A life without gadgets
We did not downsize as a gesture of protest against consumer society. We simply found ourselves with a reduced income and set about discovering the things we could do without. We were helped by situating ourselves in a place where it is quite difficult to spend money in the ways we spent it before. Patmos did not have available the range of goods that eat up income at an expanding rate so that you never feel you have quite enough. And doing without them has the therapeutic effect of slowing you down. It takes time to hand-wash clothes or to jump up and down on sheets, rinse them, wring them out and hang them on a line between trees in the garden; to top and tail the beans; to mix, whip and grate by hand; to haul up buckets from a well. A life without gadgets develops a different, slower rhythm. And, oddly, more time seems to be available in a life without labor-saving devices.
Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul
Too rich to live well
We live in comforts that the richest of aristocrats not very long ago could never have dreamed of, and yet we claim that we are too poor to have more than a child or two. The truth is the reverse: we are too rich to have more than a child or two, too committed to work for work’s sake and to the purchase of prestige, mansions, the “best” schools, and toys for grown-ups.
Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes
Cosmopolitans and Scholars
A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Putting yourself in the right place
Christian liturgies serve as “frameworks of clues which are apt to induce a passionate search for God.”
Michael Polanyi: Epistemological Therapist for a Secular Age
Quick to listen and pray, slow to speak
Although one must think of God constantly, he said, one must not speak of God quickly or readily. One acquires knowledge of God through the mind, but only with the aid of prayer and ascetic discipline. Gregory taught that theology is not for all people or for all occasions. Knowledge of theological matters is not necessary for salvation; only simple faith is needed. Speaking of God is a great task, but spiritual purification is far more important
Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
The Prodigal’s Father
We may act like the wayward younger brother and feel like the hardworking elder brother, but in the end we are called to be like the merciful father.
James Martin, S.J., Jesus. (I dislike plagiarism even more than I dislike quoting this author. As they say, “even a blind pig finds a truffle now and then.”)
Humility
Real humility, I learned from the nuns of Evangelismos, is not thinking yourself less than the dust. It is thinking of others so completely that you do not think about yourself at all.
Peter France, A Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos
Only wonder understands anything.
St. Gregory of Nyssa
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 