is] an extremely significant part of our life.... Indeed, our life wouldn't be possible without it. It's essential to our way of living.

She then highlights how silence rids a person of their blinkers, the mindset they are often unaware of but which controls their view of themselves and others, in fact, reality itself. She says: "Silence removes the filters that we put on life." 

There is a clearing of the mind - new thoughts emerge, and old ones become clearer.

Building on that, the community's silence is closely connected with prayer and with a continual communication with something that is "deep".

Their life of prayer is "not about us personally" but "for the rest of the world, too". It's a sacrificial offering of themselves in order to serve the whole world:

On our mountain at Jamberoo, there we are trying to live a deeper life. We believe while we’re trying to do that, then something's being breathed into the world that hopefully makes a difference.

In an environment that fosters silence, it has been said, it's easier to "benefit from striving for a connection to something bigger than one's self".  

Therefore, organise a quiet time of prayer, a small moment every day in which to experience silence. Scott advises:

For five minutes, every day, just five minutes, give yourself a time when there isn't any noise. Don't turn the radio on the minute you get into the car. Go and stand in your backyard, and listen to everything that's going on around you.

You begin to crave more and more. And you begin to crave the clarity of life that comes with it.

Those Christians whose heritage starts with Christ and not in the 1500s have great respect for those who are prepared to enter a community that praises God as its 'work", because that has proved to be the source of God's bounty to the Church and to the world.

Benedict, who inspired others to join him in what became known as the Benedictine order, was shocked by the poor moral and living conditions of the people in the decades after the sacking of Rome (in 410). His monasteries gave strength to the still struggling Christians and kept learning alive, teaching all sorts to read, to plant crops, and to build structures that would last for centuries.

Abbess Hilda Scott and her 23 companions are there to serve today's needs. Her comunity members bind themselves through the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to providing care and cabins for people to come for quiet, to pray and for counseling. 

The radical nature of their undertaking and their profound insight into the concrete reality of the supernatural (yes, a contradiction but true) is shown by the fact that the community's life most clearly espouses Marx's dictum: To each according to their need, from each according to their ability. The members are not consumerist borgs, nor emotive, personal brand promoting individualists, but servant followers of the God who is love.

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It's a 'radical act', but silence is the door to the soul

Erling Kagge - 'we don't wonder so much anymore'. Photo: Simon Skreddernes

Erling Kagge, 58, is a Norwegian explorer, publisher, author, lawyer, art collector, entrepreneur and politician. In 1993, he spent fifty days walking solo across Antarctica, a trek of 1300 kilometres, becoming the first person to reach the South Pole alone. He has also trekked to the North Pole and climbed Everest.

Drawing from his life, he wrote a "transformative meditation" with the English title Silence: In the Age of Noise (2019). The publisher's blurb states:

In this book. Kagge explores the silence around us, the silence within us, and the silence we must create. By recounting his own experiences and discussing the observations of poets, artists, and explorers, Kagge shows us why silence is essential to sanity and happiness—and how it can open doors to wonder and gratitude.

With the great Antarctic expanse surrounding him in all directions, he wrote in his journal on day 26 of that journey:

Here stillness is all-absorbing. I feel and hear it. In this endless landscape everything seems eternal and without limit.

For sure, over the eons of human experience silence has been known to be a portal to the supernatural.

In the world's wild places on land and at sea, Kagge gained a profound appreciation of silence. "Developed" societies have it that silence is "something that's empty, and amounts to nothing", according to an interview  last year on Australia's ABC Radio National. But for him, the opposite is true.

Silence is something, and it's rich; it's a quality. It's something exclusive and luxurious and a key to unlock new ways of thinking.

New ways of thinking! Yes! Get rid of those mental filters! But there is another matter of importance, as Kagge's interviewer writes: 

It's also something that can seem out of reach in the modern world, where switching off and slowing down can feel like radical acts.

It's important to acknowledge those "radical acts" and how such a commitment amounts to being "countercultural", which takes guts.

But Kagge gives us some leeway with his style of silence: "He discovered it's something you can find anywhere. ... It's there all the time — even when you're surrounded by noise. It's something we all have inside ourselves, waiting to be explored. It's an inner silence, a sense of deep stillness, which Kagge says has a lot to teach us about who we are." 

Kagge puts it this way:

I think most people are underestimating themselves in terms of silence and the possibility to get to know yourself. Some of the oldest advice throughout history is to get to know yourself, and I think any advice that has lasted for more than 1,000 years you should take seriously.

[Also,] most people have all this noise in our heads. Even if it's quiet around us we have noise in our heads, thinking too much.

Noise is always an easier option than silence. I think we are afraid of it because to explore your own silence is about making life a bit more difficult than it has to be, in the sense that the present hurts. It's easier to think about the past, about the future.

Silence is very much about being in the present. It's about getting to know yourself better. Sometimes that can be not very comfortable; it can be disturbing.

However, the interviewer reports that Kagge believes the rewards are bountiful - "His own inner silence has unlocked a deeper sense of gratitude for life, taught him that the simple pleasures hold the key to happiness, and helped him tap into a sense of wonder about the world."

Kagge says:

We were all born explorers, and if you look at kids, they are wondering all the time. But I think today we don't wonder so much anymore because if we are wondering about something we Google it and we find out right away. I think that's a pity because to wonder is one of the most beautiful things you can do in life.

The step-by-step approach to life is another element that he recommends, especially in this time of pandemic:

It's very much about pulling back, it's about cooling down, and it's also about being reminded about the secret to a good life is to keep your pleasures simple.

You can find the silence anywhere, wherever you are. And I think that's really important because you can't wait for silence to come to you, you have to invent your own silence. It's easier to find it in nature, at least for me, but you can find it anywhere. 

So, the message is to no longer be a "consumerist borg", but to be countercultural by focusing on the reality beyond the material and enjoying the bounty of the world instead of racing past it with headphones on. 

Ω For ideas on meditation, go here  

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Homosexuality as a fad; the sex-drenched society

The Netflix film Cuties - sexualised depiction of women starts young

Nothing is more passé than being straight these days: Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo, the 23-year-old daughter of the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, said as much in an Instagram interview in which she spoke about what it meant to her to announce that she is queer.

In the interview she said her main concern when coming out was not with negativity from the wider society but that her own circle might think she was just trying to be trendy.

She said this fear arose because it’s “hip or cool to be not hetero in my liberal bubble”.

What! That young people make decisions on their sexual orientation for life on the basis of what is the latest fad! How sick is that? But it fits the pattern of the "transgender craze" that has erupted and the cluster phenomenon of a group of girls suddenly declaring they want to be male, going on to explain themselves with an outpouring of the "internet-speak" they have absorbed.

New York-based Guardian columnist and lesbian Arwa Mahdawi, whose partner recently gave birth to a daughter they will raise together, reacted with amazement at the nature of Kennedy-Cuomo's fear for her reputation.

Mahdawi said that when she came out 20 years ago she was afraid of being assaulted for being gay. Now, instead of inciting "widespread slurs", being gay is "something that the privileged offspring of politicians reckon is a badge of honour".

Homosexuality as purely a status symbol!

Not taking away respect for homosexuals, if this is how young people make their decisions under the macabre influence of social media and the mainstream media's delight in highlighting weird self-invention,  then they are bound to suffer the death of their psyche, given how they have adopted the lie fed them by the elite who often create, certainly cultivate, the latest fashions in lifestyle as much as in entertainment or clothing. There's no fun in such fashions, however, as by their warped nature they eventually kill their followers' spirit - we all pity the ill-fated follower of fashion!

Kennedy-Cuomo also revealed that she had experimented with several flavours of sexuality (such as bi- and pan-) before deciding that hers is of the demi- variety.

That was another element that jarred with Mahdawi:

Last time I checked, demisexuals weren’t exactly an oppressed minority fighting for equal rights. They are just people who aren’t sexually attracted to others unless they form a strong emotional bond with them first.

Furthermore:

Acting as if needing to get to know someone before jumping into bed with them constitutes a marginalised sexual orientation that needs a flag seems to play into the hands of rightwingers who are desperate to argue that liberals are narcissists with a victimhood complex.

That said, I don’t think demisexuality should be written off as attention-seeking. Indeed, I think it’s instructive to look at what the rise of demisexuality says about sexuality more generally; Kennedy-Cuomo, after all, is just one of a growing number of (mostly) young people [my emphasis - BS] who have latched on to the label in recent years.

Note "latched on to"! Hardly, language to confirm that the state discussed relates to a innate personal attribute.

Then Mahdawi gets to a second point of importance when discussing sexuality today:

The fact that there was a need to come up with a term like “demisexual” (which was coined in 2006) shows how sex-drenched society has become. The portrayal of women in the popular media has become increasingly sexualised. Porn has never been so accessible. Dating apps such as Tinder mean it has never been so easy to hook up.

It all starts young, especially for girls, as was highlighted earlier this year when Facebook announced Instagram for Kids. In a letter to the company, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy group that often leads campaigns against big tech and its targeting of children, wrote of Instagram: 

The platform’s relentless focus on appearance, self-presentation, and branding presents challenges to adolescents’ privacy and wellbeing. Younger children are even less developmentally equipped to deal with these challenges, as they are learning to navigate social interactions, friendships, and their inner sense of strengths and challenges during this crucial window of development.

A coalition of 35 consumer advocacy groups along with 64 experts in child development co-signed the letter, which also stated: "Adolescent girls report feeling pressured to post sexualized selfies for attention from their peers". As well:

Citing public health research and other studies, the letter notes that excessive screen time and social media use can contribute to a variety of risks for kids including obesity, lower psychological well-being, decreased quality of sleep, increased risk of depression and suicide ideation, and other issues.

By their fruit you will know them! Another impact on young people's lives from corporate profit-seeking and the slavery of consumerism is stressed by Mahdawi:

Here’s the funny thing, though: while pop culture has become more and more sexualised, statistics show that young people are actually having far less sex than previous generations. There has been a lot of hand-wringing about hook-up culture, but it may be more of a media invention than a reality.

Indeed kids these days seem to spend more time describing the exact specifications of their sexuality and where it sits on various spectrums than they do actually having sex. Sex is supposed to sell, and it’s being sold to us willy-nilly – but as the rise of demisexuality shows, fewer people seem desperate to buy into what we’ve been told sexuality is supposed to look like.

The harm here comes in the form of young people turning to temporary sexual relationships - plural - and putting off a healthy search for one partner in life, in marriage, with a willingness to commit to the fruitful outcome that is children.

Especially, Mahdawi, as a new mother and obviously endowed with moral seriousness, is disturbed by the mental and emotional massaging of a sexual nature that goes on in the West, and increasingly in other societies, through all media and their accomplice, the entertainment world. Her terms, "sex-drenched society" and "increasingly sexualised" and "[sex is] sold to us willy-nilly" convey to me that this New York resident is very worried at the direction of society.

Rightly so! How can young people see the video of Cardi B's WAP, and note the awards given the song, and not have a shamed (girls) and scornful (boys) view of women? No wonder girls want to shed that female persona!

A second case of a woman letting down the side comes with the predicament that Billie Eilish found herself in after posing in a set of corsets. She had to withstand some disappointment from fans, even ridicule, but retorted with cussing repeating, "It's all about what makes you feel good".

Eilish is only 19 and so we can give her some leeway in sorting out what's important. Reportedly she told British Vogue:

My thing is that I can do whatever I want. It’s all about what makes you feel good. If you want to get surgery, go get surgery. If you want to wear a dress that somebody thinks that you look too big wearing, f**k it – if you feel like you look good, you look good.

New York Post also quotes a sympathetic fan:

“Guys, can we please realize that Billie is finding herself and that she is happy with the way she is and that is all that should matter. Billie is only 19 years old. She’s been [in] the public eye since she was 15 and she is finding herself. She don’t [owe] us anything.”

But the ET outlet identifies the contradiction of a young woman showing off her assets in a sexualised manner while campaigning for a positive view of women in society:

Eilish's new music also tackles the idea of men taking advantage of underage girls. She knows that this message combined with her more mature look will raise eyebrows.

Obviously, Eilish did not learn from the earlier instance of misuse of a photo - she has reported how her "boobs were trending on Twitter!" - or from the mockery that Emma Watson encountered after baring her breasts in - again - a women's fashion magazine in 2017. The mockery arose because Watson's interview had dwelt on serious topics like women's empowerment whereas she was seen to have let herself be milked by the magazine for greater sales.

A wag put these words into Watson's mouth: "Women's rights! Feminism! Social justice! Hey, look at my tits!" For both Watson and Eilish, certainly be proud of one's body, but don't let yourself be part of the abuse of women by the corporate elite in their profiteering by broadcasting sexualised images of girls and women. Learn the difference between liberation and objectification. It can come down to the question: "Who makes the money?"

This post has given attention to the diverse sources of concern about how the soft oppression of young people bolsters the malaise that is building in Western society, and rapidly elsewhere. The manipulation of the young and innocent by promoters of a set of false principles relating to sexual orientation, and feminism, is causing harm on a personal level and it is destroying the health of society as a whole.

The solution is to take stock, to start from the fact that young people are trapped in a toxic culture that prevents them from knowing the joy that flows when a person has learnt to be self-disciplined enough to be in control of their own intellectual and emotional life.

For that, they need goals and the support along the way that Western society no longer provides. Western society needs to return to the basics of our civilisation and learn again that God made us, and in opening up a relationship with us, makes it possible for us to know ourselves, how to be the best person we can be. That's the kind of self-invention we need.

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In the prison of my subjective feelings

A prison of our own making - photo by Enrico Hänel from Pexels

One time when the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at a magnificent waterfall that many people were admiring he overheard one visitor describe the scene as "sublime" whereas another called it "pretty". Coleridge decried the expression of "pretty" as failing to match the reality of the sight.  

The academic and writer C S Lewis explains Coleridge's disgust:

The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions. ...  'Can you be righteous', asks Traherne, 'unless you be just in rendering to things their due esteem? All things were made to be yours and you were made to prize them according to their value.'"

When people are in a group where there is an argument going on, each of those arguing looks for support on the basis of what everyone should agree to, what is logical, what is true to that which exists in the real world, and akin to that, what is the God-given reality. In other words, each party in practice points to some objective moral or intellectual value that the other side has violated. Each side ought to know, but often doesn't, that it is pointless to say "I don't care what you say, I have my own opinion - [or worse] - I have my own facts".

To speak about the objectivity of moral and intellectual values means there's something outside of what I think or I feel - my subjectivity - and things are right and wrong or good and bad in reality, for reasons that everyone must agree to because, on consideration, those reasons can be arrived at logically or because they can be observed and their meaning agreed to.

We have our own feelings and emotions but we have to live in the real world. Therefore, we have to train ourselves to react in an appropriate manner to what we encounter. The child has to learn "to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful", as Plato wrote. Teachers help the young learn of the richness that lies in Shakespeare's lines, or in the works of other writers or artists that have lasted the test of time - esteemed because they are seen as being true to life and therefore valuable in understanding the human experience.

Some in education, especially, come up with methodologies or concepts they want introduced into the curriculum. They often shy from expressing an objective value for their innovations but say they are important because they are "necessary" or "progressive", or "effective". However, Lewis states:

They could be forced by argument to answer the questions 'necessary for what?', 'progressing towards what?', 'effecting what?'; in the last resort they would have to admit that some state of affairs was in their opinion good for its own sake.

Objectivity relating to intellectual and moral values is not just a Western concept. Lewis refers to the principle being the basis of the Tao, the ultimate reality,  and acknowledges Hinduism's focus on what is known as Rta:

In early Hinduism conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta — that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality. 

Unfortunately, what worried Lewis, Coleridge, and Plato, is now widely accepted, namely that values such as what is good, what is beautiful and what is true "are just expressions of my subjective point of view, my subjective feelings". This means there are no principles outside ourselves that determine how we should behave or what degree of respect we should give to others. Here is where we pick up the content of a talk given by Catholic Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles.

He expresses what is the common sentiment of younger age groups: 

"Don't tell me what to think; don't tell me how to behave; don't tell me what's beautiful. My subjective feelings determine value and what's the matter with that?"

That attitude of a young person going into life draws a heartfelt response:

Do you see everybody how it locks us into these little prisons - the little prison of my subjective consciousness of my immediate feelings, and how the realm of objective value breaks us out of these pathetic little prisons and allow us now to explore worlds beyond my little arena of feeling and subjective apprehension?

To be drawn by a great master [artist] into the realm of objective value - it opens my life in such a wonderful way.

Another problem with this hyper-subjectivism is we're locked in our little prisons affirming our own feelings all the time - it sets us necessarily against one another if my feelings are incommensurate with yours. My feelings have no real reference to an objective value. All I can do is fight with you. We can't appeal together to some transcendent "third" by which our feelings are measured. No, we're just now in a war of feeling against feeling, this little prison that leads to warfare. I'm afraid that's where a lot of people find themselves today. That's the default position of a lot of people.

Break out of the prison! What gets you out is objective moral, intellectual, and aesthetic value. What opens the door toward real communion [is that] together we fall in love with Shakespeare, together we fall in love with Dante.... Good, now we've transcended this little petty world.

I know you hear this all the time, but don't let them seduce you with this suffocating subjectivism. Rather be open to the realm of the objective.

Michael Sandel, a political philosophy professor at Harvard, says in his book What Money Can't Buy, "We need to reason about how to value our bodies, human dignity, teaching and learning." He means we ought to use our intellectual powers to arrive at principles that allow us to agree on the reality of all that is important. The purpose of that is to create a harmonious society. For example, we need to go beyond scientific findings and find the deeper values of matters like patriotism, family, solidarity and justice. 

In an interview on that book, he is asked if there is "any downside to engaging with the world through the eyes of moral philosophy, rather than simple market logic?"

His answer is: "None but the burden of reflection and moral seriousness."

Rather than charging into debates on important issues flailing about with hot emotions or pure assumption, we need to identify values that are relevant to the context, that provide essential meaning. Sandel gives a topic related to his book's subject matter to illustrate his approach and he points to the goal of social discourse:

"Consider the language employed by the critics of commercialisation," he writes. "'Debasement', 'defilement', 'coarsening', 'pollution', the loss of the 'sacred'. This is a spiritually charged language that gestures toward higher ways of living and being." 

Those "higher ways" point to the importance of understanding the distinction between subjective and objective values. Lewis and his short work The Abolition of Man (see here) states that emotions "can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it". Further: 

Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own natural impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. 

All the more reason to escape from the horror house of subjectivity, that small prison of self-invention and emotional self-absorption. 

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Christian meditation app fills the gap

Jump into this video here for insight into a richer experience

Sam Harris is a writer and podcaster with a background in neuroscience. His is the youngest face of the "New Atheism"  brigade, which we don't hear about so much now because it has become clear that it is a touched-up version of traditional atheism.

However, Harris has gone on to promote Mindfulness, a well-meaning fad that has a business side attracting products such as Jimmy Kimmel's Mindfulness Coloring Book or the emag, 108 Mindfulness Lessons, which offers advice on surviving test stress and other student difficulties.

Harris' interest in mediation dates from his college days and his Waking Up app has been well-received. However, he has given his attention mostly to the Hindu and Buddhist strain of meditation, ignoring the riches of the Christian experience.

This is where those who want a more complete form of meditation, one that aligns with the hunger for a relationship with the deepest element of reality, that is, God, need to turn to groups such as the long-established World Community for Christian Mediation. This is "a global spiritual community united in the practice of meditation in the Christian tradition. It shares the fruits of this practice widely and inclusively, serving the unity of all and building understanding between faiths and cultures."

The community serves people in all kinds of situations, including business people and physicians."Members of WCCM span more than a hundred countries. There are about sixty-seven national coordinators. Its international centre is Bonnevaux – an ancient monastic site now dedicated to global peace and dialogue around the daily practice of meditation – near Poitiers in France."

For the latest community news on its website have a look here, and jump into the mediation page here. 

Watch the video titled The Pilgrimage - The Way of Christian Meditation here. Access the WCCM app here 

Sam Harris is right that we must do something to rid ourselves of the "habitual distraction" that contends with us for control over our time and mind space -  "your thoughts are incessantly appearing and capturing your attention and deluding you", he says.

But you can see how more profound  the Christian experience is when meditation is regarded as the pathway to deep attention to God, leading us to "feel the feelings of God". That is the path to follow!

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