Unplug from the machine. Tune in to God’s reality.
“If we are to restore an authentic…Christian culture, we will have to think not just about fighting infanticide, sex education and pornography — by all means fight them to death — but for the positive work of the restoration of culture which lies wrecked in the wake of the humanist assault: we will have to think about simpler, larger, elemental things which, losing their original strength, gave access to the enemy in the first place —elemental things which are the foundation and the principle of the superstructures we must rebuild” (John Senior, Restoration of Christian Culture).
It has never been so urgent that we slam on the breaks of our lifestyle. Pull off to the side of the road, plant your feet on the grass, breathe in the air. Why are we rushing? Towards what are we rushing, or, should I say, being pulled. I wonder how many of our lifestyle choices are really directed by God’s heart, let alone my own heart. Indeed, something else seems to be driving us — the social milieu, the entertainment industry, the “machine.” Whatever you call it, we need to stop. For the next few weeks, we will be reexamining the modern norm, challenging shared attitudes, and looking at the wisdom of older generations.
Here is a list of topics that we will start with:
- The Centrality of Liturgical Worship
- Music, Art, Literature, and Etiquette
- Home and Community Life
- Boundaries with Technology
- Leisure and Entertainment
- Nature, Gardening, and Farming
The following quotes are from works by or about John Senior. If you are not acquainted with this thinker, get acquainted.
Where do we begin? We begin with culture.
“Culture as in ‘agriculture,’ the cultivation of fields, derives from the Latin cultus, which means essentially anything subjugated…So culture is anything subjugated, put under a rule…and made tame. A cultivated field is subjugated to the rule of the farmer to facilitate the growth of crops; it is no longer wild” (Senior, Restoration of Christian Culture, 217).
“Culture, as in agriculture, is the cultivation of the soil from which men grow…All the paraphernalia of our lives, intellectual, moral, social, psychological and physical, has this end: Christian culture is the cultivation of saints” (Senior, Death of Christian Culture, 8).
“Christian culture is the natural environment of truth, assisted by art, ordered intrinsically — that is, from within — the praise, reverence and service of God Our Lord” (Senior, RCC 15).
Environment Shapes Who We Are
“Everything a person does and experiences enters his imagination and thus influences him and his relationship to truth. Nothing is indifferent” (Bethel 198).
“There is a cause-effect relation between the work we do, the clothes we wear or do not wear, the houses we live in, the walls or lack of walls, the landscape, the semiconscious sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches of our ordinary lives — a close connection between these and the moral and spiritual development of souls” (Senior, RCC, 222).
“Nothing should be purely functional and nothing should be purely aesthetic, that is, aimed only at pleasing the senses. Everything we make and use should have meaning and be support for contemplation, a means of spiritual development, like the handle of the crusader’s sword, made in the form of a Cross to indicate whom he was serving and from where he hoped to draw his strength” (Fr. Francis Bethel, John Senior and Realism, 198).
“His environment should not be fabricated purely for comfort or immediate efficiency, but conformed to his spiritual dimension, indicating that he has an end beyond the material use of this world” (Bethel 199).
Material Disorder Leads to Spiritual Disorder
“It is ridiculous but nonetheless true that a generation which has given up the distinction between fingers and forks will find it difficult to keep the distinction between affection and sex or between the right to one’s body and the murder of one’s child. If you eat ketchup-smeared French fries with your fingers day after day, you are well on your way to the Cyclops” (Senior, RCC 222).
Why Secular Culture Doesn’t Work
“Seeds of a pure and rich Christian culture were sown in the fifth century by monks, and the weeds of humanism began destroying that culture in the Renaissance” (Bethel 201).
“Steadily step by step over the last few hundred years since the triumph of Rationalism and Liberalism and now Modernism, the person of Christ has been withdrawn from our experience. Generations now grow up in a religious vacuum, in an atmosphere charged, as it were, with His absence” (Senior, RCC 233)
Rewire the Dance in Your Life
“Our Lord explains in the Parable of the Sower that the seed of His love will only grow in a certain soil — and that is the soil of Christian Culture, which is the work of music in the wide sense, including as well as tunes that are sung, art, literature, games, and architecture — all so many instruments in the orchestra which plays day and night…and if it is disordered, then the love of Christ will not grow. It is an obvious matter of fact that here in the United States now, the Devil has seized these instruments to play a danse macabre, a dance of death, especially through what we call the ‘media,’ the film, television, radio, record, book, magazine and newspaper industries. The restoration of culture, spiritually, morally, physically, demands the cultivation of the soil in which the love of Christ can grow, and that means we must, as they say, rethink priorities” (Senior, RCC 21).