Metanoia

A boy is alone in the dark. He’s been preparing for this moment for weeks—what it is about he can’t really say. He’s only seven years old, and he’s been going to strange classes for weeks at the church his family goes to only several times a year. The church is a modern building, and yet gothic at the same time. It is full of stained glass and shadows. It’s dark. The boy never forgets the dark.

He was taught a lot that he couldn’t remember. That God was in the bread, or was the bread, and that he would have to eat him, or something similarly gruesome to a seven-year old mind. In the dark he was brought to a cavernous room the day before it was time. He was told to confess his sins, and he was scared. What could he say, what could he do? He took the path of least resistance and confessed to cruelty to his dog, but he was still scared, and who isn’t cruel to anything seen as lesser?

It’s the next day, and he’s kneeling. He’s been told to always kneel in the church; its priest and old Monsignor of questionable countenance always insisted on it. Why is it so dark? He’s supposed to eat God, and he does. He doesn’t feel changed, but instead turns around and walks to his parents. Before he leaves the church, he finds a window, stained-glass, and sees the light. An ordinary light, but yet not. For a moment he forgot the darkness. As he left the church that day, he looked back and saw both, streaming light and yawning void, and he knows they’ll always be there, even when he thinks he grows up, and when he thinks he forgets.

That boy was me, and maybe you too. We always have to make a choice.

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There’s something wrong with the world.

Almost everyone feels that way at one time or another. The armchair psychiatrists amongst us usually trace this back to some psychological problem, a bad childhood, internalized phobias etc. In a certain way, I suppose this isn’t a bad impulse, but it makes the mistake of seeing human beings as bodies with traumas and not souls in need of salvation.

For years I was involved with the right-wing movement known as the “alt-right.” I shouldn’t say I was merely involved, but that I was a leading polemic voice, for whatever that’s worth. I edited articles and contributed to the general discourse of far right narratives for years, and I was wrong. Maybe I wasn’t wrong about everything; after all as C.S. Lewis says: “Fascism and Communism, like all other evils, are potent because of the good they contain or imitate.”

Admitting you’re wrong is hard, but not impossible. People do it all of the time, every day in fact. They admit it about matters large and small: about politics, religion, sports—even the weather, for that matter. I was wrong about more than the weather, though, and more than politics and religion, for that matter. I was wrong about my own soul.

The best place to start is at the beginning. I was always a big believer in taking the easy way out of any problem. This is easy enough to do when you’re of above average intelligence and everything that comes so hard for your peers growing up is so easy for you. But it wasn’t enough to be a slacker: I was a slacker with ambition.

In middle school I read George Orwell’s 1984 and it sparked a passion in me against socialism and anything that smacked of authoritarianism. Really, a rather inauspicious beginning to the career of a future pseudo-fascist radical. In college I was a libertarian activist, and later my early career path was in the world of libertarian and conservative Washington D.C.-based think tanks.

I became disillusioned fast, as is easy to do whenever you go to Washington D.C. Agendas seemed mostly about tinkering around the edges of the modern welfare state, and what’s more, Washington breeds a detachment if not outright hostility to average red state American life. I was born in New Orleans and went to school in Mississippi, so I’ve always had a schizophrenic attitude when it came to my neighbors. On one hand, I desperately wanted to be accepted as educated and above where I came from, and on the other, I had a real contempt for the elitist dismissal of “rednecks and racists.” In some respects I still do. This divide isn’t one that’s going away anytime soon, but its also been with us since cities were first reared on the Tigris and Euphrates thousands of years ago.

As my career stalled, and my drinking increased, so did my own anger. I supplemented this Dionysian urge with an Apollonian diet of right wing classics, everything from Evola and Junger on down to Nietzsche, Spengler, Dugin and the rest. I got a lot out of this reading, and still do. In fact some of it probably helped as obscured signposts towards where I finally ended up.

My religious consciousness was to some extent bound up with my politics. I was raised as a standard Louisiana Christmas-Easter Catholic, though I did serve as an altar boy at my local Life Teen mass in high school. I went through the typical rebellious period towards the end of high school and college and considered myself an atheist and later on a Zen Buddhist. I even spent a brief weekend once at a Buddhist monastery.

My return to Christianity was essentially political, at first. I attended a high church continuing Anglican parish, in part because I felt it accorded to some sort of idea of the white race at prayer. I never ceased considering myself as a Catholic, however. I returned to Rome not long before I got married, and I prayed for faith. I prayed desperately that prayer from the Gospel of St. Mark, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!”

Then my life fell apart.

My wife and I were “doxxed” to our employers and had to reflect on our lives. We were newly married and we had no jobs, no career prospects, and no professional networks anymore. We had to start over. It is easy enough to turn bitter, and Lord knows there have been days I’ve stewed, wishing nothing but harm on others. Ultimately that is not what we are called to do.

I was lucky. We got to start over again, if only for a little while. I went to graduate school and that experience helped to change me. Not all at once. It was an ongoing process, but in reengaging with the Great Books, with Plato, St. Augustine and all the rest, I felt my soul start to change.

I guess I would call myself a conservative now. But not in the sort of static or ideological sense that word typically conjures. Instead of the idols of race, power, and anger I once bowed before, now my main concern is conserving my own soul and that of my families, and if I can do some good for my neighbor too, I’ll count myself blessed.

I returned to Catholicism and attended the Latin Mass for awhile, and I kept praying that litany from St. Mark. It was hard to pray in Catholic churches though. I started to go to the Latin Mass as a political expression, but I stayed for the reverence, and the silence. But, it was becoming increasingly loud in that silence. The status of the Mass, saving the “West”, etc. Mass started to feel less like an engagement with the divine and more like a political statement. But ultimately that’s my problem, and I don’t begrudge anyone who is able to find and keep God there when I couldn’t.

Then one morning I went somewhere else. It was dark that morning, but the open doors were warm, and wood and icons greeted me. Through windows I saw a light come down, a light I had forgotten, and I was able to pray again.

It was at an Orthodox Church where I found again, and continue to find Him again and again. Sure, I’ve also read Church history till I was blue in the face and puzzled endlessly over apophatic vs. scholastic theology and the essence/energy distinction, but really only one thing matters. I’ve found Christ again and as David Bentley Hart once so elegantly put it, it’s a choice between Christ and Nothing.

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Send Down The Storm

“May I address the foreman of the jury?

Why do you hold back your fury?

Don't hold back your fury”

- Mobile, The Mountain Goats

I’ve thought a lot about the Book of Jonah. It is redundant to say that a book of the Bible is “relevant” for any time, but with fear and trembling, I must say that it is true. For anyone whose main concern is “defending the West”—or who seeks to wield Christianity as a sword, as the writer Paul Kingsnorth so eloquently puts it—the Book of Jonah is a helpful stumbling block.

Jonah, like many of us, is ethnocentric. God asks him to warn the gentiles of Nineveh to repent, and save their city. But he was frightened, and fled. Like all of us, he fled from God when what was asked of him was hard. Into the depths he went, and from the depths he returned. Upon delivering God’s message to the Assyrians, God spares them from His wrath, Jonah was angry. Why should the non-believers, those not part of his nation, be spared? Why shouldn’t God strike them down?

“This decision greatly displeased Jonah, and he became very angry. 2 Praying to the Lord, he said, “Lord, isn’t this exactly what I predicted when I was still in my own country? That is why in the beginning I fled to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, who is slow to anger, abounding in mercy, and ready to relent from inflicting punishment. 3 Therefore, Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4 The Lord replied, “Do you have any right to be angry?”

In the post-Christendom West, we’ve all felt that cry. It’s humbling to look on the great cathedrals of our ancestors and look at the great monuments that they have built. We want to know why our cathedrals now burn, why our countries are changed beyond recognition, and we cry out in anger and desperation, just like Jonah, and ask why?

When we don’t get an answer, we start looking for our own. We start picking up swords that look like crosses and start searching for monsters to slay. Often, we stare too deep into the whirlwind or the world and hear not the voice of God like Job, but our own wrath echoed back unto us, until we resemble those monsters we set out to destroy.

God reminds us, like he reminded Jonah, in his own time, and in his own way. The plant that grows and that withers is like human civilization and achievement. The plant shelters Jonah, and he is happy until God removes it and he is angry. But His ways aren’t ours. Spengler once likened the growth and decay of civilization to that of a plant, and in this he was perhaps more right than he knew. As ours withers, we share Jonah’s anger, but we would do well to remember the Lord’s admonition:

“You are concerned about the plant, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow. It came into being in one night, and it perished in one night. 11 Therefore, why should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot tell their right hand from their left, as well as innumerable cattle?”

Too often we want things to happen in our own time. One thing being a parent has taught me is that control really is a fantasy; we are at the mercy of our children, of time, of nature herself, and of course at the mercy of God. Like children, we wretch and moan when we don’t get our way. We throw our tantrums, but instead of toys and teddy bears, we “adults” tend to prefer missiles and munitions.

There was an old conservative movement slogan: “don’t immanentize the eschaton.” Well, another word for eschaton is apocalypse. Apocalypse in Greek means “unveiling” and much has been made of how our age has been an unveiling, in part, of all of the inadequacies our “civilization” has had up until now. That being said, too often when one veil comes off, we try all the harder to put a new one in its place.

That’s what happens to the protagonist in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, who tries and fails to convert to Catholicism, and ultimately becomes a cultural Muslim. However hard we try to make God’s ways into our own, the more that they’ll break on the brittleness of our own strength. What we usually end up doing is making an idol of something in the world: race, power, money, or even “Christendom” itself. I know, I did it myself.

Right before Jesus began his public ministry, he was tempted by the devil. He was tempted with power; he was asked to right the wrongs of the nations and reign over them as an earthly king. His words: "Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only,” should echo in our hearts and minds every time we find ourselves setting up those earthly idols in our lives.

Ultimately though, all idols are lies. Placing our faith in anything short of the apostolic faith handed down through Christ and explicated by the fathers will leave us wanting. Worse than that, it will make us liars, and servants of their prince.

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The Saruman Trap

“If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Whenever I’m asked for the name of my favorite novel, I never hesitate: The Lord of the Rings. I’ve loved it since I was a boy and still try to reread it annually. For years I stopped doing that. It was only in the last three years that I picked it up again. It taught me something about the beliefs I held, and maybe it will help you too.

In the alt-right, “dissident” right, “civilizational” right, or however they want to brand themselves, there’s a common refrain: The only way out is through. We have to be as ruthless as our enemies, and we must use whatever means necessary to ensure the survival of “Western Civilization.”

Elon Musk encapsulated this mindset perfectly in a tweet where he said: “Unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.” Of course, bravery is needed and it is important to stand up for the faith, but Christianity will never perish until the end of the world. The Incarnation was more important than the Roman civilization where it came into the world, and that Incarnate reality is still around long after the realm of the Caesars fell into ruin. As human beings, it’s easy to think something more must be done than follow those Gospel orders that are so hard for us. We want to believe in something easy, a silver bullet. We want to control the outcomes with our own will and action.

The real trick from the enemy is the compelling sense of responsibility that is animated in those who want to “do something,” to save what was once Christendom, or the West. There’s a relentless refrain of “I,I,I” in the activist mindset, “only I can do something,” “only I care,” or even that hidden I in “It’s up to me.” To paraphrase J.G. Fichte, the I does indeed posit itself, and that’s our problem: we always think about what it is that we want, and never enough about what God wants, or asks of us. We do our best to find those silver bullets, or rings of power, and in the words of Gandalf use “the desire of strength to do good,” but the desire to right earthly wrongs on earthly terms is the true road to bondage and tyranny.

The character of Saruman the White in Lord of the Rings is the leader of a group of non-human guardians of Middle Earth, commonly seen as “wizards,” but something greater than wizards in truth. Saruman gives into the temptation that Gandalf and another powerful elf, Galadriel, both resist: to take hold of dark power in order to do good.

Saruman says to Gandalf:

“A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Numenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow: and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it.”

He might as well have said: “Hail Sauron, Hail Istari, Hail victory!”

We all want to consider ourselves wise. That we have the right answer, that we have the silver bullet. It's easy for any of us to fall into the Saruman trap. Many people in politics do, regardless of the goodness of their intended aims.

What’s harder is knowing when to abandon such folly that passes itself off as wisdom. One of my biggest pet-peeves with Peter Jackson’s film interpretation of LoTR is that it leaves out the “Scouring of the Shire.” If you’ve read the books, you know that this is a crucial scene for the books, representing the hobbits coming into their own and taking responsibility for their community. Saruman, cast down from power but escaping punishment in the second book, makes his way to the Shire and there reigns as a petty tyrant over the hobbits using cheap tricks instead of great magic, enforcing a regime of revenge and cruelty over those weaker than himself. In the end, his small-souled desire for revenge and domination do him in, and the would-be tyrant of Middle-Earth dies stabbed by his much abused and twisted henchman, Grima Wormtongue.

We all risk becoming like Saruman in the end, a resentful conjurer obsessed with hurting those with the least power to harm us back. It’s an ugly path and one anyone who thinks they’ve got the final solution to modernity’s problems should remember. Saving the world shouldn’t be a substitute for saving our souls.

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Repentance is a suspicious word in our society. If someone has “repented” of anything, from sexual sin, hatred or even good old fashioned calumny, the crowd out there can’t wait for them to fall. With Christians, whether they be Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant, this is doubly so. The only thing the world loves more than a “repentant” sinner, is a sinner who falls back into sin. But, there’s old Greek word, Metanoia, typically translated as “repentance.” As my trusty Greek lexicon tells me it means something closer to turning around, or changing course. In this life that’s all we can do, turn around, and hope we take the right exits.

That boy is older now, and he was in the dark for years. Seeing the light again hurts, but it’s better than the alternative.