Bastille Day

Yesterday was Bastille Day, a holiday that grows more bittersweet with each passing year.

I am, as far as that goes, a totally unreconstructed Catholic: I hate Reformation and Enlightenment alike; I am a Distributist.

Still for all this, I am not really a reactionary; I am not even a monarchist.

Nevertheless, we live in a reactionary age; and it is good for us to recognize this.

The sins and evils of our civilization have been piled up so high that they are now impossible to overlook or ignore. The politics of the present and near future will be largely or entirely premised on reactions to this present state of affairs, and its evils. For some, this will be a recipe for outrage, an endless reactionary anger that will search far and wide, through both the past and the future, for weapons to mock and destroy and undo--in this, there will be less and less difference between progressive and conservative reactionaries. For others, it will lead to despair, and all that comes with it, especially a blind and desperate willingness to submit and accept and surrender to anything or anyone that promises meaning or escape. For many, perhaps the majority, it will simply require better drugs, easier comforts, the first and vileest of which is arrogance, and the most human of which is perhaps irony.

These are not discrete categories; they will be difficult to tell apart, as indeed they already are. Trump channeled outrage, appealed to despair, and in practice gave entertainment: in this, he found a winning combination which the mavens of #theresistance are already employing for their own purposes. These are, I think, the basic elements of our future politics; and since American politics is consensus politics by necessity, they will rarely be found in their purity.

Still, these are all, in their essence, reactionary stances, and reactionary forms of politics. They are premised on the presence and unavoidability of unbearable evils. They are little more than the various poles of the Lost Cause.

There are grave dangers that come with reaction, though; and the greatest of all is the loss of any balanced, human perspective on reality, any real attempt to come to grips with the world as it is, and how one ought to live in it. The future, though, will belong, in the end, to those who can in fact do so; those who have some vision of the New Jerusalem on which to build, not those who can do no more than squabble in the ashes of Babylon.

But there is also a less grave, but still important, danger that comes with reaction; that we will do grave injustice to our fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers: that we will lose all sight of, and all touch with, whatever good truly existed in our civilization.

Everyone these days is talking about liberalism--though usually under the aspect of that amorphous and unbearable status quo of neoliberalism, or the even more degraded and repulsive substitute of libertarianism. For libertarianism is simply liberalism without liberality--that is, without any of the genuine sympathy and humanity that made the ideologies of the Enlightenment even remotely bearable by human beings. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is simply liberalism without liberty.

We have lost, as a civilization, any sense of what was once meant by liberty, as well as any idea as to why such a thing would ever be desirable. In this, those who defend liberalism commit the gravest injustices of all.

Those who defend liberalism today are generally engaged in defending technological power, technocratic knowledge and control, and universal moral indifference. The boons of freedom they defend generally boil down, at the end of the day, to their own individual ability to live in luxury, moral wantonness, and disregard for the sufferings of others.

Worshiping liberty in this sense is simply the worship of negation, if it is not simply the worship of the self.

This is not, of course, a new ideology in itself; indeed, in the trueest sense, it is as old as the Garden of Eden. Nor is it exactly new to our civilization, whose crimes and abominations of at its height are past recounting. In this, liberalism was all too often often nothing more than a convenient ideology of the powerful and the immoral: slave-owners and Imperialists and eugenicists and robber-barons.

But for all this, there was something else, too, that our civilization once possessed: something that made men fight and bleed and die and suffer to free slaves and build Republics and gain rights and welfare for the poor. This was not precisely liberalism, as we now understand it and speak about it; but it was, at its heart, a love of liberty. And is there anyone today who can even understand this liberty, let alone defend it?

Men of the past lived a life they saw as basically good and desirable; something worth aspiring to, and dying for. They lived in families and communities, with songs and traditions and histories and legends. They grew up, married, worked and ate their daily bread, prayed and worshiped, suffered and died. And in this life, they saw it as desirable that they be free from certain evils, from certain bonds, that made such a life impossible or unbearable. If men were subject to a King who recognized no rights save his own, who stole from and imprisoned his people and did violence to them, then they should be set free from him; if men were slaves, subject to beatings and violence and the breaking-up of their families and the iron laws of the market, they should be set free from this; if men were imprisoned in factories and company towns, paid starvation wages or else left to die in masses according to the whims of their employers, they should be set free from this, too. Perhaps, even, in a Republic such things would be less likely to happen; perhaps, in a Republic, the rights of all could be guarded, so that they could live well. In any event, Republic or no, there should be freedom.

As a perspective on life, this is lacking in many important ways; it is far too naturalistic for the Catholic Church and the supernatural goals and desires she brings with her. It too easily and quickly degenerates into a mere comfort and luxury, producing a disregard for the sufferings of all those who are despised or hated or safely out of sight. Then, too, all too often it trusts far too much in the goodness and decency of man, and the stability of human life in this world; it is easy for it to believe that it needs no help, no grace, and no penance for sins.

And, yes, too, there were certain arrogant, "enlightened philosophers" who supposedly argued for liberty and were inseparable from it--though oddly enough, most of these were fervent supporters of tyranny.

But when all was said and done, there is a reason why men fought and died and suffered for our civilization--because they loved their fellow men, and because they loved liberty. Not because they loved technocracy, or because they loved a libertarian ideology of the absolute validity of contracts, or because they loved their own absolute autonomy and power, or because they loved that ultimate moral indifference that allowed them to care nothing for the sorrows and sufferings of others. They died because they loved their homes and their families and their children and their nation; and because they wished these things to be free.

It is well that we should remember this.

Repentance

In the end, we will all be forced to face the truth. It is a terrible thing, but it can only be escaped for so long; and the longer we run, the harder we fight, the more we strive to flee from it it, the more terrible it will be when it finds us at last.

This is the only thing to ask for, the only thing for which we should pray: to repent, now; to have all our lies and illusions torn down, now; to learn, somehow, to live in the truth, now.

It is one thing to pity those who suffer in the truth--they will have their reward, if they do not taste it already. We should pity far more those who do not suffer in the truth, those who live in the secure solitude of their own lies and comforts, who will have, in the end, nothing save the fragile, falling walls of their own indifference. It is these for whom Christ wept in the garden. He wept for them, because they could not weep for themselves.

I have lived all this, have drained this cup to the brim, and I know its bitterness well.

I know also that there is one other thing for which we should pray: mercy. It is a terrible thing to face reality, a terrible thing to repent--as terrible as waking from a dream. This is why we must all pray, always, for ourselves and for one another, that God will be very gentle with us: that he will show us the truth with love, and help us to be able to bear it; that he will take us by the hand, and embrace us with tenderness, even as we stand face to face with the Cross. This he has done for me, a thousandfold; and I am grateful. May he do it for us all.

This is why we must all bear each other's burdens, love one another, intercede for one another, without any exception at all, before God; for in the last balance we are all the same. No matter our sins, no matter our virtues, we will all, in the end, be forced to face the full and terrible truth of who and what we are, and what we have done, to ourselves, to each other, and to God himself, suspended on the Cross of his love.

Let us pray, then, for repentance and mercy, for ourselves and each other and the world. There is no other hope.

Trusting God

We speak very often of trusting God, but all too often, as I know from bitter experience, this is nothing more than a facile collection of words. We "trust God" to give us what we desire; and when he does not, we feel our trust has been betrayed, or misplaced. This is the trust of the consumer, or, at best, the trust of the distant, distrustful child.

This is not the sort of trust God desires of us. Here, it is helpful to consider the root meaning of the word "trust," in all the languages I know (Greek, Latin, English): to entrust something to someone. In this sense, trust is not vague and sentimental; it is quite practical and concrete: I have entrusted this valuable thing to you, and in doing so, I have given up whatever power I might have over it. It is now in your control, rather than mine, and you have the power to do with it whatever you wish. Yet in giving it, I *trust* that you will preserve it, that you will do well by it and me; and most of all, I trust in the pledges you have offered me, that you will keep the promises you have made. I trust you to love me.

This is what God desires of us: that we should entrust every thing we possess, every thing we are, from the lowest to the highest, to him. In this, it is far from sufficient merely to entrust to God our highest and best thoughts and desires and ideas, the "religious" or "moral" or "successful" side of ourselves. Inn fact, as Christ on the Cross, God desires far more to receive our sins, our wounds, our sufferings, and our terrible humiliations, all our lack of control and understanding and dignity. Not only this, though--for do our lives in this world not consist just as much of innumerable tiny things--indifferent, trivial things--things hardly worthy of our own or other's considerations? Christ desires these as well.

In this life, we will have, necessarily, many desires. Most of them will be for good things; some of them, inevitably, will be disordered in some way. Much prayer, though by no means all, consists in the expression of our desires to God--and this is right and proper. Still, all too often, we pray, and ask, in way that is fundamentally without faith. We ask God to grant our desires, yet at the same time we keep our desires, our fears, our hopes, entirely under our own control and power--and in doing so, we center our prayer in ourselves. We do not truly entrust our desires to God: that is, put them under his power, give them to him in such a way that they become his rather than ours. And for good reason--for the alienation of the self from its own desires is a terrifying and painful thing. Yet if we do this, we will find, in all things, a peace that is denied those who trust in themselves.

Then, too, we will have sufferings, torments, pains, things that overwhelm and humiliate us. Often, we pray to ask God to take them away--and this, in itself, is right and good, as Christ prayed in the garden. Still, here, too, we pray very often without trust. We do not entrust our sufferings and pains to God, in such a way that they become his; that is, in such a way that he may choose not to take them away at once, that they might become in fact, a participation in the Cross of Christ, of infinite love for human beings and for God. Often, too, we are ashamed to entrust to God our own human weaknessess, our natural desires for health and happiness and peace. We feel they are a discredit to us; that we should be stronger, better, able to bear sufferings and humiliations with perfect composure and resignation; this is madness, since even Christ cried out on the Cross. All our human and natural weakness, all our desire for release and relief and escape from suffering, is Christ's as well--and we must give him what is his. Even what is most imperfect in us must become his, to do with as he pleases.

All of this is, and should be, absolutely terrifying--for it is the real and tangible giving of our deepest selves, of all in which we repose our confidence and from which we draw our sense of control and assurance, into the total power of another.

In this giving, though, we trust, quite rightly, in the love of God for each one of us. For we have two real and tangible pledges of this love from God, to which we can always turn. In the first place, there is the love of God present and manifest in our creation and preservation at each moment, in love; the love by which he entrusted to us, and continues to entrust to us, the great and terrible gift of existence, to do with as we please. In the second place, though, and far greater, is the eternal pledge of God's love made manifest in the Incarnation and Cross of Christ. If God loves us so much as to seek to give to us his very self, to entrust himself and his divinity to a weak human body and soul, and then to entrust that body and soul to Mary and Joseph and the sinful Apostles, and finally to Pilate and the priests and the soldiers and each and every one of us to torture and crucify and crown with thorns: then how can any of us fear to entrust ourselves to him? If this is not a love worthy of trust, there can be no such thing.

This is the challenge of the Christian life; to trust God, and in doing so, to entrust everything to him. It is not easy, by any means--but I speak from experience in saying it is far easier, and far more blessed, than any other path we can follow. For in this path, we will be led and guided by God himself--and in all others, we will be led and guided only, in the end, by ourselves: and God is far greater, and far kinder, than ourselves.

God be with you all.