Into the desert
I have been thinking about the desert fathers again, and spent part of last night re-reading sections of Derwas Chitty’s The Desert a City, trying to put my finger on something. There are probably too many contingencies in history to draw direct parallels, but it surely seems that Religion has saturated the air in a way that has a lot folks wondering where and how faith is practiced. Things feel…well, not exactly unhinged, but definitely not settled. Claims are being made, victories recorded, and frisson seems to be the order of the day.
A sort of dualism has taken over completely - us and them, the pure and the impure, in and out. What’s more the conversation happens and re-happens hourly, every event read in terms of signs and symbols, every pause is an opportunity to assert, fight, and claim. We have filled our spaces with noise and have forgotten silence, if indeed we ever really knew it. Our connections to one and another have created a city of the entire world. No silence, only city. Only an endless marketplace of shouting and infinite walls of graffiti.
The answer to the city is the desert. The desert is where the demons lived and where the fathers went to fight them once the cities had been made Christian. To go into the desert was to confront the devil in your own sins, in ways that were somestimes fantastic and grotesque and in other ways that were subtle. Maybe those were the hardest. One thing the fathers learned was a sort of detachment, and the silence that was necessary to listen to God.
In Scetis a brother went to Moses to ask for advice. He said to him, ‘Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.’
We need this silence now more than ever. We can’t go to the desert, not physically anyway. We can, however rediscover what Martin Laird calls the “silent land,” which is the place of silence and stillness deep within us. You laugh - I can hear it, but it’s there. It’s always been there, though it may take a bit of effort to find it.
Getting to a place of silence - contemplative prayer - is difficult, at first, because we have trained ourselves to move and think and react constantly. The world we’ve built for ourselves demands it, but we can also remake small parts of it. And in those small parts, we can rediscover that our union with God - the matrix of our very existence - this union can never be lost or buried beyond reclamation. It is yours and can never be taken away any more than you can cease to suddenly exist. There, you will find the silence of the desert, and there you can build a hermitage, Carmel, or interior castle.
Antony said, ‘He who sits alone and is quiet has escaped from three wars: hearing, speaking, seeing: but there is one thing against which he must continually fight: that is, his own heart.’
The more someone enters this silence, the more they become accustomed to it, and the fainter the noise around them becomes. And then the city is not quite as noisy, and the currents are not as strong and suddenly the swirling motion of modern life begins to break a bit against the eternal things.
Evagrius wrote: a soul which has apatheia is not simply the one which is not distrubed by changing events but the one which remains unmoved at the memory of them as well.
I can’t seem to stick with Marquez, so it’s Charterhouse. The portrayal of Waterloo was interesting, for sure. From our hero’s perspective, it’s just chaos from start to finish. He doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know what’s going on, who he fought, or even if it was the Battle of Waterloo. Granted, it’s early days but Julian was a more interesting main character for me than Fabrice is…so far. We’ll see.
In queue, I have:
- El llano en llamas and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
- Como agua por chocolate by Laura Esquivel
- Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela
- El laberitno de soledad by Octavio Paz
Also 2666 by Robert Bolaño, but that’s in English.
Classwise, we’re halfway through the Canon Law sequence. It’s…occasionally interesting but parts of it are pretty dry. The second section - which will focus more on marriage - looks like it will be more practical, in terms of Things Deacons Do Which The Tribunal.
Speaking of things deacons do, a recent episode of The Pillar podcast had a decent discussion about the diaconate in the present moment.
The bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and he leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as he found them. True devotion does still better. Not only does it not injure any sort of calling or occupation, it even embellishes and enhances it.
Moreover, just as every sort of gem, cast in honey, becomes brighter and more sparkling, each according to its colour, so each person becomes more acceptable and fitting in his own vocation when he sets his vocation in the context of devotion. Through devotion your family cares become more peaceful, mutual love between husband and wife becomes more sincere, the service we owe to the prince becomes more faithful, and our work, no matter what it is, becomes more pleasant and agreeable.
— St. Frances de Sales, “Introduction to the Devout Life”
Frances de Sales has been part of my spiritual reading for some time now. I took a run at Introduction awhile back but lagged after a little while. After reading Phillipe on contemplation and Chautard on the absolutely primacy of the interior life for apostolic work, I picked up de Sales again and am finding it much more resonant. The latter chapters (“Part Second”) are nice and short - perfect for meditative reading and teeing up contemplative prayer.
For leisure reading, I am (once again) tackling Cien años de soledad. It seems to be going faster this time, but I’m not sure if it’s because this is my Nth go-round or I’m just improving. Probably a little of both.
Looking ahead, I asked Claude for book recommendations from the Mexican literary canon; it suggested Juan Rulfo, Mariano Azuela, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Octavio Paz, Laura Esquivel, and others. Very much looking forward to digging into them soon. I also have The Charterhouse of Parma sitting here on the desk.
Excellent article by Luke Plant summarizing his response(s) to a request to use his content to train an LLM for apologetics (h/t HN):
A serious regard for truth means not only that we remove falsehoods that are found by other people, but that we repent of the laxness that allowed them to be there in the first place.
Now consider the case of using an LLM to write responses to people about Christianity. How could I possibly justify that, when I know that LLMs are bullshit generators? As Simon Willison put it, they are like a weird, over-confident intern, but one that can’t actually be morally disciplined to improve.
To put a bullshit machine on the internet, in the name of Christ, is reckless. It’s almost certain that it will make stuff up at some point. This is bad enough in itself, if we care about truth, but it will also have many negative consequences.
Relic of St. John Paul II I held several years ago. Today I was blessed to receive the Precious Blood from a chalice he had used. Purified it afterward as acolyte too.
Currently reading: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz 📚
Thomas Zak explores the paschal mystery by way of Scorsese (h/t Metafilter):
In truth, the sacrifice of God makes me want to hide, makes me cower in fear at a being who would do that to himself. As I read Book of Common Prayer every day, I find myself ignoring, or glossing over certain parts of the prayers or Scriptures, concocting my own religion, something akin to Hazel Motes’ “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ” in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. I am asking, like Satan guised as an innocent girl in The Last Temptation of Christ, “If he saved Abraham’s son, don’t you think he’d want to save his own?”
Let’s make 2025 the year of the cozy Internet: websites, blogs, RSS feeds, federation of things, listservs, and the like. The Internet was perfectly useable without the big social media platforms in the past and there’s nothing except inertia preventing its return. I’d wager that everyone would feel a whole lot better day to day.
With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.
— St. John Henry Newman
More adventures with Claude: I set it to work on some Arduino code I use to drive WS2811 LEDs. As it is, they just cycle through a set of a half-dozen different patterns. I’ve got ten strands of 50 LEDs apiece and need to inject power every so many strands, so in addition to a large-ish ugly length of LED bulbs, I have 5 separate power leads coming back to a 5V PSU. In short, it’s something of a pain to set up but once we cover all the ugliness up with ornaments, the effect is quite nice.
Anyway I wanted to have some more control over it, so I had the AI iterate over some wifi-enabled options but I think my wifi hat is flaky as it tends to drop its connection randomly (which I noticed awhile back when using it for some DIY weather station experiments). I dug around in the Arduino starter kit and came up with an IR sensor and remote and had Claude write code to, first, record the various codes sent by the remote and, second, add the control functions to the code. It took a little tweaking, but the end result works great and I have 2 strands wrapped around a lamp in my office running the patterns just for fun. It even showed me how to make the simple breadboard connections required to link it all together. I have to say it’s been great fun using it chase down various “hey, what if…” tech scenarios that pop into my head. It feels a bit like the first time I used the 3-D printer to make a custom part for something which otherwise would not have existed: from brain to Tinkercad to tangible object. A little magical if I’m being honest. I start looking around thinking “what else can I use this for?”
The snow days have been nice. Everyone was home yesterday and everything was cancelled today so we’ve spent Saturday lazing, reading and tinkering. Tonight: more Factorio. It’s looking like things will generally be normal on Monday; the kids who’ve gone out and about report that the streets are fine, though I guess concerns about buses on secondaries might keep the county home one more day. We’ll just have to see.
Thoroughly enjoying Little, Big. I like it’s generally cozy pacing and the writing is just gorgeous, particularly descriptions of warm outdoor spring and summer days!
Currently reading: Little, Big by John Crowley 📚
So I just had Claude.ai iterate a few times over a custom extension for publishing to microblog directly from vscode, which is nice. This is the second bit of useful code that I’ve been able to generate from AI; the first was a dumb little ncurses app for displaying ‘live’ data from my weather station. I used ChatGPT for that, but had Claude add a few refinements. If you have an Ambient Weather Station and want to take a look at it, it’s in my github repo.
Pretty nice. I am, at best, a decent shell and perl scripter. I know enough python to hurt myself badly, and that’s about it. Either of these would have taken more time than I would have wanted to spend and I actually learned a little bit about vscode extensions in the process. Here’s the brave new world and all that.
In other news, the snow is looking more and more like a sure thing for this weekend. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t close schools in advance of Friday. Since we usually do our grocery shopping on the weekend, we got ahead of it and stocked up last night. Oh and I pulled the trigger on the Factorio expansion. Bring on the weather I say.
Edit: I also put the vscode extension into github. If you run into any problems and need help troubleshooting…uh…ask Claude!
On games
For the last few years, my go-to game for wintertime has been Factorio. It scratches a very deep itch for me, and I am very careful not to start playing until the decks are completely clear of work or other responsibilities. This happens most often in the winter when yardwork is on hold. Since complex mechanics seem to be a thing for me, I decided to give Dwarf Fortress another try, this time via Steam. So far…it’s ok. I’m slowly - very slowly - getting a sense of how deep it goes in terms of complexity, but it hasn’t quite gotten ahold of my nerd-nerve like Factorio’s optimization problems did. Plus, you know, there are rail networks to automate.
I’ve managed to keep my first Dwarf Fortress alive for a year of in-game time, which I know is barely scratching the surface. The population has grown a bit, and I can sort of see the farming, hunting, crafting, and defense management cycles forming. To be fair, I’m starting on a nerfed world with low-aggression monsters and whatnot. I’m nowhere close to kicking it to the curb, but I may restart it again on normal settings across the board and see how it runs without the training wheels. But I also just applied the 2.x update to Factorio and am eyeballing the Space Age expansion. The weather this weekend is looking grody, and we may be sort of locked in for a day or two. Pity.
Anyway, PTO is over, so the daily routines are more or less back in place. Paradoxically, with the holidays behind us, things feel a little more relaxed. I got a lot done and am in good shape to resume classwork towards the end of the month as we enter the homestretch. Some business travel is coming up, but I’ve got plenty of reading, so we’re good to go.
Currently reading: The Religion of the Day by University of Mary 📚
Currently reading: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa 📚
Last day of PTO, and I spent it doing all of those fiddly things that I never have time for during the rest of the year: rearranging and cleaning a bit of the office, planting seeds I want to germinate outdoors, running stuff to the dump, that sort of thing. All the other to-do stuff got to-done. The only thing I didn’t get to was the garage, which can wait. Still enjoying Absolution and we are having a lot of fun with Bad Monkey. Lots of weird/gonzo Florida in the air around here in the dead of winter, which seems about right.
A low-key NYE for us: served at the vigil mass, lots of tacos, and a colossal bonfire which has become a tradition. A toast at midnight, then off to sleep. Puttering around with house cleaning today and catching up on the horrible news out of New Orleans. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis
We pledge that the Catholic Church in Kentucky and Tennessee will continue to accompany and serve migrants with every possible resource. We will continue to advocate for your just treatment and dignity as our Catholic Social Teaching instructs in every way that we are able to do so.
The Church recognizes the right of individuals to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their family members. The Church also recognizes the responsibility of nations to control their borders and create migration policies. However, the Church teaches that this right is not unlimited and must be exercised with respect for the human dignity of each person and the common good.
The Church in the United States has long advocated for comprehensive immigration reform that includes pathways to citizenship, family reunification, and protections for those fleeing persecution. It emphasizes the need for just and humane treatment of all migrants, including access to legal protections, and due process. The Church recognizes that basic human rights are based on the dignity of being created in the image and likeness of God.
from “Statement of the Bishops of the Province of Louisville on the Feast of the Holy Family,” 2024
Currently reading: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer 📚
Currently reading: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 📚
Essays on eschatology and salvation turned in. Need to do one more small project to close out another class and I’m done until late January.
