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The Art of Faith: How the Church lost the Artists and why She needs them back.

How did we go from Dante and Flannery O’Conner, from Dostoyevsky and Da Vinci, to this barren, desolate landscape of Christian art? How did we get from Bach and Handel, from early twentieth century American Gospel music, to the travesty of modern Christian country-rock and the cringe inducing mediocrity of post-conciliar Catholic liturgical music? Where did Christian devotional art jump the proverbial shark? Somewhere along the line the arts lost their religion, and religion lost its art. Art and music became institutionalized; a part of the academy, indoctrinated into Enlightenment values, and suspicious of the value of enlightenment. Nihilism replaced the Good, the True and the Beautiful and the Theory of Relativity replaced the prologue to the Gospel of John. In the Catholic universe specifically, we lost our faith. Catholicism in the pre-conciliar period was already losing its hold on the artist. The neocon legalism of the Neo-Scholastics had eclipsed the cosmic, Neoplatonic understanding of the early Church Fathers and the poetic speculations of the medieval mystics. The pre-conciliar Church was a Church of banned books and ridiculous formulations: “learn this prayer and get ten days off of purgatory.” No thinker—no artist—could take such nonsense seriously. The Church as spiritual institution had become a mental institution. 

Then came Vatican II and the great hope of renewal, the great challenge of tackling modernity head on, of engaging with the culture and its ideas from a Catholic worldview; not of modernizing the Church but of meeting the challenges posed by the post-Enlightenment atheistic paradigm with a better Way, a richer Philosophy of Being, a more compelling worldview. That was the idea. A return to source. A revival of the religion via the Church Fathers. A little less Aristotle and a little more Plato. Instead, the modernists in the Church hijacked the post-conciliar period and went about liberalizing and secularizing the Catholic Church to such an extent that it lost its very essence, its meaning. Since we no longer had to abstain from meat on Fridays, it followed that we no longer had to take Lent seriously, we no longer had to discipline ourselves, to steel ourselves against modernity’s excesses. We no longer had to take the Catholic faith seriously. We could eat meat whenever we damn well pleased and go on a second vacation this year. We could go to a fancy dinner on Friday, take the boat to the lake on Saturday, and catch 11am Mass on Sunday. With a crisis of meaning in the culture at large, we were responding by making Catholicism ever more meaningless. Instead of rising to the challenge of modernity by offering a real alternative, we were allowing modernity to dictate the terms. No small wonder we lost the artists. No small wonder we haven’t seen great Catholic art in the post-conciliar period. Artists deal in meaning, and if you are going to strip meaning from the Church, then the result will be (and has been) to strip the Church of art.

But, there is always hope. We are Christians, after all, and hope is still one of our three cardinal virtues. Mainstream culture, birthed by modernity’s Cartesian values, is in serious crisis. We have stripped the world of its center. We have separated logic from logos, and the wheels on the post-enlightenment Western worldview are falling off. The bloom is off the secular rose and there is not enough lipstick in the world to pretty up this pig. Left and Right have lost their sense of direction. The American anti-war movement is on life support and fading fast. Boys think they are girls and girls want to be boys and you dare not question this phenomena for fear of being accused of a lack of sensitivity—or worse. The cities have become hotbeds of conformity catering exclusively to young professionals, and outside of the cities the suburbs are violently crumbling. Boomer retirees have colonized the small towns, pushing the cost of living beyond the reach of a shrinking working class, and on the edges of everywhere the homeless, unhoused masses wander aimlessly in drug-zombie stupor through this post-apocalyptic American Nightmare. And therein lies the hope. We are at an undeniable crossroads as a society. The dark house of cards that we have built our institutions on is being exposed, brought into the light of day, and there will be no political salvation. 

There is no salvation in politics. There is only salvation in Truth, and Truth has a shape—its shape is cruciform: a vertical bar connecting humanity to God, and a horizontal bar connecting us to each other. And artists, true artists, are always after the Truth. Great art is never atheistic. To the extent that the secular world has produced great art, it has been, however unknowingly, in relationship to the Unknown God; a God who is, nevertheless, always reaching down to reveal himself to us. As George Steiner argues in his book Real Presences, a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art, and as Hans Urs von Balthasar points out in Christian Meditation, “…the senses and imagination of a believer…become of themselves ‘spiritual’ senses and a ‘spiritual’ imagination, since they are at the service of faith, and together with their ‘object’—the man Jesus Christ, who is open to God and reveals God—they in turn open up to the divine.” The Unknown God is knowable, the Father reaches for his children in infinite friendship, and the principalities and powers of this world are powerless in the face of Eternity. But bourgeois Christianity; ornamental, devoid of Spirit, and atheistic in its presentation — is in no position to inspire, to evangelize, and to rise to the challenges we face as a society. We need a mystical, tactile, all-encompassing Christianity. Christianity as an Art. And who better to articulate this vision of a robust and colorful Christianity than the artists? Perhaps a new generation of Christian artists will emerge, pick up their parable, and show us the way. I have faith in our artists, and I hope that it happens, because I would love to see it.

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You Are Welcomed at The Christian Drifter…

Welcome to The Christian Drifter, a newsletter of sorts, where we will be exploring the brightest lights in Christian thought of the last two thousand or so years, as well as putting in our own two cents in the form of theological speculations, radical proposals for a new spiritual counter-culture, book reviews, essays and opinion pieces, and biblical exegesis; with humility and an awareness of our limited capacities, but also, it must be acknowledged, with the reckless verve of a layman caught up in the third Heaven. We will be engaging with ideas orthodox and at the very edges of Christian orthodoxy; universal salvation, Christian anarchism, radical personalism, food & faith, the Omega Point theory, the Faith-Works problem, Christianity as counter-culture, Christian Minimalism, the future of Catholic art/music, the future of Catholic education, Christian Meditation, the Yoga of Mary, and what the psychedelic experience can tell us about death, resurrection and the Holy Trinity.

My name is Mark Saint Paul and I am the titular Christian Drifter. I hope you enjoy the writing and that the ideas here are stimulating. My aim is to help articulate a Christian Vision of the future that is grounded in Charity (Love), for we are tasked to love our neighbors, and they are all our neighbors. In a new age of false binaries, fear of the other, political religiosity and spiritual estrangement, I feel compelled to lend my voice to the growing choir of thoughtful Christians calling for a return to an earlier, communitarian Christianity. The Christianity of Acts, of the small flock, of shared meals and the strange joy of faith, hope and love. You are welcomed here.

Make A Joyful Noise (a poem)

Make a Joyful Noise


Make a joyful noise
you–sons of silence 
the kind of noise
that can only rise up
from the sound of Nothing
the Quiet of Everything
the Quiet of the All
the sound of God
the Sacred Breath of
The One
who sits inside our secret room
in the deepest recess of
Our Hidden Palace
which is but one
of countless mansions
in the majesty of
His Kingdom

His Kingdom is contained 
within Him
just as Our Palace is contained
within Us
and the secret room
within the Palace
is where you will find Him
waiting for you
silently 
waiting for
you

big enough to contain
All
that ever was and
ever will Be

and small enough to fit
to sit
silently in the middle
of your heart

enjoy the sound
the soundless sound
of silence–
Sacred Breath of God

and when you break that silence
when you rise 
from the altar 
in the secret room
in the Hidden Palace
amongst the countless mansions of
His Kingdom–
make a joyful noise
sing a Song of Silence
make a joyful noise.


-Mark Saint Paul

Reflections on a Neo-Monastic Home

Reading Thomas Moore’s Meditations: On the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life, I am compelled to explore my own meditations on the subject and to put forth my reflections on a Neo-Monastic Movement—of sorts—within the Church and, as a broader spiritual movement, outside of the Church. The subject of Moore’s meditations is easily discerned by the book’s title, in simplest terms: how can one incorporate aspects of monastic life into one’s daily life? In the book’s second meditation, Moore suggests that “Maybe it’s a mistake to think of the monastic life as a withdrawal from the active world; we might see it more as an alternative to the hyperactivity that is characteristic of modern life.”

The negative side-effects of modernity and its devotion to technology, to the cult of politics and the church of social media—all while the economic equilibrium of late-stage capitalism continues its precarious dance on the tight-rope of wishful thinking—have progressed into a full blown spiritual epidemic. I am reminded of a scene from the film You’re Gonna Miss Me, a documentary about the mentally ill rock musician Roky Erickson, in which Roky is at home with his mother (who also suffers from mental illness) and he is scrolling through the radio dial, static and mariachi music giving way to talk radio and then to more static, all while sitting in front of a television set which is blaring cereal and shampoo commercials at full volume. In the next room his mother is sitting in front of her own television set, which is tuned to an entirely different channel; the cacophony of sounds swirling in the ether inspiring a feeling of total madness. I remember thinking as I watched the film, “If he wasn’t crazy already, this environment would drive him crazy!” When Thomas Moore talks about the “hyperactivity of modern life” I think of all the noise—the “information”—being streamed from smartphones, iPads, and television sets into the atmosphere of our every day lives, and I think “it’s no wonder the world’s gone mad.” We need an alternative.

Here in our home, which we affectionately refer to as the Church of the Family Flower, we live under our own monastic Rule. The alarm is set for 4:30am and my wife and I dutifully, and happily, rise from our slumber with the sign of the cross, and make our way to our respective altars for morning prayers and meditations. Candles and incense are lit and with rosaries and prayer beads in hand we kneel to pray. After my personal prayer routine, while my wife transitions into yoga, I make my way into the kitchen to prepare a simple breakfast of steel cut oats for the family. While our boy gets his last bit of sleep in and my wife showers and dresses for work—she teaches at the Waldorf school where our boy attends kindergarten—I head into our study to read and write. We all have breakfast together somewhere in the vicinity of 6:30am. My wife and I drink our green tea and the boy goes in for raw milk. After seeing them off to school, I grab by walking stick and take a short stroll around the block to get my blood moving.

That’s how we do our mornings at the Church of the Family Flower. What we don’t do is touch our phones, turn on computers, and we absolutely do not own a television. We have a fantastic vinyl collection and usually listen to old gospel, folk or country music over breakfast. The boy watches no television and he gets no screen time. He listens to vinyl (Pink Floyd and the Beatles are his favorites) and he does “500 piece” puzzles which are marked for ages 12+, but, at 4 years old, he finishes them with no help from me or his mother. We go on walks together. He helps out with cooking and cleaning when he is in the mood, and when it comes to working in the yard and tending the garden, he is always in the mood to help. We pray together before dinner and after dinner he likes to perform a “concert” for me and his mom. At bedtime he asks for a blessing as he is being tucked into bed. I make the sign of the cross on his forehead and ask his guardian angels to watch over him in his sleep. There is always time for a bedtime story. There will never be a video game console at the Church of the Family Flower. 

My wife and I close out the night reading from our extensive library, sharing conversation, writing in our journals, attending to our studies; or else I play the piano, doing my “poor man’s Randy Newman” routine, while she does some evening yoga. We return to our altars for bedtime prayer and meditations, before laying down together at the end of the day. We make our own bread, ferment our own kimchi, wildcraft herbs from the forest and make our own tinctures. We have a small garden, we make all of our own meals and we invite friends to dinner instead of asking them to meet us at an overpriced restaurant. We do what we can to live a life connected to the sources of our sustenance. We venture out into the community to meet up with friends over a cup of coffee or tea, we take pilgrimages to sacred sites on Saturdays and we go to church on Sundays. We donate clothes to the local Catholic Worker House when we can and we are dead set on organizing a weekly meal for the homeless, which we hope to have off the ground before summer.

We do all of this because we want to live a life of meaning, of charity, of love; a life bursting with intention and hope, grounded in Source, filled with Spirit, and reaching upward into an ever greater union with the Most High. We do all this because this is what “being Christian” means to us. I am not proposing that you live the way we do, that you follow the Rule of the Family Flower—everyone has to find their own way home—but I am suggesting that you live intentionally, that you watch your diet (food and information) and that you consider “… an alternative to the hyperactivity that is characteristic of modern life.” I am suggesting that you pick up your cross. Your mental health depends on it—your spiritual health depends on it—and this world depends on you.

The Courage To Read

Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be was first published in 1952, based on a series of lectures he gave at Yale University that same year. Reading Tillich’s masterful treatise on courage in the “age of anxiety” in the midst of Lent in the year 2023, with war raging in Eastern Europe and chemical disaster train derailments closer to home (in a rapidly fading American Empire), one is left with the feeling that Paul Tillich is reaching out to us through space and time with a prophetic diagnosis of the current “crisis of meaning” and the widespread existential anxiety everywhere apparent in our present moment. More importantly he is reaching through time to present to us a model of courage in the face of existential anxiety, with a way in which we can take this inescapable “anxiety of non-being” upon ourselves, to lift up our cross and have the courage to be.

I am not here, at this moment, to write a review of The Courage To Be, but rather I mention it here to entice you and to illustrate a point in a broader discussion. We are living in a new age of anxiety. A post-modern, presentist age where online algorithms push twenty-four hour news cycles and cultural binary gamification; it’s “fear of the other” and “what’s new” distractions, it’s mind games in the cyberspace pews of the Cult of Now. We are hooked to our digital devices, on a morphine drip of questionable (but rarely questioned) information. Passive receivers brainwashed into “true” believers, all fooled into the belief that we are thinking our own thoughts, forming our own opinions, mixing our own unique kool-aid. Instead, we have fallen victim to groupthink, to a narrowing of the cultural conversation, a limiting of the range of possibilities and an under-estimation of our human potential. But we are plugged in! We are in the know! We are in the Now! We are artificially intelligent.

Our mistake is that we have narrowed the focal point on our cultural lens to such a degree that we can not see the forest for the trees, as the old saying goes. We are under the strange and myopic impression that the human story that we are all partaking in is a Netflix series that just came out last week, and which we can binge watch while laying in bed and scrolling through our instagram, instead of what it actually is: a huge, intimidating, sprawling sacred book full of intertwining  stories and layers of meaning, hidden truths, strange parables, paradox and supernatural wonders. That is our story. The world that we are now living in wasn’t born yesterday. If we want to understand it, if we want to be equipped to deal with it, then we have to be willing to go back to the beginning and read the sacred texts of the ancient world, the philosophies and mythologies of the Greeks, the Torah of the Hebrews, the New Testament, The Bhagavad-Gita, the Diamond Sutra. We have to follow the line through the middle ages and the mystics and alchemists and esotericists. We have to read Shakespeare and Dante and Kempis and Darwin and Spinoza and William Blake. We would do well to engage with Walt Whitman and Dorothy Day and E.E. Cummings and Teresa of Avila and Flannery O’Conner and Adorno and Jacques Ellul and Guy Debord and Aldous Huxley. Read Twain and Emerson and Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver if you want to learn something about America. Read. Don’t listen to the audio book. In a time of mass confusion and mass distraction, we need to have the courage to unplug from the machine, the courage to broaden our view, the courage to explore the breadth of the human experience, the courage to read.