“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever”
(1 John 2:15)
It is really, really, REALLY okay to hate the world.
Detachment, or the state of becoming dead to the world, is an important state the Christian must achieve. It can be done by literally everyone, once you explain how to do it and how important it is.
The sanctifying grace you receive from Baptism, Confession, Holy Communion, and Extreme Unction will literally save your life, which is what they were meant for when Jesus instituted them in His Church. Keeping that life in you, helping it to grow stronger in your soul, defending your mind and physical body from deadly attacks by evil spirits and turning your life around from just some perpetual coffin-bait example of victimhood into a living soul liberated from slavery to sin and on the path to sainthood requires training in the use of a saint’s weapons, machinery and armor.
And that’s a big problem today. To be fair, it’s been a big problem through the whole history of the Church since its founding. But today, it’s very hard to find a simple explanation of how to do it. Oh, there are explanations -- thousands of them. There is no lack of treatises, manuals, rulebooks, and theological discourses. But it’s hard to know where to start, and it’s hard to find a short, to the point summary in all of that, is it not?
“A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.”
Gandalf, the Two Towers, JRR Tolkien
If you are new to Catholicism of the old traditions, you’re likely feeling overwhelmed by 2,000 years of documents, often made by well-meaning saints who lived in very different times when it was perfectly okay to write miles and miles of pages about the things you want to know about, because it never occurred to them that you, the person living now, would never have decades to read them.
But even if you’re not new to Catholic Tradition, you were born in this time and place, and it ages you fast.
So much is going on in the world around you, and it is dark, depressing and evil. None of us feel like we have the luxury of time anymore.
Many of us feel like we’ve aged to about 900 before we’re forty.
We want out of this world, alive. We can feel something in it is killing us on the inside.
I write from the point of view of somebody who has seen combat, done a lot of teaching and training, and doesn’t really give a damn anymore if what I write sounds crazy.
My aim here is very similar to what it was when I was an active duty soldier, training people to be soldiers. I’m not interested in re-writing the “training manuals” of the Roman Catholic Church, that’s somebody else’s job.
My job is to help you, like an old veteran should, by summing up the long-winded orders from the ‘officers’, telling you how to do what the ‘Sergeant’ says, and what you need to learn to survive the shooting war.
How prayers and blessings work
Many people mistakenly think that all blessings require the anointed hands of priests and bishops.
And yes, some blessings are reserved only for the priesthood and the clergy. There are many very good reasons for this, chiefly concerning their leadership roles and as teachers and preachers of true, sound doctrine.
But people often forget that the power, graces and blessings, healing and holiness all come from Heaven and God. Sanctity and holiness can flow to us through the bishops, priests and clergy, and they can come through us too.
In both the clerical and the lay state, sanctity and holiness flow to us who live on earth when we ask for it, and are in a state to properly receive it.
Heaven and God will always listen to our prayers, and answer our legitimate needs.
Everyone can ask God for forgiveness, healing, and blessings. Everyone can ask God to use His power to make ourselves, our works and our things sanctified.
Nobody is denied this, and God has said many times before in the Bible that He will do it. This is what Jesus meant when He said, ‘Ask, and you shall receive’.
You do have permission to pray all of the Psalms, to read and say out loud every word of the Gospels, to recite the Our Father and a whole bunch of other prayers that were made and intended for the use of laity. And you say them all as many times as you wish. It’s okay.
You will need prayers. You must say them a lot.
How you pray is very important. You must say them as if you are talking to living people right in front of you, not like a bored child reciting a cheesy poem in front of the whole class because your teacher made you do it.
Why? Because you will be talking to living people, and they will be right in front of you when you say them.
“It is extremely good for you to see within yourself both your own fall and the fall of the whole of mankind. It is essential for you to recognize and study this fall in your own experience, in your heart and mind. It is essential for you to see the infirmity of your knowledge and intellect, and the weakness of your will.”
--St. Ignatius Brianchaninov
Living a worldly life, or to say it in a different way, living for the world, is a soul-destroying path of suicide. It doesn’t matter which path in such a ‘life’ that suicide takes, or how long the person lives in the world. Every wordly path goes to the tomb, and into the gloomy underworld of the kingdom of darkness, a nightmare that the foolish and unrepentant travellers taking them will never awaken from again.
There is only one Way to get out alive.
What the World is, and why it is not the Earth.
“The world is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them the passions.
The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honour which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancour and resentment, and physical fear.
Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.”
--St. Isaac the Syrian
The world is made chiefly by and through fallen man, ruled by the Devil, and infested with parasitic evil spirits. Like a human being, the world is both a material and a spiritual state.
And the more a person lives in the world, the more they get kicked, abused, robbed, used, and infested with spiritual parasites – the evil spirit kind, and the human kind.
“The world of Christians is one thing—their way of living, their mind, and speech, and action, is one—and the way of living, and mind and speech and action of the men of this world is another.... and the difference between them is great.”
--St. Macarius the Great
To a practicing Catholic that holds to the ancient traditions, sitting through an episode of the Walking Dead, or any zombie apocalypse-styled “entertainment” is a gross chore – and a groaning snooze fest.
People who are not in a state of grace ARE the living dead. Their bodies have life in them for a while, but their souls are dead.
The moment when they give up on truth and stop seeking for it -- that is the point they start the downward decline.
Slowly at first, then faster over time, their intellect darkens – yes, they literally get less intelligent and more intolerant as their minds darken. They become less aware of their surroundings and their situation. Their maturity seems to just stop in its tracks, and they never “grow up” beyond that age.
They grow to envy and hate all living people, whether it is just dead-souled people with more life inside than themselves, or those of us with living souls.
They react more and more out of spite or jealously toward anybody that just goes on with a normal life of maturity, growth and seeking truth, doing things to try to sabotage and stop them from pulling away from the place they are stuck.
Eventually, people with dead souls will resemble the evil dead they emulate – cold, stupid, manipulative, destructive, terrified of change, gloomy and repellent to the living.
“The man who has come to hate the world has escaped sorrow. But he who has attachment to anything visible is not yet delivered from grief. For how is it possible not to be sad at the loss of something we love?”
--St. John Climacus
The societies we live in today were hollowed out by these kinds of people many decades ago, and only a kind of outward appearance of the culture and structure now remains.
In some places around the world, living people vanished from the general population entirely, and only the vast numbers of the living dead, ruled by the evil dead, remain.
People with dead souls spread a kind of “deadening effect” around them, especially in great numbers. Slowly, the things they build in the places they dwell together get plainer, uglier and flimsy.
You notice the difference in the cities and towns as you pass through older neighborhoods to newer ones. We used to be able to make buildings that could stand for over a thousand years, but now the dead souls that build them can’t make them last for fifty, and don’t have the Charity to understand why.
Or they’ll build box-like structures with pretty front facades, but they’re all beautiful illusions, and as welcoming as – well, tombs.
What else would the dead build?
Imagination and creative inspiration are the faculties of living souls. The dead can only mimic and copy things over and over.
If you haven’t already realized it, the living souls left in the world (but not of it) are vastly outnumbered by the living dead.
The world is not eternal either; it is an artificial construct, doomed to fail. It is breaking down already, pothole by pothole, failure by failure, one illusion at a time. Its engines can’t keep being rebuilt anymore. The body is rusted out, the brains are decaying, the brakes are gone, the lights are dimming and everybody is tired of fixing it.
The whole contraption is crap, and nearly everybody knows it. It’s a resource-hogging, amusement park eyesore pretending to be something it could never be – real. It was never worth dying for.
It was never worth a damn.
Planet earth, on the other hand, is not the world. The planet was made by God, Who said it was good, and God does not lie. At the end of the six days of creation, He said that it was very good. He planted a garden on the earth called Eden, and walked in it with the Elohim and the first humans.
After the Fall of man, the earth fell too, and remains mostly in a fallen state but through no fault of its own, and is awaiting for the time to come when its own total reclamation and restoration will come. People often forget this important little bit.
The world will be destroyed; but the earth will be restored and made new one day.
The Father gave this earth to Jesus as His Inheritage, and the earth will be made new at His Second Coming.
One day, the entire renewed earth will be sacred -- but not today. In the meantime, the Catholic Church has been given the ability to make sanctuaries.
It is from these places she goes forth to preach the Gospel, teach the Way, the Truth and the Life, and do battle with principalities, powers, and rulers of darkness in the world.
As I’ve written before, people, not their possessions or things, make a nation. Jesus Christ, and the Church He founded with fallible people who are the nation of His Kingdom believe that the earth and the people in it are worth fighting for. Even dying for.
But the objective to this war is not to die for our side, our cause. It’s to make the other bastards die for theirs.
Dead heroes are honourable.
But Living saints are preferred.
Unlike the ancient Kingdom of Israel, which was tied to one geographical location on earth and called the holy land, the Catholic Church has built sanctuaries literally everywhere on the planet.
Israel was once described rather poetically as the camp of the saints. Cathedrals, churches, monasteries and cloisters of every kind are found all over the place, and now, the camp of saints is to be found all over the globe.
We can make our homes into a sanctuary too. We need to, because as every soldier knows, you can’t just stay on the battlefield forever.
You need a place away from the front line danger to rest, heal wounds, eat, and regain your strength. In the old days, going to a monastery, a shrine, a cloister or visiting the local parish church was the way most people did this. The clergy even now in these times have hundreds of ways to help people, and give them lessons on detachment.
It’s always worthwhile to look around and ask them first, and when you do, you may find that you have been instinctively rejecting the world a lot more than you realized. At any rate, it’s a great place to start to get your bearings.
As outlined in the book Unseen Warfare, it is very important to apply the following spiritual medicine when wounded:
“• Do not lose heart and fall into senseless turmoil. The temptation after a fall is to despair and condemn yourself with false humility which can lead to hopelessness which is NOT repentance.
• Do not dwell on yourself.Ruminating on how horrible you are for falling is not productive in repentance or spiritual growth.
• Do not blame others. Do not look around seeking on whom you can place the blame. Neither the people around you nor the circumstances are guilty of your sin.
• Never doubt forgiveness. Never forget or doubt about forgiveness. Forgiveness is already fully prepared and the record of all sins has been torn up on the cross.”
Nowadays, we have to shift for ourselves a lot. There are fewer places of Church operated sanctuary accessible, and they are under threat everywhere. There are still good, living, hard-working and honest clerics out there doing their jobs, but their numbers are fewer.
Going to a monastery or the local traditional cloister are certainly great ways to achieve the detached state and keep it. But that is often beyond most people’s ability to do, and nowadays, the options are fewer and rarer than ever before.
If you can’t live in a cloister permanently, then live in one temporarily. The aim is to learn and practice detachment, and it does not always require special vows and financial arrangements. You can look for religious orders offering retreats and pilgrimages, for instance.
If you can’t live in one temporarily, because there isn’t one, or they shut the doors to outsiders, or they cost too much money, or the places you looked into are too far to get to, full of apostates, hypocrites or just obnoxious creeps, then you must make one for yourself.
“When a man knows himself, the knowledge of all things is granted to him, for to know one's self is the fullness of the knowledge of all things. In the submission of your soul all things will be submissive unto you. At the time when humility reigns in your manner of life, your soul will submit herself to you, and along with her, all things will be submitted to you, because the peace of God is born in your heart. But so long as you are outside it, you will be unceasingly persecuted not only by the passions, but also by accidents. Truly, O Lord, if we do not humble ourselves, Thou dost not cease to humble us. Real humility is the fruit of knowledge; and true knowledge, the fruit of trials.”
The Real Fortress of Solitude
A monastery or cloister, at its most basic, is a spiritually defensible location made by a human, with the intention of learning to detach themselves from the world and worldly things by learning spiritual warfare, and getting closer to God and Heaven.
To put it another way, its purpose and function is to be a redoubt, a fortification for rest, healing, learning, communicating and regaining strength out of the storm of battle.
It is a machine of holy war.
As much as possible, you should make your home a sanctuary, with religious pictures, crucifixes, holy water and blessings. Even if all you have is a room, everything you can do to sanctify it to protect yourself from evil influences and evil spirits is a win-win. Many people who have the means and the room make small prayer altars or even shrines to their favourite saints.
A home has distinct differences from a cloister sanctuary, though.
First and most notable, especially if your home is full of the noise of children busily growing up, is that cloisters are quiet – mercifully, blessedly, restfully quiet. And this silence makes room for God in a way that the “busy-ness” of life cannot do.
When I speak of such a sanctuary, I mean a quiet place where you can go, and when you are there, you are not mommy or daddy, mister, missus, or miss. You are not rank, titles, duties, or responsibilities in that place.
You are just you. This is the kind of sanctuary you need, so you can be simpler, smaller. Where you can pray without embarrassment or interruption.
Where you can leave enough room for God to come visit you. And where, if you ask Him from a humble heart, He will.
And maybe, if you have it quiet enough inside the sanctuary, and inside of you, to hear Him speak… He may.
And there will be no illusions or distractions in your way to know for certain. Where the risk involved in you doing this is not that you’ll fail, but that you might succeed.
Defense On The Move
In previous articles, I wrote about the tent I use. To use this or any tent for a sanctuary cloister, you don’t have to have a lot of skills, money or even experience, but you have to get the matter, form, and intention right.
It’s not intended to replace other monasteries or cloisters. It’s not built to make you or me or anyone else into a replacement for the orders of monks and nuns, bishops and priests either. It’s not for making money, or for show.
There is no worldly or selfish reason to make and use a cloister sanctuary of your own. In other words if it were made for worldly reasons, it wouldn’t work.
True sanctuaries of God are places where you resolve your problems, not run away from them. Your self-interest in building and using one is not selfishness.
Get everything you can blessed by priests. Make it habitation that God would want to visit.
It makes perfect sense to make a sacred sanctuary from something you can carry on your back to anywhere you want to go.
The normal way to build cloisters and monasteries is with wood and stone. They are too heavy to move around, though, and when they can’t be used anymore, they are often just abandoned.
But a cloister made as a tent can move where it is needed, and stay as long as it is needed. If the Israelites wandering in the desert for forty years is anything to go by, God certainly does not mind.
That’s how easy it is. I mean, any tent will do, even the cheap ones they sell in department stores. Fix it up with holy things, get a priest to bless it if you can, use holy water and ask for God to bless and sanctify it. Then take it out to a quiet place away from people, bless the ground, and use it as a cloister is supposed to be used.
Imagine taking a long trip through the wilderness, blessing the ground wherever you stop and set up your tent? A long time ago in the fur trading days, that is exactly what missionary priests and clerics did, as they travelled by canoe along the waterways of northern Canada.
There is a lot of blessed ground still up there – miles and miles of it. And all over the world – thousands of miles. A little does a lot.
The blessings conveyed upon things that holy water is sprinkled on endure for a long time. Many people, surprisingly enough, have the mistaken belief that the blessings only effect where the droplets land, or that the blessings evaporate away when the water is dry.
The opposite is true, in fact. The whole thing is infused. Any object, or even a piece of ground that is sprinkled with holy water can retain that blessing for years undisturbed.
Evil cannot abide where holiness is. Evil spirits avoid places and objects (and people) that are in contact with the sacred; it repels them.
Properly made and maintained, a sanctuary is very hard for them to even detect, and when you go into one, the only evil in there is whatever you take with you.
Fantastic article. I absolutely love your writing style and this is exactly what I needed to read this morning.