I’m on my phone and not my laptop, so I couldn’t search proper snippets, and also failed to find the place in the conversation here where you were asked if you own a flip phone, but someplace like “The Silicon Rule” (https://cjshayward.com/silicon/), I mention several options, and from my research Sunbeam Wireless (https://sunbeamwireless.com/) offers the best choice of flip phones. Their most capable model offers a technological Swiss Army Knife with camera, GPS, etc., but all of their models shed away email, web browsing (and unlike some of their competitors, you apparently can’t watch enough YouTube videos to turn on porn delivery), and the App Store (and with it, addictive games).
I’m holding on to my iPhone 8 because I can use it to update my website, but I would very much like, for reasons of solidarity in making recommendations, to have a Sunbeam Wireless flip phone. Possibly if and when this phone gives up the ghost, I may decide that I do not need the ability to update my website to be at the hip.
I read your Silicon Rule -- yeah, man, if the cook's not gonna eat the soup, you know it's poison!
I lived on a hippie farm in North Carolina for awhile, and there was one internet connection, and it was on one computer, in this one dude's house. So, if you really needed to do something on the internet, you had to go drink tea with this dude and the handful of other people just chillin' out on his porch, in the beautiful woods, waiting for a chance to check email or whatever.
That was nice.
And inconvenient.
Which is good for the human heart, very clarifying.
Jun 2, 2023·edited Jun 4, 2023Liked by Graham Pardun
An excellent post as always, Graham! I was especially struck by the wafer-factory passage. Being Anglican, I've often had those wafers for communion. While I'm not wanting to get into a discussion on the reality or illusion of sacraments in different ecclesial groups, I will say that our theology, at least as practiced at my parish, has a heavy belief in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist -- in fact its view isn't as dissimilar from the Orthodox one as might be expected -- and so that factoid about the communion wafers is not one with comfortable implications for me.
Fortunately, the wafers are not the common usage in parish. My priest makes the communion bread every week. I've seen him kneading the dough in the church kitchen myself. As far as what is the common and regular occurrence in my parish, then, is the embodiment you speak of, and that helps alleviate some of the discomfort from the wafer-factory passage.
What a gift that your priest makes communion bread with his own hands -- glory to God!
I grew up in a pretty aggressively anti-sacramental Protestant denomination in which the Lord's table was "only" symbolic -- but, as a consequence, the way in which the ritual was done was devoid even of just the basic symbolism that was supposed to be there (we didn't have one loaf, but rather separate and homogenous rectangles -- tiny crackers, or what my sister calls "Jeez-its"; also, not one cup, but a silver tray of individual tiny cups -- in retrospect remarkably similar to a drum of machine gun ammo -- which was passed up and down the aisles, just as the collection plate was).
I'm very familiar with that. Before I became Anglican -- my first service at my current parish was only 6 years ago -- I was non-denominational Evangelical. The first 24 years of my life was in explicitly anti-sacramental churches, with those same crackers and tiny cups of grape juice. 😆
Certainly churches/temples are important things; there’s a reason Christians started building them as soon as they feasibly could, even when their legal status was rather ambiguous. (I once attended a nerdily-fascinating presentation on the legal status of Christian church buildings in late antiquity.) But I think they need to exist in a symbiotic relationship with Christian homes functioning as temples. Small groups gathering to pray in each others’ homes is a great suggestion for building up the “home-as-church” side, which is often the more deficient. (Suggestion for a more-challenging version: reader’s Vespers instead of Typika.) Things like Bible study groups, which for better or worse usually have only a few regular attendees, can also meet in homes with good success, or so I've found it in my parish.
I don’t think you meant to imply that church communities having dedicated temples is superfluous, although at points it comes close to sounding that way. But there is at least one important sense, which you capture well, in which the “home-as-church” side of the symbiosis is the more important one. A church community that’s built up a strong home-church life can live on without its temple, but (as one unfortunately sees sometimes) one with a beautiful temple and no sense of its homes as churches is basically dead already.
This went through a lot of drafts & although it more or less makes a pretty simple point, there were a ton of moving parts -- I had meant to emphasize that the "archipelago" metaphor brings in the idea of there being an underlying (geological) unity between the islands -- they are all of the same landmass, only water has come between them. the underlying unity of scattered homes-as-temples is of course the dedicated main temple to which the people in those homes would be going to pray with everyone else, under peaceful enough circumstances. I do pray we get to keep those temples in the long run, and I do think we need them -- people here can attest that Orthodox life is doable, but very difficult and lonely, without a temple close enough to attend regularly. And I am sad that 2020 sent a lot of people home from those temples, and that some haven't come back...which I wonder if continuing to live stream enables.
That last thing you said really struck home, too: "A church community that’s built up a strong home-church life can live on without its temple, but (as one unfortunately sees sometimes) one with a beautiful temple and no sense of its homes as churches is basically dead already." I've been thinking of 2020 as a kind of little "apocalypse" in the sense of revealing us for what we are...2020 felt like an invasion from outside, but a lot of it was a revelation of who we already were, unfortunately, within.
So I added a phrase at the end, to at least allude to the greater emphasis that I would have later in, let's say, a crystallized book, where now it says: "Or, as I'd maybe put it: Every home a temple, every temple a garden, every garden a forest, every forest a home. That's how I read the prophets, anyway: A return together to an archipelago of blossoming temple-homes—unified by a common life together in the main temple—sprawled across the Machine's worldwide oceans of asphalt and concrete—a retraction, when necessary, to quiet resting places enveloped in Edenic gardens from which we'd feed ourselves..." {{and as a side note to the side note, if indeed our dedicated temples were, as a rule, much more like the ethiopian forest-temples, surrounded as much as possible by gardens not just hostas, that would become a living witness for the gardens surrounding the home-temples, too}}
Also: Just found this gem in the journals of Fr. Alexander Schemann: "God gives us His Life, not ideas, doctrines, rules. At home, when all is done, life itself begins. Christ was homeless not because He despised simple happiness -- He did have a childhood, family, home -- but because He was at home everywhere in the world, which His Father created as "the home" of man. "Peace be with this house." We have our home and God's home, the Church, and the deepest experience of the Church is that of a home."
Your solar flare reference reminds me of a book: When The English Fall. It's about exactly that event, as experienced from the perspective of an Amish community. It's short and you might like it.
We just returned from taking 17 fourth graders to Gooseberry Falls Park, for a two day camping trip. (40 mile NE of Duluth, MN, on the shore of Lake Superior). Over the three days we were there we took some glorious walks. We walked inland, along the Gooseberry River, passing it's five beautiful waterfalls (having a lovely lunch on the warm rocks above the "fifth falls"). Much of the children's conversations during the walk (at least a particular group of boys) were filled with talk of video games. This is often the default conversation of "city" kids when confronted with sun, trees, and a long path more than a half a mile (except the child laser focused on finding agates by the water). At the Waldorf school I am at we have media guidelines/suggestions for families. For the most part these guidelines are not heeded (thus the river conversations). There are all the excuses from parents. All the excuses.
At school, the kids know (somehow) that I don't like smartphones. "Why don't you like smartphones Mr. Kampf? What's wrong with smartphones?" I always say, very pointedly, "If you're not careful they will lead you away from your heart!" Well, I used to say that...now I leave out "If your are not careful". They look at me like I was speaking Occitan.
The above may not be apropos...either way, Graham, you'll always be my guru.
Brad, you're my guru: "They'll lead you away from your heart!" -- that's exactly it!
When there are rocks and trees and rivers and sky and everything, I'm always amazed at the things people would prefer to talk about -- anything other than rocks and trees and rivers and sky and everything, man!
Love this reflection and thank you for your thoughtfulness! Me and my kids and best friend and some of our friends from church have started doing this...we all have the same intuition you describe. During COVID times we gathered and read the typika because the streaming services felt...cold. At a time when we were so desperate for warmth! We are terrible singers so we learned to laugh at ourselves! Ha! God bless you Graham we are all in this together. Thank you for the encouragement while we are in touch over the wired! Someday probably not too far down the road... people like us will probably withdraw from this corrupt medium of contact. When the time comes, I hope you will keep sending out your writing on paper via the snail mail! The postman will return to his old heroic form! My dearest friend is a rural postman, he'll be a hero in the days ahead! Ha! If there is an option now to receive your writings by mail I would love that option so much! Either way thank you and may God bless you a million blessings!
Diana, so good to know of kindred souls out there -- I love the thought of you & your loved ones doing your best to sing together -- in the body! And of the postman returning to his old heroic form -- that's asking to become a poem! I do look forward to the days of slow, very slow, paper-based contact, too...but have appreciated that the wires bring us together, too, when we probably wouldn't have found one another otherwise. And that the Substack platform in particular allows this kind of conversation (though, of course, conversation on someone's screened porch in the woods would be far better...the problem is: We're all here on this planet together, but somehow we can't be the small village in the body that we'd like to be -- it's sad! But...I trust these barriers will be overcome in the fullness of the kingdom of God; our sense that we belong together is going somewhere...)
(more on the paper option in my response to Juliana below)
(wait, book idea: "The Paper Option For The Benedict Option: How to Unstack Your Substack For a Post-Tech World")
Yes, please do a paper mail option! I would pay more. Already ditched my phone months ago but now I'm going crazy staring at my laptop screen reading substacks. This stack is worth it, but it would be so wonderful to eventually just give up the screen altogether.
Juliana, wow! I know I'm in a very small minority, not having a (smart)phone in the first place, but those who have had them, then stepped away, I think are an even rarer breed!
I would really love for you to be able to read my crazy little essays on paper rather than screens; I am seriously thinking about the Paper Option...I just don't see, yet, how it could be logistically feasible (yet). A few scattered thoughts:
1) I have written a small book -- three essays -- which says, I think, enough in itself. And I do plan to distil & reorganize some of this Sabbath Empire material into more small books from time to time. Reading books, though, doesn't include one important dimension of all of this, which is what's happening exactly now -- public conversation about a few thoughts at a time. Would there be a way to include something like that in the Paper Option? I don't remember how these things used to work back in the day...
2) It's not as great as paper, but it is possible to read Substacks on a Kindle. e-ink, with no backlighting, is much, much easier on the eyes. it's still digital tech, but it's a step in the right direction, I think. definitely more pleasant than a laptop.
3) I would actually really love to type these essays on my typewriter & literally cut & paste them zine-style in some kind of grungy black & white format and send them through the mail...so, I really am thinking about it.
Whether you are a faithful son/brother or slightly deranged trees hugging cousin, you certainly are (to swipe Kierkegaard's paradoxical justification of the church) making the right mistakes, asking questions that promise to bring us closer to instead of further from the way of repentance and salvation.
It's a way that needs a living baseline or source to give and direct life. And yes, we have that in the BODY of Christ, the logos made Gnostic-confounding flesh that you rightly ties to its cosmic, biologjcal, historical and sensuous presence. Touch more than grass. But not less.
I'm suspicious of apocalyptic visions that offer quick solutions. But the mustard seed of reclaiming home and local centers of renewal and fellowship could yield a helpful crop. The continuing vitality of Pharisaic Judaism is sometimes attributed to its relocation to the home as the primary site of worship after the destruction of the temple. A post-covid lesson better than live streaming for sure.
Small note: I really like your picking up the archipelago image. I mentally substituted that for your "Empire" title early on since empire seems the quintessential bureaucratic form for a "Machine" politics and an oxymoron for Sabbath. Onward!
This is an old thought, but I wonder if there is a sense in which God keeps sending us into one kind of exile or another, so that he can keep us more or less on the exodus road, forcing us into these retractions where we relearn home, Earth, body, kinship, rather than the opposite--rather than getting too far up the Babylon tower...
"Touch more than grass. But not less" -- I love it!
What is essential is what we have when earthly treasures have been taken from us and all we have is the treasure we found hidden in the field - the kingdom of God which is “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, Romans 14:17, the Spirit of God, the Spirit in the temple of our body and the Spirit found between two or three gathered in His name. But we, so often in our cravenness, find that not enough, and seek solace in the transient. May we exult in the gift of “It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is no help at all” John 6:63 and have rivers of living water flowing from our hearts. For “let the one who desires take the water of life without price”
Yes, exactly Jeff! Whenever God strips away our colossal, dazzling treasures, it's only so that we may discover, or rediscover, his treasure hidden in the field -- his Spirit, his Life-Breath, within, which is all we really need anyway.
A forthright opinion from me. I get impatient with the whole focus on meeting, seeing God in nature thing. I have had the blessing of a life with much immersion in the air, sky, soil, plants, weather, animals in beautiful settings, but it isn't enough. I get that many people have a deficit in this area and are thirsty for it. I get also the need for meaningful deep ritual and ceremony and the blessing it gives - Why once I saw the light of Christ emanating from the broken loaf as when Christ broke bread and the two disciples recognized him for who he was. Yet what is essential, that truly gives life is available - let's say alone in a lonely dark prison cell, or a sordid slum in a huge city filled with grinding poverty, ugliness and uncaring people - the Holy Spirit as gift, Jesus said to seek first the kingdom of God, defined in Romans 14:7 as "righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit" He also said "fear not little flock, the Father is pleased to give you the kingdom" The invisible Jesus is available always as the one who gives the Holy Spirit as a permanent ever present flow of life, as is the Father who is is also eager to do the same. A focus on ceremonies or even ascetic practice or the created order in a way can be unbelief in the gift and givingness of the Lord
Very beautiful, Graham. And an encouragement to those like me who are far from an Orthodox parish. We continue to faithfully (and imperfectly) celebrate the Typika out here on the Great Plains in our home with the incense burning. Perhaps the only Orthodox prayers said for hundreds of miles around us, besides the praise offered by the growing grass and the chants of the birds. I've been slowly collecting the service books so the use of my phone during our service is limited. It's a little clunky, fumbling through big service books, but the fumbling seems far more human than scrolling with my little black box. And not unrelatedly, we are working to better establish our garden in our backyard, removing the invasive buckthorn from taking things over. I opted to pull the buckthorn out when I could, cut it back, and cover it up; rather than annihilate everything with glyphosates. as the machine recommends. Restoring the land and soul, without convenience, seems to be the better, more humane path. The screen and glyphosate don't allow me to struggle and fumble along—they make me glow in the wrong kind of way. :)
How beautiful, John! The growing grass and birdsong, and two or three gathered together, with unwieldy liturgy books and burning incense and a garden growing in the back...God willing, two or three other families sojourning through the Great Plains not so far away will gravitate toward the beauty of what you all are doing together, if you stick with it. I pray for this! And, people long for it everywhere -- they often just don't know it yet--they have to "taste and see." You could put up a couple icons in your garden and burn incense and do the Typika with the mourning doves!
Graham, so much to think on and pray about here. These were the first lines of many that hit deeply:
“It's as if we believe that rededicating ourselves to the melancholic irony of lament, since it's all we can muster now, should be able to count as some kind of resistance in the eyes of somebody, somewhere—it's as if we're muttering a kind of prayer.
But I don't know who we're praying to when we pray like that.”
On a side note, I’m guessing you may have a flip phone instead of a smartphone? If so, any suggestions on that front? Your posts have brought this to the forefront for me once again. A change is needed if nothing else than a means of “protest of the darkness.”
Chris, so glad you felt that passage...that was one of the ones that was in and out of the various drafts, but my intuition was that it meant something, and so it ultimately stayed.
Yeah, I do have a flip phone. Not a good one! I remember way back in the day I had one where the keyboard slid out from the bottom, so you could compose a text message pretty easily that way; I miss those. This is just the one and only flip phone left from TracFone.
I was kind of curious about the LightPhone for awhile, but a friend who actually has one doesn't like it much; battery runs out fast and it's hard to use. What I would really love -- for the engineers out there -- is something with a chunky keyboard, like the blackberries of old, but with an e-ink screen, like the kindle. and it would just call people and send and receive texts, that's it. that's my request to the world. oh, and it would be made largely out of recycled digital junk.
I have a cheap smart phone, but I ignore the fancy features and just talk, text, and take occasional pictures. But I do spend too much time on my IPad.
Last summer I actually got a 12 year old refurbished Samsung Galaxy with a keyboard, but also little touch screen and everything...I was going to use it exactly the way you described.
...but, all the cell towers in my area had, literally the month before, finally ceased all legacy 3G activity, and so this phone couldn't connect. dang!
I’m on my phone and not my laptop, so I couldn’t search proper snippets, and also failed to find the place in the conversation here where you were asked if you own a flip phone, but someplace like “The Silicon Rule” (https://cjshayward.com/silicon/), I mention several options, and from my research Sunbeam Wireless (https://sunbeamwireless.com/) offers the best choice of flip phones. Their most capable model offers a technological Swiss Army Knife with camera, GPS, etc., but all of their models shed away email, web browsing (and unlike some of their competitors, you apparently can’t watch enough YouTube videos to turn on porn delivery), and the App Store (and with it, addictive games).
I’m holding on to my iPhone 8 because I can use it to update my website, but I would very much like, for reasons of solidarity in making recommendations, to have a Sunbeam Wireless flip phone. Possibly if and when this phone gives up the ghost, I may decide that I do not need the ability to update my website to be at the hip.
I read your Silicon Rule -- yeah, man, if the cook's not gonna eat the soup, you know it's poison!
I lived on a hippie farm in North Carolina for awhile, and there was one internet connection, and it was on one computer, in this one dude's house. So, if you really needed to do something on the internet, you had to go drink tea with this dude and the handful of other people just chillin' out on his porch, in the beautiful woods, waiting for a chance to check email or whatever.
That was nice.
And inconvenient.
Which is good for the human heart, very clarifying.
Thank you.
An excellent post as always, Graham! I was especially struck by the wafer-factory passage. Being Anglican, I've often had those wafers for communion. While I'm not wanting to get into a discussion on the reality or illusion of sacraments in different ecclesial groups, I will say that our theology, at least as practiced at my parish, has a heavy belief in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist -- in fact its view isn't as dissimilar from the Orthodox one as might be expected -- and so that factoid about the communion wafers is not one with comfortable implications for me.
Fortunately, the wafers are not the common usage in parish. My priest makes the communion bread every week. I've seen him kneading the dough in the church kitchen myself. As far as what is the common and regular occurrence in my parish, then, is the embodiment you speak of, and that helps alleviate some of the discomfort from the wafer-factory passage.
Thanks, Zach!
What a gift that your priest makes communion bread with his own hands -- glory to God!
I grew up in a pretty aggressively anti-sacramental Protestant denomination in which the Lord's table was "only" symbolic -- but, as a consequence, the way in which the ritual was done was devoid even of just the basic symbolism that was supposed to be there (we didn't have one loaf, but rather separate and homogenous rectangles -- tiny crackers, or what my sister calls "Jeez-its"; also, not one cup, but a silver tray of individual tiny cups -- in retrospect remarkably similar to a drum of machine gun ammo -- which was passed up and down the aisles, just as the collection plate was).
I'm very familiar with that. Before I became Anglican -- my first service at my current parish was only 6 years ago -- I was non-denominational Evangelical. The first 24 years of my life was in explicitly anti-sacramental churches, with those same crackers and tiny cups of grape juice. 😆
Certainly churches/temples are important things; there’s a reason Christians started building them as soon as they feasibly could, even when their legal status was rather ambiguous. (I once attended a nerdily-fascinating presentation on the legal status of Christian church buildings in late antiquity.) But I think they need to exist in a symbiotic relationship with Christian homes functioning as temples. Small groups gathering to pray in each others’ homes is a great suggestion for building up the “home-as-church” side, which is often the more deficient. (Suggestion for a more-challenging version: reader’s Vespers instead of Typika.) Things like Bible study groups, which for better or worse usually have only a few regular attendees, can also meet in homes with good success, or so I've found it in my parish.
I don’t think you meant to imply that church communities having dedicated temples is superfluous, although at points it comes close to sounding that way. But there is at least one important sense, which you capture well, in which the “home-as-church” side of the symbiosis is the more important one. A church community that’s built up a strong home-church life can live on without its temple, but (as one unfortunately sees sometimes) one with a beautiful temple and no sense of its homes as churches is basically dead already.
Thanks for this, Father!
This went through a lot of drafts & although it more or less makes a pretty simple point, there were a ton of moving parts -- I had meant to emphasize that the "archipelago" metaphor brings in the idea of there being an underlying (geological) unity between the islands -- they are all of the same landmass, only water has come between them. the underlying unity of scattered homes-as-temples is of course the dedicated main temple to which the people in those homes would be going to pray with everyone else, under peaceful enough circumstances. I do pray we get to keep those temples in the long run, and I do think we need them -- people here can attest that Orthodox life is doable, but very difficult and lonely, without a temple close enough to attend regularly. And I am sad that 2020 sent a lot of people home from those temples, and that some haven't come back...which I wonder if continuing to live stream enables.
That last thing you said really struck home, too: "A church community that’s built up a strong home-church life can live on without its temple, but (as one unfortunately sees sometimes) one with a beautiful temple and no sense of its homes as churches is basically dead already." I've been thinking of 2020 as a kind of little "apocalypse" in the sense of revealing us for what we are...2020 felt like an invasion from outside, but a lot of it was a revelation of who we already were, unfortunately, within.
So I added a phrase at the end, to at least allude to the greater emphasis that I would have later in, let's say, a crystallized book, where now it says: "Or, as I'd maybe put it: Every home a temple, every temple a garden, every garden a forest, every forest a home. That's how I read the prophets, anyway: A return together to an archipelago of blossoming temple-homes—unified by a common life together in the main temple—sprawled across the Machine's worldwide oceans of asphalt and concrete—a retraction, when necessary, to quiet resting places enveloped in Edenic gardens from which we'd feed ourselves..." {{and as a side note to the side note, if indeed our dedicated temples were, as a rule, much more like the ethiopian forest-temples, surrounded as much as possible by gardens not just hostas, that would become a living witness for the gardens surrounding the home-temples, too}}
Also: Just found this gem in the journals of Fr. Alexander Schemann: "God gives us His Life, not ideas, doctrines, rules. At home, when all is done, life itself begins. Christ was homeless not because He despised simple happiness -- He did have a childhood, family, home -- but because He was at home everywhere in the world, which His Father created as "the home" of man. "Peace be with this house." We have our home and God's home, the Church, and the deepest experience of the Church is that of a home."
Your solar flare reference reminds me of a book: When The English Fall. It's about exactly that event, as experienced from the perspective of an Amish community. It's short and you might like it.
Thanks for the recommendation, Brian!
We just returned from taking 17 fourth graders to Gooseberry Falls Park, for a two day camping trip. (40 mile NE of Duluth, MN, on the shore of Lake Superior). Over the three days we were there we took some glorious walks. We walked inland, along the Gooseberry River, passing it's five beautiful waterfalls (having a lovely lunch on the warm rocks above the "fifth falls"). Much of the children's conversations during the walk (at least a particular group of boys) were filled with talk of video games. This is often the default conversation of "city" kids when confronted with sun, trees, and a long path more than a half a mile (except the child laser focused on finding agates by the water). At the Waldorf school I am at we have media guidelines/suggestions for families. For the most part these guidelines are not heeded (thus the river conversations). There are all the excuses from parents. All the excuses.
At school, the kids know (somehow) that I don't like smartphones. "Why don't you like smartphones Mr. Kampf? What's wrong with smartphones?" I always say, very pointedly, "If you're not careful they will lead you away from your heart!" Well, I used to say that...now I leave out "If your are not careful". They look at me like I was speaking Occitan.
The above may not be apropos...either way, Graham, you'll always be my guru.
Brad, you're my guru: "They'll lead you away from your heart!" -- that's exactly it!
When there are rocks and trees and rivers and sky and everything, I'm always amazed at the things people would prefer to talk about -- anything other than rocks and trees and rivers and sky and everything, man!
Where are the Sherrard quotes from in this post?
"The Desert Fathers and Ourselves" (https://www.eighthdayinstitute.org/the-desert-fathers-and-ourselves)
...one of the last essays he wrote, I think.
Love this reflection and thank you for your thoughtfulness! Me and my kids and best friend and some of our friends from church have started doing this...we all have the same intuition you describe. During COVID times we gathered and read the typika because the streaming services felt...cold. At a time when we were so desperate for warmth! We are terrible singers so we learned to laugh at ourselves! Ha! God bless you Graham we are all in this together. Thank you for the encouragement while we are in touch over the wired! Someday probably not too far down the road... people like us will probably withdraw from this corrupt medium of contact. When the time comes, I hope you will keep sending out your writing on paper via the snail mail! The postman will return to his old heroic form! My dearest friend is a rural postman, he'll be a hero in the days ahead! Ha! If there is an option now to receive your writings by mail I would love that option so much! Either way thank you and may God bless you a million blessings!
Diana, so good to know of kindred souls out there -- I love the thought of you & your loved ones doing your best to sing together -- in the body! And of the postman returning to his old heroic form -- that's asking to become a poem! I do look forward to the days of slow, very slow, paper-based contact, too...but have appreciated that the wires bring us together, too, when we probably wouldn't have found one another otherwise. And that the Substack platform in particular allows this kind of conversation (though, of course, conversation on someone's screened porch in the woods would be far better...the problem is: We're all here on this planet together, but somehow we can't be the small village in the body that we'd like to be -- it's sad! But...I trust these barriers will be overcome in the fullness of the kingdom of God; our sense that we belong together is going somewhere...)
(more on the paper option in my response to Juliana below)
(wait, book idea: "The Paper Option For The Benedict Option: How to Unstack Your Substack For a Post-Tech World")
Yes, please do a paper mail option! I would pay more. Already ditched my phone months ago but now I'm going crazy staring at my laptop screen reading substacks. This stack is worth it, but it would be so wonderful to eventually just give up the screen altogether.
Juliana, wow! I know I'm in a very small minority, not having a (smart)phone in the first place, but those who have had them, then stepped away, I think are an even rarer breed!
I would really love for you to be able to read my crazy little essays on paper rather than screens; I am seriously thinking about the Paper Option...I just don't see, yet, how it could be logistically feasible (yet). A few scattered thoughts:
1) I have written a small book -- three essays -- which says, I think, enough in itself. And I do plan to distil & reorganize some of this Sabbath Empire material into more small books from time to time. Reading books, though, doesn't include one important dimension of all of this, which is what's happening exactly now -- public conversation about a few thoughts at a time. Would there be a way to include something like that in the Paper Option? I don't remember how these things used to work back in the day...
2) It's not as great as paper, but it is possible to read Substacks on a Kindle. e-ink, with no backlighting, is much, much easier on the eyes. it's still digital tech, but it's a step in the right direction, I think. definitely more pleasant than a laptop.
3) I would actually really love to type these essays on my typewriter & literally cut & paste them zine-style in some kind of grungy black & white format and send them through the mail...so, I really am thinking about it.
Will subscribe!
"essays on my typewriter & literally cut & paste them zine-style in some kind of grungy black & white format"
Sign me up!
Whether you are a faithful son/brother or slightly deranged trees hugging cousin, you certainly are (to swipe Kierkegaard's paradoxical justification of the church) making the right mistakes, asking questions that promise to bring us closer to instead of further from the way of repentance and salvation.
It's a way that needs a living baseline or source to give and direct life. And yes, we have that in the BODY of Christ, the logos made Gnostic-confounding flesh that you rightly ties to its cosmic, biologjcal, historical and sensuous presence. Touch more than grass. But not less.
I'm suspicious of apocalyptic visions that offer quick solutions. But the mustard seed of reclaiming home and local centers of renewal and fellowship could yield a helpful crop. The continuing vitality of Pharisaic Judaism is sometimes attributed to its relocation to the home as the primary site of worship after the destruction of the temple. A post-covid lesson better than live streaming for sure.
Small note: I really like your picking up the archipelago image. I mentally substituted that for your "Empire" title early on since empire seems the quintessential bureaucratic form for a "Machine" politics and an oxymoron for Sabbath. Onward!
Thanks, David -- these are encouraging words!
This is an old thought, but I wonder if there is a sense in which God keeps sending us into one kind of exile or another, so that he can keep us more or less on the exodus road, forcing us into these retractions where we relearn home, Earth, body, kinship, rather than the opposite--rather than getting too far up the Babylon tower...
"Touch more than grass. But not less" -- I love it!
Powerful second to that thought. Sinai and Zion.were/are both places of dynamic encounter. The Way is open.
What is essential is what we have when earthly treasures have been taken from us and all we have is the treasure we found hidden in the field - the kingdom of God which is “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, Romans 14:17, the Spirit of God, the Spirit in the temple of our body and the Spirit found between two or three gathered in His name. But we, so often in our cravenness, find that not enough, and seek solace in the transient. May we exult in the gift of “It is the Spirit that gives life; the flesh is no help at all” John 6:63 and have rivers of living water flowing from our hearts. For “let the one who desires take the water of life without price”
Yes, exactly Jeff! Whenever God strips away our colossal, dazzling treasures, it's only so that we may discover, or rediscover, his treasure hidden in the field -- his Spirit, his Life-Breath, within, which is all we really need anyway.
A forthright opinion from me. I get impatient with the whole focus on meeting, seeing God in nature thing. I have had the blessing of a life with much immersion in the air, sky, soil, plants, weather, animals in beautiful settings, but it isn't enough. I get that many people have a deficit in this area and are thirsty for it. I get also the need for meaningful deep ritual and ceremony and the blessing it gives - Why once I saw the light of Christ emanating from the broken loaf as when Christ broke bread and the two disciples recognized him for who he was. Yet what is essential, that truly gives life is available - let's say alone in a lonely dark prison cell, or a sordid slum in a huge city filled with grinding poverty, ugliness and uncaring people - the Holy Spirit as gift, Jesus said to seek first the kingdom of God, defined in Romans 14:7 as "righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit" He also said "fear not little flock, the Father is pleased to give you the kingdom" The invisible Jesus is available always as the one who gives the Holy Spirit as a permanent ever present flow of life, as is the Father who is is also eager to do the same. A focus on ceremonies or even ascetic practice or the created order in a way can be unbelief in the gift and givingness of the Lord
It might not seem so, Jeff, but I couldn't agree more!
Very beautiful, Graham. And an encouragement to those like me who are far from an Orthodox parish. We continue to faithfully (and imperfectly) celebrate the Typika out here on the Great Plains in our home with the incense burning. Perhaps the only Orthodox prayers said for hundreds of miles around us, besides the praise offered by the growing grass and the chants of the birds. I've been slowly collecting the service books so the use of my phone during our service is limited. It's a little clunky, fumbling through big service books, but the fumbling seems far more human than scrolling with my little black box. And not unrelatedly, we are working to better establish our garden in our backyard, removing the invasive buckthorn from taking things over. I opted to pull the buckthorn out when I could, cut it back, and cover it up; rather than annihilate everything with glyphosates. as the machine recommends. Restoring the land and soul, without convenience, seems to be the better, more humane path. The screen and glyphosate don't allow me to struggle and fumble along—they make me glow in the wrong kind of way. :)
How beautiful, John! The growing grass and birdsong, and two or three gathered together, with unwieldy liturgy books and burning incense and a garden growing in the back...God willing, two or three other families sojourning through the Great Plains not so far away will gravitate toward the beauty of what you all are doing together, if you stick with it. I pray for this! And, people long for it everywhere -- they often just don't know it yet--they have to "taste and see." You could put up a couple icons in your garden and burn incense and do the Typika with the mourning doves!
Graham, so much to think on and pray about here. These were the first lines of many that hit deeply:
“It's as if we believe that rededicating ourselves to the melancholic irony of lament, since it's all we can muster now, should be able to count as some kind of resistance in the eyes of somebody, somewhere—it's as if we're muttering a kind of prayer.
But I don't know who we're praying to when we pray like that.”
On a side note, I’m guessing you may have a flip phone instead of a smartphone? If so, any suggestions on that front? Your posts have brought this to the forefront for me once again. A change is needed if nothing else than a means of “protest of the darkness.”
Chris, so glad you felt that passage...that was one of the ones that was in and out of the various drafts, but my intuition was that it meant something, and so it ultimately stayed.
Yeah, I do have a flip phone. Not a good one! I remember way back in the day I had one where the keyboard slid out from the bottom, so you could compose a text message pretty easily that way; I miss those. This is just the one and only flip phone left from TracFone.
I was kind of curious about the LightPhone for awhile, but a friend who actually has one doesn't like it much; battery runs out fast and it's hard to use. What I would really love -- for the engineers out there -- is something with a chunky keyboard, like the blackberries of old, but with an e-ink screen, like the kindle. and it would just call people and send and receive texts, that's it. that's my request to the world. oh, and it would be made largely out of recycled digital junk.
I have a cheap smart phone, but I ignore the fancy features and just talk, text, and take occasional pictures. But I do spend too much time on my IPad.
Last summer I actually got a 12 year old refurbished Samsung Galaxy with a keyboard, but also little touch screen and everything...I was going to use it exactly the way you described.
...but, all the cell towers in my area had, literally the month before, finally ceased all legacy 3G activity, and so this phone couldn't connect. dang!
but actually, I think this is the way: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/27/ham-radio-emergency-natural-disaster-climate-crisis