A Sound of Sheer Silence

I am writing this on November 6, 2024, a few hours after waking up to the see the results of the Election.  If you are looking for answers, unfortunately I have none to provide you.  Nor I do I have any sort of concrete set of plans. Instead, as I lay in bed unable to get back to sleep, I came up with three principles that I hope to follow in the days, weeks, and months ahead.  I think this is going to be bad, bad in a way that none of us who have lived our entire lives in the United States have ever experienced.  How bad, in what ways, we can speculate about but not really actually know.  For me, in this kind of uncertainty, what matters is having a set of priorities and clear principles that you can rely on to navigate your way through chaos.  So, here are the ones I plan to be using.  Perhaps it can be useful to you as you process and make sense of what has happened. 1.  What Matters Is Each Other.  I am not  a rich or powerful man by...

Last night, I attended--for a time--Maundy Thursday services.  It was the first time I had been to Maundy Thursday, or Holy Week services at all, since 2021.  The services were held at my new parish, the one I have been attending fairly consistently since the middle of 2023.  It progressed in a fairly standard manner for the first part.  Instead of foot washing, there was hand washing, in which each person in turn was washed and then washed someone.  I've never seen the Mandatum done that way before, but it was fine.  After that, they were going to do Communion in the form of a sit down meal.  The problem was that I had plans to go to dinner with Danielle after, so I slipped out after the Peace before everyone sat down.  Which was a bit of a shame, because I always found the stripping of the altars very powerful, and I missed that. During the course of my (admittedly brief) time at the service, I mostly thought about the fact that I hadn't been si...

Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you’ve always known. --From the Orange Catholic Bible, as quoted in  Dune , Frank Herbert Lead them to Paradise. --The last words spoken by Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) in Dune: Part 2 (2024) 1. This is not going to come as a surprise to anyone who really knows me, but sometime around late junior high I read Dune.  I had seen the David Lynch movie version a couple of years before and thought it was cool but didn't really understand it (not an uncommon reaction to that film, whether one is ten as I was or an adult).  Reading...

Exactly twenty-two years ago, in February of 2002, I was living in River Forest, Illinois, finishing up my undergraduate degree.  I was living in an enormous old priory, hoping that I would be able to join the Dominicans when I was done with school in the summer (which, in fact, happened).  The priory was built in the 50s, when the Dominicans would have classes of a fifty or sixty students a year.  Those days were long gone, and so I was the only person living on the hall, on the far other side of the building from the actual Dominicans.  Other than meals, I was basically living entirely by myself. In my evenings, after getting done with my homework, I had a ritual on weekdays.  I would turn on the radio to the Chicago rock radio station Q101 and listen to the syndicated show Loveline .  Loveline  was a call-in show, focused on giving sex and relationship advice to teenagers and twenty-somethings.  The hosts of the show were comedian Adam Corolla ...