My morning is two parts Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, two parts insomnia, and a splash of hope that there’ll be some quiet before the kids wake. Bottoms up.
Revenge Bedtime Procrastination is this psychological phenomenon where you stay up late, late, late trying to claw back some control. The car leaks oil, the kids spill spaghetti on the carpet, a political figure gets assassinated. Things get away from you.
So when the sun goes down you fight back. For a bit of order in the chaos. You scroll on your phone, you binge Netflix, you retaliate at a day that slipped through your fingers.
The heart is formed by its liturgies
Walking through the kitchen my right hand clicks the stove-top light on. It spills a soft orange over the kitchen table. The clock blinks 05:45. Yesterday’s shirt is sleeping on a chair; putting it on brings all those past thoughts into the present.
They arrested the assassin.
And that was part of my insomnia, the event. The other part is that Charlie’s kids won’t see their dad in the morning. No sleepy hugs in the September half dark.
My left thumb pushes a button to turn on our espresso machine, and my right hand reaches up to grab a tin of coffee beans. Our scale is sensitive down to a tenth of a gram and it counts up to 18 as beans pour in. I am thinking, dumping beans in the hopper, about violence as a barometer. That when violence comes from hatred it’s spiritual sickness, when it’s for defence of the innocent it’s spiritual health.
Our grinder has two metal arms, and the portafilter rests on them; that’s the handled basket you lock into the espresso machine. You push the grind button and the conical burrs spin, crushing the beans, and they fall into the basket like fluffy, aromatic, brown snow.
Next you tamp down the grinds, compact them, and you insert the portafilter into the machine, twisting to lock it into place. Press the button and the boiled water gets pumped towards the portafilter, and pressure builds up to about 9 bar. The boiled water has to push through the compacted grinds, and I know I have 27 seconds until 2oz streams into my cup like an hourglass.
“Stars, hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires.” MacBeth said that, and for some reason it’s on my mind as the digital timer counts up 4, 5, 6…
The close up video plays in my mind, and all these things are revelations of a spiritual condition. The hatred, the rage, the dehumanization. These mark our world East of Eden.
18, 19, 20…
Compassion for the guilty is injustice for the victim.
Is that true?
Maybe it’s more complex than that.
The brown gurgles into my espresso mug. The only thing that makes sense to me, right now, is that a heart estranged from God cannot see the other as an imager.
26, 27…and my thumb pushes the button to stop.
Our screen door out to the patio is open, and morning’s breath washes in cool over my dim living room. I usually sit on our love seat because from there you can see the mountains and the trees, and because I can put my oldest son’s monitor on the coffee table. And I can see all this, and read and sip at my 2oz of creme brûlée and marmalade.
Spiritual sickness is having eyes, but not seeing the world as God intended.
We get infected, lose clarity, as we move further from the Light of the World. I’m rubbing my eyes awake, sipping in the quiet morning, and wondering why this kind of violence has been the answer we’ve reached for since everything went belly up. Since the serpent whispered all those lies to our first parents.
On the table is an essay I printed about how individuals and also nations can become possessed. By demons, I mean. And the signs are the same.
Demonized individuals, the article says, manifest pride and avarice, manifest stubbornness and a refusal to admit mistakes. And that make sense to me because God hates pride, because God loves humility, and because repentance leads to life.
And isn’t everything in opposition to God demonic?
There’s the more dramatic manifestations, too, the silver screen kinda stuff. There’s loss of control, there’s shrieking, there’s acting without reason. The assassinating of a political opponent? Yeah, probably, because God is the Author of Life. And I’m having my last sips.
The espresso cup rattles on its saucer as I walk it to the kitchen and pour water over the sticky memory of coffee. There’s supplements to take every morning, and gulping down the handful of them has me thinking about the move from individual to nation.
Nations can fall under a collective madness.
That’s what the article says. Nations can succumb to spiritual influences that lead to ruin and self-destruction. Putting the cup in the dishwasher, whispering, praying it was this easy to clean away the grime of the world.
But it’s not.
I just keep asking myself:
What are the symptoms of a distorted nation?
But there’s no time to think it through. A door clicks open, and my two year old boy is rubbing his eyes down the hall, holding back tears.
“Poppa, I had a bad dream.”
The stove top clock says it’s 06:15, and crouching down to look at him, he falls into my arms. And the reason I can’t shake this whole thing, is because of how much love there is for my son. He won’t get this again. Charlie, I mean. And neither will his kids. They won’t get hugs from their dad when they get scared.
“It’s going to be okay, pal. Poppa is here.” They won’t get to hear that, either.
He’s sniffling on my shoulder and he’s asking for crunchy cereal, and I plop him on the counter as we pour a small bowl. His bedhead is wild, and I wonder what kind of world I will pass onto him.
Ransom, my son, takes my hand and jumps off the counter, and slowly walks his morning snack to the living room. Walking beside him there are the echoes of people celebrating Charlie’s death ringing in my head. There’s the cheers, the kind born of rage. They ring out in unison. And I’m thinking, yeah, I guess collectives, nations, can be possessed.
You see these things, but you don’t want to.
I don’t want to see the whole world. I can’t. I’m just a man. Just a husband. Just a father. And I can’t keep up with it all, you know? I move at the pace of my humanity and I don’t know how to make sense of everything just yet. And I don’t know if I’m even supposed to.
Whatever few moments of contemplation I had, well, they’re washed away by the laughter of my son who grabbed his rocket and started counting down 10, 9, 8 all the way to Blast Off!
We’re running together and I’m grabbing him, throwing him and his rocket onto the couch, and he yells, Crash Landing!
You can’t understand life when a Machine forces you to swallow it whole.
Everything, altogether, all at once. Feeds and algorithms. Social Media. It feels like the telos of that diabolical machine is to intensify vice. It echoes with pride, multiplies it, posts it, shares it. I’ve read the comments, the glee at Death, the calls for re-vengeance.
I can’t keep up with it all. I can’t parse out reality from propaganda, truth from rage-bait. And it makes sense to me, that all this, too, would be a symptom of some deeper sickness.
There’s people I talk to who land on either side of this whole thing, and each of them feel morally justified in where they land. Some of them tell me I’m complicit, that I’m a coward if I don’t publicly draw a line. If I don’t condemn or affirm or whatever else.
I don’t buy that.
That feels like the kind of brain rot that infects a chronically online generation who thinks the virtual life is a real one. Not everyone needs to comment on everything all the time. These magic boxes we carry around, the 5.8x2.8” bricks with the flashing lights in our pockets, the ones that beam endless streams of horrific news into our brains, well, these are secular liturgies. They catechize us towards consumption and despair and hopelessness, and they shape our lens for interpreting the world.
We understand as we hear, as we see, their sermons. Their homilies are our hermeneutic.
I’ve watched people say stuff like “No one deserves to die, but he did have harmful rhetoric.”
And also stuff like,
“I never really liked the guy, but he shouldn’t have died.”
And those big buts, the qualifiers, they sound strange in my ears. They sound like the kind of thing someone who communicates via tweets says. They sound like the kind of thing someone who assesses life based on the perceived response of however many potential, digital, viewers says.
It’s virtual, it’s disembodied.
And I think the article alluded to that, the demonic and the disembodied.
I didn’t have to qualify myself when I talked with my wife. I could just tell her it affected me, and that I didn’t really know why. Maybe it was because I almost bled to death three times when she was pregnant; maybe it was because I had to say good-bye and hope it was a lie, and Charlie never got the chance. Damn. I don’t know.
But that’s what I mean by brainwashing; the flashing clockwork orange of cat memes and bus stabbings, of sourdough recipes and bombs in Gaza. The endless streams of fit-fluencer thirst traps and political pundits calling for arms. I mean the reprogramming scroll of people calling their opposition every pejorative in the book : nazis, commies, calvinists.
All that stuff forms you.
Aislinn, my wife, she wakes up, and she’s walking down the hall in an oversized shirt, holding our youngest, Cassian. I’m standing to give her a kiss and watching Ransom do the same. And I’m thinking Charlie will never get to do that again, either. A kiss at dawn. And I see the flash of the close-up video.
It’s 18grams for her, too, and while the machine warms up, I boil some water because she likes an americano. Watching Aislinn with the kids, I can’t stop thinking about what shapes us; family, culture, screens. And Aldous Huxley comes to mind, his Berkley address.
While the beans grind into fluff, I’m thinking about his idea of the Ultimate Revolution, the technological one, the one that, according to him, will be Pavlovian and Skinnerian in its control.
While the machine pumps and forces water through the compressed coffee, I’m thinking about how all of that, he says, combined with mind altering drugs, will allow the powers and authorities of our nations act upon the mind-body of their fellow man.
Or, brainwash them. Mind control them. With bells and dings, with electric zaps and reward loops, with narcotics and hallucinogenics.
And I’m wondering, pouring three ounces of 195°F water into her cup, adding a splash of cream, just how slowly things change. If that’s what happened to the assassin. If, somehow, all that social input made him dehumanize Charlie. And I’m thinking of all the responses. I’m wondering about the psychological manipulation of TikTok and Instagram, about the gradual group think, about the kind of dopamine hit that degrades the other so much it leads to murder.
We become what we behold.
Walking the americano over to my wife, with her hair up, I’m looking at my chubby infant crawling after my wild toddler, and I’m being shaped by the kind of laughter that holds the world together.
It’s not long after that I have to head into my office to work. All of this is still churning inside me for the handful hours before Ransom’s nap-time. We live in a small apartment, my office is in his room, which triples as a spare room. And when he goes down, I workout at the outdoor gym across town.
My Subaru stalls every time I try to start it, so I have to press the gas a little bit as I turn the ignition. Pulling out onto the main road I’m trying to put it all together: the demonization, the brainwashing, the sin. All of it is a hijacking of our spiritual perceptions.
Billy Idol is singing about a Rebel Yell, and I’m thinking of the Early Fathers who say that the eyes of our heart were made to see God, who say that evil seeks to distort our vision. It clouds our ability to see clearly. All the noise, all the lies, all the disembodiment, it blinds us. You can’t begin to make sense of life, of love, of happiness if your nous, your spiritual perception, is all jumbled up. That’s why lies seem true, and it’s why hatred feels like a virtue.
“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil.” That’s on my mind, too.
My AC unit has been broken since we bought the car three years ago, so the windows are down, and September is blowing through my hair, and it makes sense to me that the assassin was de-formed, un-made, by the false catechesis of the world. At some level, he’d been brainwashed, demonized, and he’d given into sin. He believed that violence was the solution, and he took the de-humanization about as far as you can go — about 160 yards or so, and a bullet.
The outdoor gym is just a few pull-up bars, and a set of parallels I use for dips. In between sets my lungs are inhaling, my heart is praying. Thinking the whole damn world needs healing. Asking just how perfect someone needs to be before they deserve mercy, before they deserve care.
I don’t know the full shape of mercy. But I know it looks a lot like Aislinn forgiving me for being a jackass. I know it looks like the sleepless compassion of care when our kids get sick, when the world overwhelms them, when they cry.
I’m thinking that Charlie’s wife, Erika, she needs healing, and so do her kids. I’m thinking the assassin, Tyler, he needs healing, too. And so does everyone effected, everyone talking about it, scrambling for answers, for next steps, for ways forward.
Mercy feels easy for my family : forgive, comfort, hold.
But how does it scale up to a nation? To a collective infected by pride and rage? I don’t know.
My Casio watch beeps telling me it’s time for pull-ups, for dips, for push-ups, and then I am wondering:
How do we heal?
And I reset my timer for three minutes, panting, thinking that if I’m right, if our nations are possessed in some way, if they’re irrational and arrogant, if we dehumanize, how can we begin to reason together?
My Casio beeps again.
And it’s another round of 10 pull-ups, of 15 dips, of 30 pushups, and then another three minutes of rest. I have to do this ten times.
And I’m thinking we start to reason together slowly.
Just like how our bodies get stronger.
I think we need to de-program bit by bit; we rewash our brains a set at a time. We build up, slowly, around Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.
There’s this idea, a central one, in the Philokolia, called nepsis, or watchfulness. You keep guard over your life, you watch over what you consume, and what consumes you. Be careful, little eyes, what you see. Vigilance over what you look at, intentionality about what you hear, attention to what you repeat.
Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks…and, man, how estranged our hearts have become.
I’m thinking all this in three minute intervals.
Then you learn to fast. Food, sure, but also these damn screens, the sensationalized media, the toxic feeds. You learn to say no to dopamine driven brainwashing; and in doing so, you learn that virtual life is a counterfeit. It’s a lie. It isn’t real. The flesh and blood all around you, that’s where life is.
The sun is slow-cooking my shoulders and my back, and I can hear the birds singing, and the crickets chirping their hymns, and I’m thinking about just how much good some silence would do us all. A quiet counter-formation. Shutting off the noise, praying. No inputs. No podcasts. No cutting edge of the cultural pulse.
Learn the zeitgeist of heaven.
That’s how you hear Him. God, I mean. In the slow and in the patient. That’s what I learned from Elijah, at least. Not in the storm, not in the earthquake, not in the fire. In the still, small voice.
My heartbeat is in my hands and in my ears, and on these last three minute intervals, my mind is trying to place confession at the centre of healing.
What if we confessed our sins to one another?
James says that heals us. What if we named the sin that was tearing us apart? What if, instead of pointing fingers, of making political dunks, instead of appealing to our base or in-group, we asked for forgiveness for all the destruction we’ve caused?
Jesus said to love your enemy, and that paradox of justice and mercy is only solved through loving confession.
Driving home is about three songs and two ad breaks; and my wife takes our kids out to the beach, and I head to the patio to try to finish an illustration project. And all these questions percolate in my mind and heart. And it’s the closest I’ve ever felt to Mother Mary. The pondering and questioning that looks like obedience.
After work, at about 4pm, I take the kids out, both Ransom and Cassian, to give my better half a bit of a break. We pack into the car, we rev it to a start, and as we drive up to the Rocket Park with the ducks, we sing The Boys are Back in Town. Well, I sing it, Ransom laughs, and Cassian burbles.
“Stars, hide your fires,” because the tragedy of a dead husband and father hits so close to home. Because that life is my life, and I love my wife and I love my kids.
“Vengeance is mine.” The Lord sayeth that.
And what about everything else?
We need justice. Justice for the family, justice for Tyler, but the Lord will avenge, He will repay. And I try to square all that up with all the tragedies of history, with those who fought against evil, but I don’t know how to make it all cohere.
Compassion for the guilty is injustice for the victim?
But I am just thinking about Chesterton and when he said:
“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
And my kids are in the back seat, so that makes sense to me.
At the park Ransom is running, and we’re sliding, and I’m throwing him up into the air, and Cassian is crawling around, smiling, trying to catch us, eating sticks. Ransom is chasing ducks, trying to pick them up, asking if he can go swimming with them. Cassian is in my arms, like a plane, and we’re chasing Ransom as he chases ducks.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Mercy. I don’t know.
Mercy for the family.
Mercy for Tyler.
Mercy because we all need it.
Justice and mercy.
Ransom finds some dandelions, and he blows on them, and he wishes for chocolate cake. He runs to the next one, blows, and wishes for another piece, and there’s dozens of them, so, his world is about to unravel when we get home.
Not all wishes come true, son.
My timer goes off, it’s 18:30, so I tell Ransom to say goodbye to the ducks, to the dandelions, to the slides, and tell him we’re going home for dinner. The car is packed up, kids in the back, toys in the trunk, and as we drive home, down the mountain, I am thinking about the lifecycle of media. Everything moves so fast we can’t process it. My mind has been on this for days, and it will be for God knows how long. And if I can’t process it, well, I can’t lament it.
At home we’re around the table, telling stories, singing our favourite songs, and after, the kids have a bath, we brush teeth, we read books, we get into pajamas, and we get ready for sleep. By we, I mean the kids. But we tell them momma and poppa are going to rest, too. They don’t want to miss a moment with us, and we don’t want to miss a moment with them.
Every night Ransom and I sing Oo-De-Lally and we say the Lord’s Prayer, and after we wish each other goodnight.
Bedtimes are liturgies, and the heart is formed by its liturgies. Then the whole world sleeps.
Bedtime is a little death; an until we meet again.
But night is not the end, it’s the waiting room of Dawn. That’s the Resurrection.
And a New Dawn, God help us, is coming.
Every Day Saints is a torchlight searching for the quiet miracles, the beautifully human stories and ideas that exist all around us. And it is a place to dialogue, not Holy Ground, but still a place of gathering.
Genuinely hitting a new level of skill and quality in your writing my friend. This slid around and weaved together so much which is so real. Well done.
I really liked moving at the speed of your own humanity. I hope they publish it. A Christian article that says “I’m not sure how to process a constellation of hysteria” written in an earth grounding way is worthwhile imo. Unless they want cookie cutter then whatever.
My take away is this conveys and offers comfort in confusion and that’s niche, needed and hard to find.