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Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Phil 4:8

Today is the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle. That verse from the Letter to the Philippians spoke deeply to me during the long run-up before my eventual return to the Church about twenty years ago. I had it pinned to my cubicle wall at work and eventually took St. Paul's name for my Confirmation at the Easter Vigil. I can't say I identified much with Saul. I had no faith to speak of, never mind feeling strongly enough about anything to actively fight against others. The Damascus road, though, is a different matter.

I, too, can point to a particular moment and place where the presence of God was made plain and demanded a response. I learned about strength perfected in weakness, and the more excellent way. Saint Paul has haunted my spiritual life since then - sometimes in clarity, other times as something of an enigma, seen in a mirror darkly.

I've been thinking a bit about the HBO series The Leftovers recently, probably because part of the soundtrack came up in a Spotify playlist I use when I'm working. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Beneath the weird-fiction/sci-fi/supernatural elements of the premise is a profound meditation on grief in response to inexplicable, massive loss. The Departure, as it's called in the show, stands in for any number of similar events: Sandy Hook, 9/11, and so on. People seem to either love the show or hate it, and my feelings ought to be apparent.

It occurred to me this morning, though, that if Damon Lindelof were making The Leftovers today, he'd need to account for the large numbers of Departure-deniers: the ones running around claiming that those who lost loved ones were crisis actors, and that the Departed were all somehow involved in a plot masterminded by...someone. In-show, there'd have to be a persistent dismissal of the whole thing as fake and frankly I think this group would be more evident (and pernicious) than The Guilty Remnant, a nihilistic cult that forms in the post-event period.

I never understood the QAnon stuff. For me, big conspiracies tend to assume a level of competence that's usually not in evidence, and when actual conspiracies do come to light, things tend to change pretty quickly - hearings are held, arrests made, and so on. The bigger the secret and the bigger the crowd involved, the less likely everyone's going to keep their mouths shut. I mean, let's set aside the actual substance of the Q theory, which is too much to go into here, and focus solely on its first principle.

Compartmentalization works. No one has a full picture, and those who do have it are few and far between, making it unlikely that they could leak and remain hidden for very long. People get caught relaying secrets all the time, and some of these ought to know best how to do it. Moreover, they're passed things along to one or maybe two people, not broadcast them to the world on the Internet. They're caught all the same. The idea that these disclosures proceed from some highly-placed government source - and continue to do so over time without identification or arrest and prosecution, well, it just doesn't fly, sorry.

For a long time it smelled an awful lot like Gnosticism to me. Certainly it has a lot in common: deliverance via secret knowledge, unavailable to all but the initiates. Or perhaps I'm making too much of one and selling short the other. In either case, QAnon occupied a peculiar spot in people's lives. What will take its place now?

I'm thinking especially for the people who, having gone all-in with it, are now finding themselves disillusioned. Some of them have sundered ties with families and friends, finding comfort with their fellow-travelers online and occasionally in-person. They sought to explain the world and everything in it, and now what? Prophecies failing to deliver, goalposts moved, just be a little more patient. When you have trusted in something completely, and it fails just as completely, it feels very much like the earth has dropped away from your feet: disorienting and terrifying. Things that made sense before are now turned inside-out. Everything has to be re-interrogated, and perhaps without much help from others. If you're lucky, you have support around you while you figure things out. If not, maybe you go grabbing for the next available thing that looks solid.

What I hope and pray for is that they find an easy return and an open door. I could never take it very seriously - I know too many people who work in government. But I recognize that many people did (and still do). And having walked down a long (and weird) road, the best thing we might be able to do is make sure that the return path is as clear as possible. I also think of the families that have been divided over this, by the very real losses they feel over someone who has taken this path, and pray for their healing and restoration.

May the ones who are leaving this - or have already left - and now find themselves struggling encounter patience and charity, instead of the laughter and derision they might fear.  We could do a lot worse than offer a way off the island to which some of our neighbors and loved ones have collectively paddled out.  

Strive to preserve your heart in peace and let no event of this world disturb it. Reflect that all must come to an end. Keep spiritually tranquil in a loving attentiveness to God and when it is necessary to speak, let it be with the same calm and peace.

— St. John of the Cross

Currently reading: Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton 📚

On deck: The Holy Week volume of Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth and Cassian’s Institutes. It’s beginning to feel a lot like Lent.

A list of text-heavy sites I visit regularly:

The National Weather Service has text-only forecast pages, like this one, which you can adjust for your own area. You can go deep into their weather nerd stuff, too.

There are also some great lectionary resources. The Dominican House of Studies in DC had some wonderful patristic resources online but had to take them down because of copyright concerns. They helpfully point to places like this one, though. Here's the Catena Aurea as well.


A reminder: social media is not the Internet, and you can use the latter without the former pretty effectively. I wonder how long before a sort of 'primitive/retro Internet' movement takes root and spreads among the younger crowd - text-heavy, low-latency, self-curated/owned, free of the exquisitely-tuned engagement and telemetry.

Sometimes I get nostalgic and revert back to pure-text in as many places as I can. Linux makes this a little bit easier. Only the email bit was a little tricky to perfect. Here is the list of apps:

  • elinks for text-only browsing
  • newsboat for RSS
  • neomutt for email (I use a commercial email provider and a tool called offlineimap to transfer mail)
  • weechat, principally for IRC, but it also has plugins for Slack and Jabber.

If you're wondering how much of the web is useful without graphics, javascript and all the rest, the answer is: a lot more than you'd think. Many sites have "lite" versions for bandwidth constrained users. Other sites render pretty well, but to be sure, places like Amazon still need a modern browser.

Now I'm off to see if there's a way to update micro.blog with vim, vscode, or atom...

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are...

- W.H. Auden

I've started The Moviegoer, and am enjoying it so far. Fulfilled in Christ turned out to be more of a reference book than something you'd read straight through. The introductory materials were good and I'm sure I'll be reaching for it a lot in the future.

The light outside is changing as the days lengthen, which is nice. The season has been mild so far, but we usually don't get our coldest days until about now. The seed catalogs came a couple of weeks ago (on the solstice, if you can believe it) and we sketched out some timelines for starting some seeds, which we've never done before. Our last-frost date is in mid-April, so there's still some time for planning and repairs of a couple of the raised beds.

The Real Deep State

I added Rod Dreher back to my RSS list and today he referenced this excellent open letter to the QAnon crowd:

The Deep State you worry about is mostly made up; a fiction, a lie, a product of active imaginations, grifter manipulations, and the internet. I’m telling you this now because storming the Capitol building has drawn the attention of the real Deep State — the national security bureaucracy — and it’s important you understand what that means.

You attacked America. Maybe you think it was justified — as a response to a stolen election, or a cabal of child-trafficking pedophiles, or whatever — but it was still a violent attack on the United States. No matter how you describe it, that’s how the real Deep State is going to treat it.

The impact of that will make everything else feel like a LARP.