Smoke And Black Mirrors

I spend a lot of my time buried in audiobooks. Philosophy, history, fantasy, science fiction, anything I can find that is a good story and is educational. I’m selective of what I put in my ears but I’m always digesting more info. I don’t have much access to social media. I don’t watch TV besides the occasional movie. I do my best to limit my randomized googling on the internet that my smart phone gives me easy access to. In a lot of ways I’m very disconnected from the latest events and the main stream media, and usually having conversations with Saint Augustine or following Sam and Frodo through the blasted wasteland of Mordor seems like a good use of my attention.  And this is not accidental, there is too much in my modern, ordinary life to take on the worries of news corporations. Or what they tell you, you need to worry about.

   I hear snatches of what’s going on in the world. Covid, Ukraine, and now Roe vs. Wade. And I bet in another months we will be back onto Gay rights in Pride Month, and back to election talk in the fall, and probably more war rumors for the Winter. The world lives off the Headlines we see scroll past our screens. This the new (secular) liturgical  year that we live by. Rising gas prices, rising food prices. Inflation and unemployment. Rising violence. The headlines never change. And our easy access to them makes us feel the oppression of knowledge. We know all these things. We are aware of so many social movements and conspiracies, our thoughts are written by the Wall Street journal and Fox News, and CNN. We have lost touch with the world immediately around us and concern ourselves with the great social problems of the world.

Our bills and work commutes, and getting church and being catholic some how seem to take a back seat to all this. Have my Parish is up in arms about abortion right now.

I’m up in arms about Saturday (aswell as Sunday) Mass attendance. People want the federal government to change its policies. I want more men to show up to Saturday work periods at the church.

People palaver over the problems in the church and the problems

With the world. Communist revolutions and doctrinal details. Overnight it’s as if everyone became a Cannon Lawyer and received their doctorate in Philosophy. But the churches are empty.

For all our knowledge and awareness, we have left Christ alone in the chapel. Sitting in a bronze box. With only the angels and the holy dead to keep him company. While the living concern themselves with wars, and pandemics and women’s rights. Well we have to be concerned with current affairs don’t we? We have to know what’s going on, don’t we?

No we don’t. We must be about our fathers business.

Knowledge is useless without action. Awareness of lies brings nothing but your head filled with lies.

Everything that the modern world tells you to focus on is most certainly what you should not be focused on. We forget the world around us that we can touch and feel with our hands for the small piece of glass that is our window into “current affairs”. When is the last time you prayed a rosary? Or spoke to God? When was the last time you talked to your friends about how you struggled against temptation, and what worked and did not work? When was the last time you stopped into a church, and whispered the Lords Pray to your maker seated on his throne?

When’s the last time you spent 45 min scrolling mindlessly through triggering headlines?

The Poem  “East Coker” by one of my favorite Poets, T.S. Elliot has something very pertinent to say about these worries and calla ties that assail us constantly.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

What do you Hope for?

What do you Love?

What do you put your Faith in?

What are you thinking about?

One of my older brothers favorite instructions to young men that he mentors is: “stop thinking”.

Stop thinking about all of these headlines outside of your control. Get to church. Be apart of your church. Grow your church. Focus on the things local to you and in your control. Your social media posts will not change the world. Start worrying about the state of your soul and not the state of gender identity.

Refocus.

Stop living your life by Mamon’s Calendar.

Live by the true liturgical year.

Live that life. Parade that life. Celebrate that life. Escape the circular story of women’s rights, gay rights, BLM, war, murder, gun control, and legalizing weed. If you think I’m crazy go look at which months the church has dedicated to what things and what the secular world has imposed over them.

Seize control of the things in your live you can actually control and do not let your interest be focused by the next headline you scroll past with your thumbs.

God isn’t going to care how aware you were of the next social movement. Awareness is not action.

God will care how much you reflect Him in the mirror of your soul, not your cell phone screen.