Why Culture Recovery?

An introduction to the Culture Recovery Journals, from my 2016 writings

Because our culture is chaotic and paradoxical and contradictory. Because, as Yeats observed, “the center cannot hold.” Our culture’s foundational values are not held passionately enough to sustain us.

Because for a long time many of us Catholics–most of us–do not really live as we believe. We are not able to. We live and act and behave in ways that contradict our beliefs. And this is not merely the result of sinful fallen human nature but a true dysfunction between what we believe and the ways our culture inclines us to act.

Because we believe as Catholics that God must be glorified in our lives and in the works of our hands, and so often He is not.

I am not merely citing the fact that the taxes I pay may be used to pay for the horrific abortion of an unborn baby, although that is among the most awful of the dysfunctions. Nor am I only observing that the sneakers my son wears may have been made by political prisoners chained to workstations in China. Nor am I referring to the constant ways in which the wider society asserts and demands that my Catholic faith be privatized and circumscribed into ineffectual nothingness. Of these and other culture wars, much has been said and written, far more eloquently than this little book could tell. These are all the sad backdrop of chaos and confusion, huge sweeping waves of ignorant armies clashing with no compass by night.

The transformation of the society, so much demanded of the believer nowadays, is beyond my present scope. I am a believing Catholic, a converted sinner, a housewife and homemaker and writer who struggles to be holy and usually does it badly. This journal is not about the storm in which our civilization is engulfed. It is about what I am searching to accomplish with the time that has been given to me.

We live in the “technopoly” defined by that sage of sages, Neil Postman, who predicted that in the absence of a strong societal creed and indifference towards or reluctance to imposing one, technology would be elevated to the role of director of our society. We would begin to live on the technology’s rules, not our own. As Postman demonstrates in his writings (which you really should read and make your teens read), we began this delegation of meaning with the telegraph and telephone, we allowed the automobile to decimate locality, and now computers and the internet hollow out privacy and masticate time second by second.

We have been persuaded to let technology drive the culture instead of the culture driving the technology.  This ease of technology generates waste beyond comprehension, drowns every crevice in noise and distraction, and makes true leisure and contemplation so seldom achievable.

There is no unity and there is so much stress as energies are fragmented by numerous tiny dissipations, efforts are duplicated, waste beyond comprehension is generated in our landfills and oceans, and zeal becomes exhaustion and burnout.

The search for the unified life must begin. Medieval Thomists searched for a unification principle that would explain all the visible and invisible phenomena in the universe: they failed. We moderns search for a unified life. Could we live as we believe? Is such a thing even possible? Could our actions reinforce our values? Could we cease contributing to systems that destroy our culture and indeed all human culture?

Some have articulated grandiose schemes for top-down transformation, but I believe our need is too dire for the surface changes of politics. The rot is no longer on the edges but in the heart and cannot be solved by policy.

What we need is transformation of the heart. It is the only thing that is left to us. In truth, it was always the only way that anything good was ever going to happen.

So I propose that I should transform my own heart by the power of Christ’s grace and that this grace should impel me to live in such a way as to resolve these contradictions, and that I should teach my children to do likewise.

We have lost faith in the power of one person to transform society. Most of us no longer really believe in saints. We no longer really, truly believe in Christ. He told us mountains cannot withstand the power of tiny faith small as a mustard seed, yet our mountains remain in place, so our faith must be infinitesimally ineffective. But will we begin now to believe?

I have foresworn the need to see results from this recovery mission. I believe it must be done, however, and so I will live.

There. Said so nicely and with such grandiosity, but what exactly does this all mean?

This means first, that I will attempt to achieve poverty, that first of the Beatitudes, which Our Lord placed in a prominent place so that we shouldn’t miss it, to try to obtain the blessing of the poor in spirit. Therefore, I shall try to squeeze poverty into my cramped and crowded heart. Sometimes the first thing we hear is the most quickly forgotten.

If I can be poor in spirit, perhaps the kingdom of heaven can live in my little piece of land. I am a housewife, and my home is my kingdom. Of this domain, this five-and-a-half acres of Virginia valley, I am queen. Here I can work out this puzzle, live out this paradox. I may plant lilies in my field and consider them. I can observe the sparrow flying overhead and its lack of sowing or reaping, and feel the surprise of the Father’s feeding them.

I may query these archetypes of Beauty and Simplicity and Stillness and see how they befriend Lady Poverty. I can learn by doing, and by going where I need to go.

As of this writing, I am fifty one, and more than three times this in pounds, my material regret. I am lazy, weary, and fond of creature comforts. To read by the fire on a cold days, to drink tea, to weave tales in my head: this is all I have ever wanted. The last has been denied me for this season, as my head is required for other matters, and time eludes me. I am only writing this now under obedience to an urgent inner compulsion. I also write because I have no answer to these lifelong questions, yet I must do due diligence in searching.

The Church has been unrelenting on her insistence on geography and proximity. The sacraments must be offered and received face to face. One cannot hear confession by avatar. The only place to begin this recovery mission is person-to-person, parent-to-child, friend-to-friend.

We cannot imagine an individual who is not a tyrant or a technocrat being able to transform society. Yet society is made of individuals, and we are interconnected. Can personal transformation lead to societal transformation?

Could I transform my church, my town? I shrink from the thought. What I can do is affirm what I find to be good in my parish and town and try to curtail the evil—at least not by adding to it. But we affect others for good more than we see, and it is perhaps best that often we don’t see it.

“A soft answer turns away wrath, and a harsh word stirs up anger…A gentle tongue is the tree of life, but perverseness breaks down the spirit.” Proverbs 15:1-2, 4

Thus says the Scripture and so I will attempt to put forward this effort in a spirit of gentleness and refrain from harsh denunciations that may stir up enmity to these ideas, and I urge others who would practice them to do the same.

When considering these journals, do nothing that disturbs your joy. Joy is that fruitfulness of Christ’s love inside us. If your fruit trees stop bearing fruit, something is wrong. If you can’t be joyful, something is wrong. Pay attention to that.

We can do this slowly because what we are after is cultural change, and culture, like a garden, grows slowly. Our refrain must be Peter Maurin’s definition of a good society: one in which it is easy to be good. We are trying, slowly and in our own way, to clear the road of societal obstacles to goodness, for individuals to achieve goodness. It is best if it happens slowly.

It is also worth recalling that too much “holy impatience” ruined the work of the Second Vatican Council and liturgical reform. Even now at my parish, some fifty years later, we are only now starting to see what the Council Fathers were after, and why it was fitting that the Church institute a new order of worship: and our parish is an outlier in our strictness and reverence.

It is true that sometimes we are called to be courageous and to make bold moves towards new things or the recovery of old things. However, the work we are setting out to do is more of the farmer’s than the builder’s: it is of necessity done in yearly incremental growth and cannot be rushed. Let your courage be the slow-burning kind, like a solid log that burns slowly through the night and does not give way to entrenched resistance.

And it may be that our children may modify and perfect these ideas so that they assume a more human shape and any ideology behind them gives way to threadbare aphorisms, well worn by overuse. So be it! Nothing remains new forever, except the Lord and His mercies.

Things Snatched from the Wreckage

What are we trying to recover? A sense of the preciousness of everything, and to take what is precious and preserve it: this task may start with our own bedroom and end with the entire universe. We need to see as G. K. Chesterton saw, that the things around us are “things saved from the wreckage.”  Chesterton observed that things can be reduced to junk by their abundance, but once one is cast up on a desert island, the few random things one has become precious, a treasure. His conversion from half-life to living was when he realized that all life is threatened and vulnerable, and hence precious.

Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. (Chesterton, Orthodoxy)

I believe Chesterton suggests here that we begin culture recovery by recovering a sense of deep gratitude for what surrounds us, whether it be an extension cord which doesn’t quite work or a chipped teacup, or a volume of vintage sewing techniques––or a grumpy neighbor, a cross sales associate, a street beggar, a needy child, a wounded adult. Our minds tend to reduce things to obstacles and refuse: the spiritual temptation is to carry this warped viewpoint into our interactions with others as well. To realize, as C.S. Lewis says, that we have never met a mere mortal, that “it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors” requires an immense energy, the energy that drove Chesterton’s Manalive to walk around the world to recover his ability to see things again. In the end, this gratitude can only be achieved by grace.  Yet that is the great work which we must continually strive for.

We live in a world glutted with images and things, and we must work our way out of it into the real world, the true world, which is a shimmering simplicity—the world of God.  To be simple means to be made out of only one sort of stuff: God is simple because all of Him is God. Gardening God into the earth, weaving Him into our daily lives: this is what we do in the neglected soil of the home. It is the little cultivations that matter.

I have sketched out some large problems, some of which we are aware of, but others which we might have been unaware. Has Our Lord been unaware of these trends, and where they would lead? Of course not. Has He left us orphaned? By no means.  In fact, He has provided tools for us to recover ourselves, to recover our sense of identity, and to recover our culture. He has been selecting and handing us these tools for centuries. It is time for us to use them. 

So what do we do? These journals are the mapping of a journey, a labyrinth I have wended my way through in the over two decades of housewifery, of what I have learned. In the process, I hope we may recover the true treasures buried in our sordid civilizations, treasures which could only emerge in our shattered age: the soil of the past was not yet right for these seeds, so only after the fertilization of broken philosophies and wasted time and wasted lives can we unearth something that was meant to come forth here and now and not before. 

The Holy Spirit, we are told, shall renew the face of the earth, if only we pray for Him to come. It is His help I invoke now as I begin this project. Thank you for reading it.

Regina Doman
Shirefeld, 2016