Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth

If the point of liturgy is to deliver Eucharist to layfolk it could be a drive thru. There are easier ways to do this.

Try this on for size: Liturgy as Vineyard.

• The Eucharist is the ‘penny’ for showing up and working.
  • The penny is a ‘small consolation’ compared to the bigger aims of the Vintner (The Eucharist can only be considered small next to the Beatific Vision, otherwise I think I would be in hot water)
• If you show up with a heart to work (that is, with a recent confession under your belt, [I hate saying ‘in a state of grace’ because that’s a hill St. Joan of Arc was willing to die on that we can’t really know if we’re there. In her words: “If I am not, may the Lord bring me to a state of Grace. If I am, may the Lord keep me there.”]) you get the consolation of the Eucharist.
• The Eucharist powers your work for the Kingdom, as a penny pays for the necessity of ordinary life. To keep providing for your life, you need to keep showing up to work.
• From the Vintner’s perspective, a penny must be a small token to get a lot of work done in the vineyard. He wants laborers (the harvest is great, the workers are few!), he wants fruits (grapes, or the fruits of a virtuous life), he wants to transform the fruits into glory (grapes to wine; people to saints; the world to His Kingdom).

Let’s stretch this analogy. It’s clear that ‘working in the garden’ can be ‘working in His Kingdom’ so maybe the liturgy itself isn’t the Vineyard. So what is the liturgy in this Vineyard framework?

Well, wait a second. I’ve used before the image of that venn diagram. Let me find it.

Heaven above, Earth below, the garden of eden in the middle. The Church occupies this space now. the GARDEN of Eden. Being in the Church is being in the Garden. Is the Eucharist the ‘bread line’? Liturgy is how we give thanks to God, commit to returning to work tomorrow, receive our ‘stipend’? Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, Supplication: We love you Lord, we are sorry for what we have done and failed to do, thank you for giving us your Church, help us in our necessities.

Liturgy isn’t just an elaborate ‘thank you’, though. It’s for God yes, but it’s not NOT for us. Just not ONLY for us, the way a drive thru is for our convenience.

There is a lot of ceremony wrapped up in things that kings do, ritual, pomp and circumstance, etc. The recent Coronation of Charles III comes to mind–anything the King does that is important is wrapped up in ceremony. In the Eucharist, we offer ourselves to God yes but then God steps down from heaven and visits us, too. No soul who receives the Eucharist leaves Mass without a personal audience with the King of Kings.

Liturgy is the ceremony by which we afford the proper respect to the King. Liturgy is the ritual whereby we offer ourselves in service to the King. Liturgy is the garden whereby spiritual work is done for and by the King.

So in Liturgical Comparison, to reduce the Liturgy to “But the Eucharist is Valid” (as I have done, mea maxima culpa) is a mistake.

Just riffin’ here. A lot on the ol’ noggin.

PLEASE NOTE: I have not made any claims in this post comparing the NO and TLM. I’m thinking about why the question is so important. More thoughts are coming on this, but…probably slowly. If anything I’ve said in this post is a heretical error, please tell me quickly so I can correct it–that’s because I’m stupid, not because I’m a heretic.

AMDG

Much hay is being made over the new king of babylon. The hay is being made because he is blatantly socialist, and we, of course, being red blooded Americans, are CAPITALISTS! No true scotsman, etc.

I have written in this space that I have cultivated no love for capitalism, because it is liberalism wearing a monetary mask. Because money matters involve math, we think of them as objective and scientific. Thus the logic of capitalism is indefatigable and any other economic system is inferior.

What about Socialism? Capitalism has faux worship of the free market and the magical logic of rational self interest the way Socialism has faux worship of central planning and the magical logic of just giving everyone the things they need so they will stop complaining about being poor.

Socialism and Capitalism are two sides of the same coin, and suffer from the same errors. Capitalism claims that people make the best economic decisions for themselves and regulation hinders their ability to make these decisions; Capitalism claims that this rational self interest leads in some way to public good. Socialism claims that central planners make the best economic decisions for their people and unregulated markets hinder their ability to make these decisions; Socialism claims that centralized selfless interest leads in some way to public good.

I’m not going to get into the weeds of why both of these are wrong, I’m going to focus on a specific expression of these economic models.

They both are avoiding individual responsibility to the human family. The Ayn Randian capitalist thinks building up a pile of cash, if you can get away with it, is the highest good and that if those other chumps can’t build up the same pile of cash well, all the more for you to grab. This is evil: we live in society, society is composed of members, those members have needs and life and circumstance and powers beyond control have led to the uneven distribution of goods across the human family. You are obligated (obligated!) to give liberally and generously (though prudentially) to the human family, out of love for your neighbors and love for God who blessed you with your immense pile of Cash in the first place.

The Democratic Socialist thinks that government adjudicating the particular needs of people is the highest good and all those greedy chumps that don’t want to pay into the pot are selfish and the cause of all inequality. This is evil: Forced charity is not charity, we are humans with a free choice and we must retain the option to freely choose–motivated by love, moderated by prudence–to the human family and help provide for their needs. The problem is not who is distributing goods, nor how those goods are distributed. The problem is that goods are distributed. Capitalists don’t want to, Socialists want to force it, the ouroboros spins on. Charity–both in the sense of love of neighbor and generosity with ones possessions is an urgent need of society.

There will always be poor. There will always be money. The problem with capitalists is they don’t like being forced to give. The problem with socialists is that they think forcing the giving will solve the problems.

Money doesn’t work that way.

AMDG

Fumbling my way through some ideas.

When I first encountered St. Augustine’s “I am restless until I rest in thee”, I misunderstood it. I might still not understand it. I read it as, to put it badly, “I won’t be happy until I’m Catholic”. Which maybe has a little bit of truth to it, but that’s not what it’s about. The error is that I supposed that the ‘rest’ was earthly rest, a reward for the earthly restlessness.

The promise of an earthly rest was appealing. I would not describe my upbringing as especially ‘safe’ in many respects. I have often labored under the misapprehension that if I just have the right combination of words I will be able to explain my ideas fully and finally, by someone, somewhere, be understood. It’s part of why I invested so deeply in writing–my written words were, to me, far superior to my spoken words. So I can make myself understood far easier in writing. Again, it might even be true, but the motivation is misplaced.

There is no point where you or me or anyone can be said to have done ‘enough’.

There’s no point where you can sit back and relax and there is nothing for you to think about because everything is taken care of. This is part of why wealth is an obstacle to faith, because you can create for yourself a pretty comfortable life and think that you have no worries, and you’re wrong. Life never ends, until it does. Life is a long chain of sufferings big and small. Life will always have new and weird concerns for you to be troubled over. This is the restlessness–an interminable, deep, spiritual restlessness, that there will always be something else to do.

Advice I have given to people before is that “no one will care about your problems more than you”. Absent the ability to make rest for ourselves, sometimes we turn to others. If only someone would swoop in and solve all my problems. If only the right person, the right job, the right car, the right bank balance–then I could rest. If only I had the time, the skill, the patience. If only I prayed hard enough, if only I won the lottery. THEN! Then I could rest.

For me, it manifested in the desire to be understood, as I hinted at above. If only I could articulate myself to someone fully, then I could rest, because I would know that someone, somewhere, gets me, and I wouldn’t have to live out this weird apology for existing that I so often inflict upon myself.

But there is no end. Life is restless, by definition. Life is suffering, by definition. There can be no comfort. The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have their nests, but there is no place for the son of man to rest his head! Because it is the nature of life to be restless. Every moment of every day will get an accounting in heaven, and false rest might be spiritually problematic. The day of the Lord, the sabbath, is a brief respite but is not an end, but rather is meant to be an oasis on the restless journey of life. And even if we rest, we can pray restlessly.

Many saints died on their feet, many saints inflicted suffering upon themselves as an antidote to the comfort the world wanted to inflict upon them. Far from trying to ‘solve’ discomfort, they embraced it as a fact of life, and made it sanctifying. If God made them wealthy in suffering, they offered it for others as liberally as if they had been given a bag of gold.

It can be the work of a lifetime to come to terms with this fact, to stop trying to “solve” the “problem” of discomfort and restlessness. Our lives will be restless until we rest with the Lord–until we rest IN the Lord. Until we get to heaven, and in the beatific vision experience the good and beautiful and true, the comfort of Christ. Only in heaven is there true rest, and it lasts for an eternity. Rest unending! Surely that comfort and rest is worth deferring all other comforts and rests of this world.

And, for me, the manifestation came in the desire to be understood. It struck me, on the drive home from Mass recently, that Christ promises that we will be fully and truly known. To know (God, and others) even as we are known (by God). No one knows us better than God. Surely a lifetime of misunderstanding is worth an eternity of being known.

That, my friends, is cause for hope. Restless we may be, with perseverance through this vale of tears, we can trust in the promise of Rest in Thee.

AMDG

Consequentialism says that as long as the result of an act is good, the act is good.

Consequentialism is evil, and is used to justify many evils which are perceived to be good.

The moral act is almost always harder, longer, involves more individual sacrifice, and less popular.

It is of the utmost importance to choose the moral act in every case.

Two wrongs can not make a right.

AMDG

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is the father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

– Longfellow

People like to say “the west needs enchantment,” but I consider this a meaningless cliche.

The west has enchantment. The west is capable of enchantment. We haven’t lost it.

We don’t need to change how we believe, how we behold, how we talk. I don’t need to turn into some cartoonish willy wonka character frolicking in the street and splashing in every puddle.

My grandfather, on his deathbed, looked at my grandmother and said, “Hello, beautiful.” Those were, as I understand it, his last coherent words. Love is what enchanted my grandfather to my grandmother. Love is what enchants us to the world. Love is a choice.

When people say “the west needs enchantment”, they say it like you can just add enchantment back into the mix. What they mean when they say this is that the west is loveless.

That’s not entirely true either. I don’t care about “the west” as a distinction. It’s fairly meaningless these days anyway. But Christianity is not loveless. Modernity is loveless. Modernity is sterile in every sense of the word. A pristine, shrink wrapped, single use package.

God is love. It’s the boring, mundane, vale of tears love, though–not a spicy romance. God sends the sunrise every morning to illuminate your drive to work at a boring job that pays the bills and provides for your family. But when God made creation he said it was “very good”. When God sees us, perhaps He will say, “hello, beautiful”. And He will mean it in a way no one else can, because he ordered every atom of our being.

Therein lies enchantment. Love. “the west” “needs” “enchantment” because “the west” needs God, from whom all blessings flow.

I hate to break it to you, modernity: you can’t get Christ without the cross.

AMDG

I have not read “A Christmas Carol”, and the only version I have watched is the muppet version. What that says about me, I leave to you to judge.

It does however capture the moment Bob Cratchit raises a glass to toast the Founder of the Feast, his miserly employer, Ebeneezer Scrooge.

I went to the Midnight Mass last night for Christmas at the FSSP Parish I’ve been attending since September or around thereabouts. At the very beginning, they went and reverenced the Nativity scene. There was a child Jesus above the tabernacle, seemingly presiding over the Mass.

Christ, even as an infant, was no less the founder of the feast for taking on his mortal flesh. Far more than that, actually–the founder of the world.

Christmas is nothing less than raising an annual toast to the foundation of the incarnation, the founding of the founder, the creation of the creator. Who took his flesh from Mary, Our Mother.

Today is a beautiful feast for many reasons. But may I humbly suggest that you take a moment and raise a glass to the Founder of the World–even if he seems for the moment to be miserly, he knew your name from the very beginning, and made this world one you might enjoy. So, enjoy it, and if only this one day–give gracious thanks.

God is good.

AMDG

Authors Note: Unseasonable Greetings! Merry Christmas! God bless you! The contents of this post is not Christmassy and I don’t feel like finding a way to make it so. I hope to have more to say on the subject–the Christmas Season lasts plenty long. For now, suffice it to say that I wish Joy in your hearts and to the whole world. God love you all!

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Except that God build the house, they labor in vain who build it. – Psalm 126

I’ve been trying to integrate the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary into my prayer life. I say this for context, not because I think it’s something everyone should do. My spiritual life is in a state of upheaval, in a good way, so I’m always reluctant to talk about it but anyway this context seems more avoidable the longer I make this disclaimer.

In so doing, I’ve had repeated exposure to Psalm 126 and the quote about ‘Except that God build the house, they labor in vain that build it’. In other words: If God isn’t with us, what hope do we have? If God is with us, who can be against us?

We can, with prayer, lay elaborate spiritual groundwork for our lives. We can build an invisible castle with prayer, as long as we hold it loosely, allowing for the will of God. There’s a difference between “I want a new car” and “God help me get to where I am going”. The former is a little short sighted, though God does inspire us to ask for what we need. The latter feels a little more resigned to me–except that God gets me to work, they commute in vain that travel.

The more I type the more lost I feel. The point I am fumblingly trying to make is that we can, through prayer, lay extensive ground work in the world around us. We can pray for people without them ever knowing, and build a castle of prayer around them. We can pray for the world. We can pray for our needs, and the needs of others. We can offer sacrifices and blessings. We can invoke the intercession of saints.

And all the people in our lives, all the people closest to us, we can build these invisible castles out of prayer with the help of God. God can instantiate these invisible castles into real ones–but perhaps he likes for us to send Him the raw materials to work with.

Cutting to the chase: This thought of building invisible castles has helped me a lot. It helps me reconcile the invisibility of the work and the intangibility of the ‘results’. I am giving it to God, and God is doing the hard work.

Build invisible castles around your loved ones, your friends, and people you want to know. No prayer is wasted.

AMDG

Writing from my phone so not a full essay.

• Understanding Fiat to be print-at-will currency. I know it has a technical definition, i cant be bothered to look it up right now.
• Understanding currency to be certificates delegating to the bearer the authority of the sovereign to requisition goods for the provision of necessities
• Understanding that this model of currency will tend to be created “ex nihilo”, because currency that is expensive to create is slow and so inefficient at providing for necessities
• Therefore: Fiat accomplishes the ends of currency on behalf of the sovereign very effectively and qua provision of necessities this is a good thing.
• Outside of that, fiat leaves the door wide open for other less good shenanigans, for which some manner of constraint must be applied. I once suggested a “bread standard” and i still kinda like it.

Open for thoughts and comments cuz i know im often a doofus.

AMDG

Another year almost in the books. What a remarkable year it has been.

Last year, I chose the patronage of St. Josemaria Escriva and the word “Presence”. The Saints do joy in coming to our aid, and they do help in their way and not our way. St. Josemaria Escriva put some stick about in my life, and things have been all stirred up. In my personal life, I have had a kind of…well, I wish I had a more romantic word for it, but what is coming to mind right now is a spiritual ‘algae bloom’. It’s been rapid, uncontrolled, miraculous, beautiful, and utterly devastating. I don’t know how to explain it and so I will stop talking about it lest my awe transmute into some bizarre form of pride. God is good and his activity in my life has left me speechless.

St. Therese of Lisieux, my patroness for the previous year, returned with a vengeance as well, especially surrounding my visit to her relics. I picked up a copy of the correspondence of her saintly parents, a book called “A Call To Deeper Love”, and it is moving. I picked up the book on the suspicion that they were circling my spiritual horizon, that St. Therese has kicked the problem of my life up the chain to her parents, which is never a good sign. Before I started writing this, I thought the word for 2026 would be something like “Grounded”, but the overflowing of my heart tells me the word has to be “love”. And my saints for 2026 St. Louis and Zelie jointly.

And I’m not talking about merely human love in its various forms, but Divine Love. I have a debt of Divine Love I have received from God–He has given me so much, I have given so little. So whatever else I do in 2026, I hope to say this time next year that I loved with a Divine Love, through the intercession of Sts Louis and Zelie.

My plans for writing here never go quite as I intended, but somehow this year was one of the best yet for the blog according to the arbitrary numerical metrics by which these things are measured. I don’t know if that’s because any more of you are reading or if it’s robot crawlers or what, but anyway I’m grateful for the stats boost and the vote of algorithmic confidence. I will continue writing here until the Good Lord says otherwise, there’s a lot to figure out in the world and I am still not a saint so the work continues.

God bless you and Our Lady keep you.

Sts Louis and Zelie, pray for us.

AMDG

I’ve been thinking about Cultural criticism at the encouragement of friends-of-the-blog (you know who you are, sorry not to link).

I have a complicated relationship with The Culture–maybe due to my transient circumstances, I’ve felt pretty rootless. And thanks to Catholicism I don’t feel a deep association with any particular art form either. There’s “Catholic Art” and there’s everything else. I struggle to have strong opinions about ‘everything else’, but I care a great deal about Catholic Art.

I am on the record as saying that there need not be a Christ-Child in every painting. Holy Art can be Holy but Art is an umbrella under which Holy Art finds shade, there are other kinds of Art–a lot of it pretty awful–but some of it is NOT holy and yet also beautiful.

Art-Deco was the last, great artistic statement made by America. Great in the sense of both scope and quality. America has had great-in-scope cultural impact since then but not equal impact to quality. America tends to export degeneracy at a shocking rate.

And yet–the antidote to degeneracy is not to put a Christ-Child in every painting. It might help inoculate ourselves against the age, but at the same time we need to be able to speak to our fellow man in his language not ours. If he watches football on sunday, listens to the radio, and goes to the movies–we need to know what he will be seeing.

We need art that is holy, because holy art raises the mind to God.

We need art that, though not with a holy subject, is still beautiful, because beauty raises the heart to God.

We need to desire to make things that are worthy of God, because working to be worthy of God raises our will and/or our spirit to God.

In typing this out, there are two kinds of cultural commentary. What does the Holy/Beautiful/Quality output of a culture say about that culture? And what does everything else say? What is the creator trying to say?

I don’t have an intuitive sense for this. I’m more of a logic brain. But I think this is an interesting exercise and I think it will broaden my horizons somewhat to start trying to observe. I won’t make promises to write more on this subject, only say that I am working on noticing. I have noticed some things already, and I have no idea how to talk about it. Stay tuned.

AMDG