tombstones
carolina's ancient zoning
One thing I love about the Carolinas is that there are cemeteries everywhere. Everywhere. I suppose it is like that up and down the Atlantic coast, but there’s something different down here. Drive through a subdivision, across from a church, down a highway, and you’ll see a small family plot—usually fenced in, protected by a chain link fence or something. Sometimes not. Sometimes they list the names of the families—often Scots-Irish names—who lie there. These graves are old—much more ancient than zoning laws—from a time when white people still buried their dead close, to honor ancestors not yet removed from them and to keep memories alive in a time when we still treasured our histories. And perhaps because they are so old and were grandfathered into the neighborhood, the world has mushroomed around them into a suburban neighborhood, a highway, a strip mall, even. The dead are nestled into the land of the living, butting up against it.
What must our ancestors think of us? Looking from their grassy hilltop onto a Ross Dress for Less?
adeste fidelis
A friend recently noted that so many of the more robust religious orders (of sisters) of late seem to revolve around Eucharistic adoration. Eucharistic adoration is — a definition for the non-Catholics among us— the practice of silent prayer in front of a consecrated Eucharistic bread, meaning that it is Christ’s body.
Now, pardon my brag, but I know a few things about adoration (as it’s commonly known: insiders drop the “Eucharistic.”). My childhood church launched a perpetual adoration chapel at some point at the end of John Paul II’s papacy, and I was a frequent flier. I even went to the adoration chapel with my date before senior prom in high school, where we prayed together before going to the dance. I know that you will never recover from just how unrelentingly wholesome and innocent my high school career was, but I’ll give you a minute to try.
Adoration chapels and praying silently in front of what Catholics call “the Blessed Sacrament” in a Church is, of course, great. I’m still a subscriber. But the point is that adoration is weird. And people emphasizing this as a practice generally aren’t acknowleding just how odd it is. And if you can’t encounter how something you’re doing (like going to adoration before prom), which seems normal to you is weird to everyone else, then you’re not encountering reality.
Here’s a piece I wrote about the weirdness of adoration about five years ago, inspired by one of my favorite chapels—the Milk Grotto in Bethlehem.
Touch Grass, Netizens
The urban watering hole and its street corner preachers have become digitized and personalized into the private of the phone. The endless forms, AI chatbots, and captchas of our digital infrastructure are poor substitutes for the warmth and effectiveness of human communication, human relationships, and human community. We’re stuck in a private, slick, but lonely world an are all looking for a public.
The Catholic Worker, I’ve found, is one of the best public-making spaces. And so its presence on the internet is both natural (where better for a movement to be that made its debut in Union Square?) and also a challenge: in a sphere where the robotic and impersonal hold sway, how do personalists engage?
I try to answer that question in a new piece at U.S. Catholic.
The Catholic Worker draws on philosophers like Eric Gill, members of the arts and crafts movement, adjacent to the Luddite movement, named after the legendary Ned Ludd, a figure who supposedly smashed automated looms in 1779. Contemporary news accounts do not mention Ludd until the movement in his name came into its own in the early nineteenth century. So Ned Ludd was probably an ideal—or a rumor, a legend, a compilation of stories that became a person.
The Luddites resist the machines: smash them: but they don’t seem to have much more to say. It’s easy to note that the progress taken by the engines of capitalism is wrongheaded but harder to find a progress that might be more right-headed. Nostalgia is tempting! I’m tempted by it. But if we follow the sickly light of nostalgia back where it leads I suppose we find that the most just of all possible societies was when we were monkeys in the trees. And, nothing against monkeys or trees, but that’s just provably false.
Sometimes we can stop on the surface and treasure the aesthetics of backwardness without really engaging creatively. It often feels easier to cosplay the past than it is to really go back to the sources, live in the tradition, and find a way to bring the old philosophy alive so that it looks like new. It’s much easier to put on the trappings of resistance to the present than it is to retrace our steps to the trailhead where we took the wrong turn and find the right path forward, a long continuous line with the past, but not the same terrain we’ve already trod.