Thread by @stevenpmillies

"Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost" ~Leonard Cohen

“[W]hat happened, is happening and will happen to us all, from the very beginning until the end of human life upon this earth.” ~John Cowper Powys, on The Iliad

1/ I'm signing off for a while.

2/ I've come to realize I've spent 30yrs with faith what's happened could be prevented—our divisions could be healed before they break us beyond repair, the #CatholicChurch could end its antagonism w/the world before it destroyed its own ability to witness to the public square.

3/ I've come to feel convinced we've recently passed a point of no return. What is lost can't be regained before it all collapses, and now the collapse seems certain to me.

It won't be like a movie. It won't happen like it's happened before. But it will happen.

4/ I also have come to think this is fine, and that I've been foolish to hope it could be prevented.

We're not so special.

As Powys reminds us, vanity and greed have set us against ourselves for a long time in cycles of destruction & renewal older than the Gospel.

5/ We are the inevitable agents of our own ruin. We fail to learn, and no matter each time we say, "This will be different," we are the same vain and greedy creatures who repeat the same patterns. We create the conditions.

Weil understood, and she tells us why we read Homer—

6/ "The human race is not divided up, in the Iliad, into conquered persons, slaves, suppliants, on the one hand, and conquerors and chiefs on the other. In this poem there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force."

7/ We all are in the grip of a force beyond us & we each participate in subjecting one another to that force.

We're the hands on chess pieces on both sides of a stalemate and the pieces.

Over and over civilizations rise to consume themselves. It's no great shock that we do too.

8/ And something else will come next.

I know perhaps this Homeric interlude seems odd. But that perspective has comforted me in recent days as this all began to seem clear.

"from the very beginning until the end of human life upon this earth.” Nothing new here.

9/ I don't see a way back on to the constitutional cliff we've fallen off. I don't see how the #CatholicChurch ever can restore itself to a trusted voice in the public debate.

10/ I built a career trying to hold up the constitutional order while asserting the Church's claim on the public square.

That all seems quite beside the point now.

I either can scream at the abyss or chart the new direction. The choice seems obvious.

11/ There is a new direction to think about. But this isn't the place for that thinking, and I'm not sure most of the writing or speaking appearances I've taken recently are the right venues either.

So I'm going to try to disappear from view a bit and think.

12/ I'm sure I'll resurface from time to time. Old habits, etc.

But the days of 'no untweeted thoughts' have to be at an end.

I've enjoyed talking with many of you and I've learned a lot here. Often this is a great public space, really.

13/ But it's not the space where I should put my energy now.

My thanks if you've read this far, or read any of the rest of it.

There is a new direction out there beyond the ruin of this moment. Look for it.