What’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?”
From "How Catholicism Became a Meme" in Vox
This is from a quote from Dasha Nekrasova, " a central fixture of the so-called “dirtbag left,” a cadre of progressive podcasters, posters, and provocateurs, according to Interview. She's also a practicing Catholic.
The meme article is mostly about trendy silliness that overlaps with themes I wrote about in a post entitled "Reactionary Chic." But it struck me as I read it that one of the main reasons I remained Catholic when I was most sorely tempted to throw the whole thing off was precisely because it was for me a countercultural statement. It's also because I came to believe the Church's fundamental assertions, but I could believe them without being officially "Catholic". But it's that feeling of homelessness in the whole capitalist, materialist, rationalist, soul-flattening, utilitarian world that Enlightenment rationalism constructed, even if with all the best intentions, that drives many like me to search for something deeper and richer. So I sympathize with what Nekrasova is saying and to what the rest of the Vox article points to inchoately even if trivializing, vulgar way. Irony can often be a way for someone to present what he hopes is true but hasn't the courage to commit to it. He can put it out there to test the waters while his tone gives him plausible deniability. The author, despite the mandatory ironic hipness her pop-culture perch at Vox requires of her, has an earnest moment or two near the end of the article.
And I remain Catholic for the same reason I remain an American. I see what is best in both for all that is embarrassing and corrupt in both. I came to see Catholicism as the great tradition of the West, for whatever its failures and crimes, it is still the custodian of the great marriage of Greek thought with Jewish revelation--and a liturgical tradition that preserves a participatory epistemology/aesthetic that must be retrieved by the broader culture in the future one way or the other. I see it as playing this preservationist role, much as the medieval monasteries preserved classical learning in a brutish society that had no use for it, and of a sacramental sensibility and sense for the sacred that must at some point be retrieved to energize a future renaissance.
The Vox article reflects a broadly experienced longing for something lost. This longing is valid, and even if it leads many to look for love in all the wrong places, it doesn't mean that there isn't a right place that what is longed for can be found. A wrong place is nostalgia. Many of the northern European Romantics in the late 18th and early 19th century converted to Catholicism out of such nostalgia for the richly symbolic world mostly rejected by the Reformation. And we see a similar nostalgia as a underlying motivation for the interest in Catholicism to which the article points. But there is no future in nostalgia, and the longing that leads some Catholic restorationists and integralists to go native in the past is unhealthy and fundamentally delusional. And yet, I would argue, there is something in this longing that can be worked with in a positive, constructive way.
In retrieval we have something that is quite different from nostalgia. It's born of the same longing that leads some to nostalgia, but its project is not about restoring the lost forms, but about reconnecting with the deep, living energies that gave them their form in the first place. The experience that leads to retrieval is rather like remembering something that has been forgotten, and wondering how one could have been so absentminded about something so essential, so necessary for life. What has been forgotten is, to use Heidegger's term, "Being", but I prefer to call it the 'Living Real'. It is the source of all true creativity because to be connected to it is to be connected to the origins of all true creativity. To have achieved such a connection is the only what to be truly 'original' in the deepest sense of the word. Our lack of creativity is directly related to our forgetfulness. Nostalgia is the experience of the loss of the Living Real, but it has none of the creativity of being deeply connected with it.
The Church, for all its failings and limitations, points to this deep originary source and seeks in its liturgies to connect us to it. All true art, whether or not it is churchy, is deeply liturgical in this sense. That the Church isn't doing this particularly well in this moment is really a reflection of how it has been weakened in a society whose cultural operating system is a rationalist materialism in which it cannot thrive. And so it's understandable that the future for such a church seems rather bleak. Because the Church's life is deeply implicated with the life of the culture in which it is embedded, it suffers the same problems as those that afflict the broader culture. What ails both the Church and the broader culture is its lost confidence in their ability to live something that manifestly expresses its connection the Living Real.
The Church, however, performs an important function for the broader society in its preserving a portal to the Living Real, which at this moment for the most part works underground and out of sight. If in good faith, you knock on this portal, it shall be opened unto you. But to be truly receptive to it requires that you be open to having most of your presuppositions turned upside down.
It's there. But for now, it's mostly unmanifest. Its presence is subtle, and so its power as a culture-shaping energy is dormant. I don't believe that will always remain dormant, but for now it is. And so we find ourselves rather like the ancient Jews wandering in the wilderness, neither here nor there, neither in Egypt for which the nostalgists long, nor in Canaan toward which some (like me) retain hope that however long we must wander, it will be our destination. In the meanwhile we wander, we put one foot in front of the other, and we wonder. Unlike those who long backward to return to Egypt, we long forward in wonder.
Such 'wondering' is a big part of what constitutes the content of this blog; hence its title. It's not data driven, to say the least, but what of any real significance is?