Technocracy and Contemplative Revolution

Cracking Open Labyrinthian Walls and Building Bridges to Glory

During Covid, I wrote that if the new evangelization is to be fully engaged today, we need to deal with walls. I now want to clarify that dealing with these walls requires contemplative prayer. At the time, I was concerned about people locked behind the walls of their own homes - for those walls were much more than material just as the disease was much more than physiological. The spiritual walls of materialism are raised today higher than ever even though the physiological pathology is no longer the threat it once was. These walls form labyrinths. The tyranny of materialism asserts itself over human affairs suffocating the human spirit in labyrinths of conflict in politics and entertainment, in wars between nations and in families, and even in the rancorous desires and judgments of the heart. To accept this tyranny is to forsake any hope of peace. But peace is worth fighting for. To overthrow such a tyranny requires a spiritual revolt, the decision to open the eyes of the heart, the effort to live spiritually awake in a dumbed and drugged out world. This is what contemplative prayer in the Catholic tradition is. The New Evangelization requires such a revolt of the heart, such a spiritual revolution, such a struggle in prayer to crack open walls of materialism and build bridges out of the labyrinth so that those we love might have the chance to step out into the open and breathe the fresh air of the Spirit.

Humanity has long been trapped in all kinds of labyrinths. In this post-contemporary world, the walls of these self-made edifices are decorated in shades of heartless consumerism, but they remain the same encircling walls both Dante and Virgil knew. Hotel California has always existed in the human heart, but never so well disguised as now. The labyrinth is designed to keep the eyes of our hearts closed. The passageways promise escapes but when eyes are closed to the sacred, one does not break through to the other side. Instead, we have whole societies groping for what can be grasped, measured and consumed. The bad news is that we are all trapped in this together. There is no way to leave … unless someone greater than us can help us out. The Good News is that God himself has entered the labyrinth and opened up a His own passageway so that we might wake up and find our way out and back home. He is the way. Not content with simply plotting our escape, He has suffered to break into our prison to lead us out - if only we will follow Him who is the bridge over the resentment and anxiety, hostility and despair that entrap us.

Even the way we see ourselves is a vacuous labyrinth. As I write, I am so aware that I am not supposed to use “man” generically anymore - because we no longer understand ourselves as men. Instead, we have been shamed into regarding ourselves as post-apocalyptic androgynes. Nudged into being consummate consumers for whom a neighbor is but a passing threat to be avoided, blamed, used, or indulged in, but never loved - we are alienated from ourselves. More than empty … our technocratic labyrinth is a vacuum. Hans Urs Von Balthasar prophetically coined anima technica vacua that is an apt descriptor of the androgyne who defines our times and haunts our families. In the 1970s, Balthasar was confounded over the devastating affect of a few hours of TV. What would he say about our hearts today?

What happened to real friendship? It is lost in the labyrinth. Friendship requires freely embraced and carefully cultivated masculinity and femininity, a mutual acceptance marked by a certain chaste finesse, a kindhearted graciousness that gives space for the other to be other, and this is especially true of marriage. The culture that we are being cajoled into - post-gender and post-sexual - is nothing but a big huge power game of competing egos. The trauma of broken marriages, the disappearance of all except the most transactional of relationships, the loss of social sincerity — all of this reaps a population of contradictions and contentions, boorish addictions and prudish rigidities. With nothing but disdain for the binary world of male-female, husband-wife, child-parent, father-mother, our brave new world’s genderless asexuality exults in the vindictive self-pity of alleged victimhood - everyone is a victim, and whoever is the biggest victim wins. No matter how much we reject what our fathers have left us, no matter how much power and control we exercise against nature, we still feel alone and vulnerable; if not anxious, then at least resentful. Yet, when relations break down this fundamentally, walls must go up.

This androgyne culture is not only alienated in its post-gender and post-sexual posture, it is also post-apocalyptic in its labyrinth. An apocalypse is the veiling of a great wonder - the end of time, the glory of God’s judgments and his power to set things right. A post-apocalyptic culture believes that science sees beyond the veil and following it, we feel shamed into concluding that the ultimate purpose of life is meaningless for material existence. In fact, we constantly are encouraged to progress through our labyrinth as nothing more than a closed circle of tightly shut spiritual skepticism. The dwarves of C.S. Lewis’s Last Battle or the Inferno damned all come to mind. As dysfunctionally as Dostoevsky’s Karamazov’s, we share this labyrinth of androgynes, broken marriages and broken families.

Technocracy is the Minotaur in this labyrinth. This monster, in the form of the administrative state, makes an absolute claim over human existence. It is Tolkien’s Smaug, his Sauron. Accepting the legitimacy of such spiritual hegemony has devastated families and marriages, burned down communities and cordoned off the most vulnerable from their loved ones. It has brought the immanence of global nuclear annihilation and the transformation of wombs into a death chambers. No freedom of thought is allowed to spoil this commercial domination. To this end, media outlets play their role with greater relish and effectiveness than George Orwell or Stalin could have ever dreamed. Hearts are caged in narratives of constant crisis. The objective is to make efficient and compliant producers and consumers of goods. The obstacle technocracy seeks to overcome is unpredictability of the human heart. This monster knows that freedom can be manipulated as long as it is driven by anxiety and resentment but not genuine love. Not just brick and mortar, not just digital, but this Minotaur seeks spiritual partitions to manipulate, shame and nudge the anima technica vacua into submission.

Before such brutal force, unless there is an intervention, a savior, the hearts of men will fail. When the heart is deaf to divine harmonies and the eyes shut to the goodness of God, the pain is overbearing - and so diversions are sought until a man plays himself to “extinction” to use the gaming industry’s expression. When the tender silences of the spheres are drowned out, there is no more desire for the communion of hearts that marriage and family are meant to know. Without higher harmonies for the soul, the very gender that ought to express its wonder is rejected and the psyche soon falls privy to a whimsical cacophony of self-mutilation. Life is not welcomed as a blessing but avoided as a threat while, deprived fresh newness, everything grows old and weary. Without the courage that comes from being still before the sacred, one fails in the resolve to be oneself - to embrace fatherhood or motherhood, to accept sonship or daughter-ship, to stand firm as a man or a woman.

The silence of the Word made flesh is the guardian of meaning for the heart and contemplative prayer the keeper of identity and purpose in life. Out of this silent fullness, the whole effort of the New Evangelization must flow. Put another way, it is a matter of proposing adoptive divine sonship to spiritual orphans who have been fooled into believing that they were made for boorishness - when as sons and daughters, they were made for glory. We are not alone in this great task. The Eternal Son of the Father and the Son of Mary has entered into this drama, implicated Himself in it and is at work in the world even now. To enter into silent prayer is to give the Word space in our hearts and in the world to accomplish his purpose.

If technocracy’s administrative state erects walls of secular materialism, Christ is opening up cracks of glory warm the heart and building bridges so that souls can find a way out. The Church, as the Body of Christ, exists as an answer to sin and death, to descend into hell of materialism and to harrow it just as the Crucified Christ liberated our first parents. So the task of the new evangelization is as necessary as ever. This means believers must allow the Word to communicate life through them in a culture of death, to propose His love through their lives in a civilization of competitive consumerism. Such collaboration in the preaching of Christ requires a spiritual revolt against materialism, the faith-decision to live at the pace of prayer in a hectic world that has cut itself off from the sacred and eternal.

To seek silent prayer is to open up one’s eyes, step out of the circle and enter into a rebellion against the alienating noise of technocracy. To choose to live one’s life at the pace of prayer is to choose to live life as the image and likeness of God, to choose to be a man and woman, to step out of the androgyne’s self-made prison and to step as free men and women into the arena of life - it is to choose to fight for all that is good, noble and true about life. The New Evangelization is then a life-line to a dying culture and a divine intervention for a civilization that has turned to self-hate, most of all because it is a drop of hope for a despairing heart. What we call the New Evangelization is nothing other than the humble effort to offer a word of hope, a way out, a chance to recover not only dignity and integrity, but also the capacity to be loved and to love. The Gospel of Christ is maybe especially meant for the post-Christian, post-religious, post gender, post sexual, post apocalyptic alienated soul.

If the Trinity has chosen to be at work in the world through the human heart, we need to return to prayer. Our job is to believe in the love of God and to live by it. Faith alone finds Him and mental prayer is an exercise of faith that makes space for Him to act. Eternal Triune love whose only desire is to bind hearts in a meaningful solidarity that lifts all of humanity above itself also confronts walls of hostility disguised as material achievement. Prayer that welcomes the Word of the Father is able to weep over the shame, fear and resentment that suffocates the heart and that God yearns to bear away. Humble prayer cracks the barriers of materialism until the light of glory shines on the soul. Contemplative prayer even bridges over these walls to reach crushed hearts and carry them out of the labyrinth to safety.

The silent prayer of faith can obtain the wisdom of this Good News until every member of our family, especially the most alienated, remembers where he came from and to where he is going and in whose image and likeness he is. Without uttering a syllable, it speaks to those entrusted to us until they know that they are not defined by their failures or by being victims of the elite and powerful. It finds words to proclaim that, at the end of the day, it is the love of God that defines who we are, and this is a love stronger than death. Silent prayer searches this love and draws from it inexhaustible riches and finds ways to make these known.

Only time spent beholding God in the darkness of faith knows the beauty that can break through the partitions and broken relationships of material progressivism. Christ stands at the door and knocks and only the prayer of faith opens a bridge of communion. Such prayer does not fear its own suffering because it knows that only in catastrophe’s shocked sobriety can the Good News be received. It is not nudged by an administrative state and has the power to dispel the enchantments of any utopia, even technocracy. The prayer of the Word made flesh in the believer’s heart hears sacred harmonies that confront technocracy’s manipulative noise. Such prayer baptizes itself in beautiful and terrifying silences to discover veils that the post-apocalyptic man is powerless to penetrate, veils that reveal the sacred for which the heart thirsts. If an alienated heart stares into the heavens sees only cold emptiness of space, the contemplative believer beholds the fullness of Divine Presence that allows men to stare at all. If the secularist concludes he is alone in the world, the faith filled contemplative confidently obtains Christ’s presence in this very loneliness to raise souls up above themselves, to offer a new meaningful life of love, sacrifice and great purpose.

Who will dare such prayer rooted subversion, such contemplative revolution in times such as these? Only the prayerful and the fasting can propose the Gospel for our wall building partitioned off contemporaries. The prayerful do this moreover right in the middle of the labyrinth, not because any Minotaur has hold of them, but because they are free to renounce, to proclaim, to be bold in their love. As members of Christ’s body, they make bold to crack open labyrinthian walls, pass through them, to give glimpses of glory and bridges out. If they seem ineffectual, it is only an appearance. Prayer empowers them to breathe in the fresh air of the Holy Spirit even when they appear boxed in and unable to move forward. And with the Holy Spirit, they are bring new life even as, in their own sufferings, they bear away sin with Christ. If breathing in the Holy Spirit and moving forward is such a spiritual battle, a spiritual revolt, a contemplative revolution, the brothers and sisters we seek to free are worth the struggle. Indeed the peace that such a struggle yields, a peace not of this world, the peace that Christ has come to give, this peace is more than worth the struggle.

Such a revolution of prayer, fasting and renunciation confronts all the ways that the work of human hands, technology, has become a barrier, an idol that has made us so out of touch with ourselves, and it teaches us to throw down false altars and to master the machine. This revolutionary prayer participates in Christ’s prayer to the Father in the face of the administrative state’s failure to answer to the most important questions of human life: its yearning, its burden of guilt, its fear of suffering and death. This revolt is against technocracy’s pretense that these questions do not matter and against any other effort to dismiss them.

This is why spiritual revolution is necessary - to help humanity out of the prison of materialism and to move forward to the glory that God has called it to. The weapons in this revolt are found in prayer of faith. It includes the discernment of and confidence that the post-apocalyptic heart still bears the image and likeness of the One who made him. Prayer that searches the heart of Christ provides the shield of faith, the breastplate righteousness and helmet of salvation. Great leaders before us, such as Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, assure us if we do not drop our weapons and we do not betray our friends (the saints), victory is assured. Those who have gone before us, who shed their blood for our sakes, they have assured us that this battle is not against flesh and blood — for it is for flesh and blood that we take up the battle of prayer. Instead, this contemplative revolution fights against principalities and powers. Against every irrational force that would imprison the human heart, it is a battle to see, to behold, to contemplate the only satisfying answer to the difficult questions of life so that others might plunge into its riches. For Christ is the answer. The contemplative revolution is a battle for life, life to the full, a new opportunity to rediscover the inexhaustible mystery of the Redeemer

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