Sullivan: Technology Won’t Save You From God’s Reboot

Mandeville, LA – UPDATE 1: My Facebook wall has exploded with comments on this post’s prime paragraph, see for yourself:

When someone asks me “what happened to you, you used to be somebody on the radio then you went all religious” (note at least 3 former, Facebook “friends” from GA, bailed the day SiriusXM whacked me) I pause, recall my vow of humility and say “I’m trying to become somebody in heaven”.

*crickets*

READ the story of über blogger, tycoon, Andrew Sullivan who got the millions of readers, plum “commentaries” with @CNN’s Brooke Baldwin et al; flashed his faux, “catholic” homosexuality and success in our faces, then nearly died of the Sin of obsession. Friends, Sullivan has discovered what the devout aspire to: Eternity. You can’t value it with wealth or measure it in earthly comforts; but you can know when the Grace is missing from the past or present to achieve it, Sullivan:

“He had escaped, it seemed to me, what we moderns understand by time. There was no race against it; no fear of wasting it; no avoidance of the tedium that most of us would recoil from. And as I watched my fellow meditators walk around, eyes open yet unavailable to me, I felt the slowing of the ticking clock, the unwinding of the pace that has all of us in modernity on a treadmill till death. I felt a trace of a freedom all humans used to know and that our culture seems intent, pell-mell, on forgetting.”

Sullivan comes back to Catholicism, the universality of The Church, as a way back to an end to the noise of modernity.

“Their services have degenerated into emotional spasms, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary. But the mysticism of Catholic meditation — of the Rosary, of Benediction, or simple contemplative prayer — is a tradition in search of rediscovery.”

If you made it thus far you’ll enjoy the entire piece and find much to agree and ponder opposition, good. Recall that my patron, St Augustine fought the temptation to return to his vulgar, “City of Man” beginnings, his entire life after conversion. I fight it too, O patron, and am blessed to fight it with you, too. Sullivan concludes with what can be read as cynicism or Hope. Since I have no knowledge of his religious life, I’ll grant him a charitable intention and say it is The Truth he concludes with:

“But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.”

Well, if the NFL, The Voice and modern movie making are indicators, yes, vast majorities of us have been taught to ignore Eternity, Sin and the soul; is there a more grave mistake that Man can make? The Magisterium informs us, no:

“Sin is present in human history; any attempt to ignore it or to give this dark reality other names would be futile. To try to understand what sin is, one must first recognize the profound relation of man to God, for only in this relationship is the evil of sin unmasked in its true identity as humanity’s rejection of God and opposition to him, even as it continues to weigh heavy on human life and history.”

Pray, O’ God, we may all be blessed with the Grace of humility to admit our complicity in the normalization of “‘Muricanism” and “iPhone envy”. Now to find a nicely bound journal and an actual, fountain-ink pen to write some notes on how I miss SiriusXM, “fair-weather” friends; but if I serve The Commander, their loss is negated. Deo Gratias, amorentibus.

TheKingDude

Host of the Mike Church Show on The Veritas Radio Network's CRUSADE Channel & Founder of the Veritas Radio Network. Formerly, of Sirius/XM's Patriot channel 125. The show began in March of 2003 exclusively on Sirius and remains "the longest running radio talk show in satellite radio history".

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