A friend of mine just introduced me to this wonderful music group. It says pretty much everything on its own. This is what true Christian culture looks like, neither antiquated nor unrealistic nor overly romantic. Perhaps it is romantic, in the true since, as the word “romance” stems from a deep longing to return to Holy Rome as it once was, that is, to Christendom. Contrary to the gospel of the Spirit of our Times, this is the life the Church creates on earth and what God offers to those who chose to pursue wholesome living.
How do we get back to it? Can we step away from the machine? Life will never be perfect, but it doesn’t have to be so barren. We can, for instance, start by turning off our screens and being families again, eating less and focusing on food we can grow with our hands, and recreating Christian neighborhoods — the original meaning of the word “parish”. Whether or not Western Civilization can experience such life again, jettisoned by so many eager progressives, it is, after all, the process that counts.
I think John Senior offers sound enough advice:
“It is time to go back to those conditions in which human beings can grow again… Simplify, as Thoreau said, not by changing governments — a change of collars on a dirty neck; not by denouncing IBM, Communism, the Catholic hierarchy, the Rosicrucians and Jews; but in a single, honest, unremembered act, as Wordsworth said, of kindness and of love. As the first significant act in the change of heart, really — not symbolically — smash the television set, then sit down by the fire with the family and perhaps some friends and just converse; talk alone, even one night a week, will cut your use of energy, and love will grow. Don’t force its growth. The hearth, like good soil, does its work invisibly, in secret, and slowly. After a long time beneath the hearth of a quiet family life, green shoots of vigorous poverty appear; you have become, in a small way, poor. If several families, sharing this humble secret, buy old houses on the same slum block and fix them up, they will have restored a kind of Auburn right in the midst of their ruined city and begun the restoration of that ordinary, healthy, human thing, the neighborhood” (Restoration of Christian Culture).