What one must immediately see is that the spiritual and the physical are completely different.  And we have always seen this.

They are parallel lines, running together but never crossing.  If we were mere physical creatures – like the lower animals – a “spiritual realm” would never occur to us.  Even among men, we are dismayed at those who are singularly focused on the physical – a woman obsessed with her looks, a man with his riches.

Just so, the spiritually obsessed are often mocked, detached as they are from the most basic and necessary elements of living on a physical planet.  The ditz, the new age believer – we instinctively understand that they enjoy a disposition supported by those who daily reckon with the elemental – dirt and steel and sweat and disappointment.

But the spiritual is more real, the foundation of the physical.  God spoke the Universe into existence, and not the other way around.

So, why not detach from the physical?  Why not all be esoterics?

Surely you’ve thought of that.  And what came of it?

You’re here, reading today – surely you’ve thought of forsaking the world completely, praying all night, perhaps, as Jesus did, or else fostering such piety that you might levitate while in an ecstatic vision of the Almighty.  Are you familiar with the Stigmata?

And you did not wonder, at least for a moment, what that would be like?

That, my friend, is exactly what forsaking the physical looks like.  It looks like holes through your hands and blood and water flowing from your side.  It is a coronation with thorns, because they are no better or worse than gold.

“My kingdom is not of this world.”  No joke, that.

My friends, it is dreadfully painful to forsake the world, because you just are a physical being.  Your very being responds to the environment, to the stimuli impressed upon you.  There is the objective quality about it, that if you are shot through the heart, you will suffer and die, no matter what you believe or how you live.

And yet…

Yet, some do forsake the world.  Not absolutely, but – shall we say? – in spirit.

Now, how are we to resolve this paradox?  We exist as physical and spiritual beings, and while the spiritual is more fundamental, we can be destroyed by physical means.  The two do not intersect, and yet we cannot ignore either of them.

How do parallel lines cross and remain parallel?

They do so, if you view them from a third angle, another dimension.

A basic biological creature – an emu, perhaps – only deals in the physical.  Life is all hatching and growing and foraging and mating and running and dying.  Often it’s not quite that good.

By the naturalist’s account, this ought to be everything for humanity, and we may as well enjoy it while it lasts.

It would be everything, except for that pesky “brain virus” that clings to religion, that continues to believe old fairy tales against all experience and evidence…or so they would have you believe.

I don’t notice the godless being all that critical about paganism.  They will tell you this is because the pagans do not trouble them, but they are ignorant of history and human nature besides.

It is more a case of making allies with a common enemy.  If modern religion disappeared, Paganism would immediately gain from it.  We know this by looking back before Christianity emerged, and noting that human nature has not changed.

But Paganism is the bellwether of Naturalism’s demise – its miscarriage, really.  If Naturalism could not dam up religion from the earliest days, it never had a chance.*

Why is this significant?  The question is the answer.

That is, significance is the first handhold out of the physical realm.  If physical objects can be imbued with meaning beyond their physical utility, then we are also engaging in a realm beyond physical activity.

Think of a flower, for instance.  It has physical utility, a place in the natural order.

Now think of giving a flower.  One is not offering the flower in order to pollinate another flower, or for ingestion, or for composting or anything else.  Instead, the giver and the receiver both perceive an abstract (roughly, a spiritual) significance to the flower and the act of giving the flower.

This is what the naturalist could not prevent from happening, never could prevent from happening.

*The usual line is that humanity has sufficiently advanced, or will inevitably advance, such that religion will be seen for the fraud it is.  They believe we will see Christianity like we now see Roman paganism.

As a matter of fact, the sword has another edge – if the Stoics and the Enlightenment could not free the world from the grip of religion, it is doubtful that anything else could.  Rather, one religion comes to dominate another at any given point in time.

We have established that humanity, over and above the emus, has an innate sense of the spiritual realm, and this is demonstrated by the persistence of religion in human life, among other things.  Against the naturalist, we see the impossibility that human life could have been purely physical, because of the ease with which humans engage in abstractions.

In other words, a single kiss from my daughter is the kiss of death for Naturalism.  Requiescat in pace.

This frees us to advance:  What do we know about the spiritual realm, anyway?  What can we know?

Our difficulty is that the physical realm seems so…well, obvious, immediate.*  When we want to say something about the physical realm – the sun is shining, the tree is blooming – these things are generally provable by observation.  Humans broadly agree about the facts right in front of them, in this sense – we don’t argue with the weatherman about whether it’s raining, nor the traffic reporter, for that matter, who sees down the road and looks upon other roads.

The spiritual realm is not verifiable in the same way.  It is not engaged with by means of the physical senses…though, it can be indirectly verified that way.  Let us return to that another time.

For now, the grievance of the naturalist is more important than his arguments:  If beliefs aren’t scientifically verifiable, then anyone can believe anything they like!  How can this rise to the level of knowledge?

That’s true.  That’s a good point.

One argument, which we have alluded to already, is that humans have a spiritual sense.  It “looks” upon the world and detects certain abstractions, like good and evil, beauty, even truth.  The philosopher Alvin Plantinga says we have a “sense of the divine” which justifies our belief in God.

For another argument, we derive from Plato the world of “forms,” which are abstract and ideal molds from which the physical instances are derived.  Is there an ideal form of a chair?  I don’t know, but there is something remarkable about the ability to make a chair without explicit instructions, as though the idea exists as a universally accessible concrete entity.

Let’s take a third.  That is, the natural order appears to be governed by laws, which laws have no physical properties.  These laws are often expressed by mathematics, which is the highest point of agreement between the naturalist and the supernaturalist – math works, is practically the most reliable form of knowing that there is.

Whereas the naturalist may agree that mathematics is the language of the Universe, the supernaturalist goes further and says that information does not simply occur, but is articulated by someone or something.  Math is preceded by Logos, which gives the Universe structure and predictability and knowability.

And so, we can have knowledge of the spiritual realm by direct experience of it (the spiritual sense), by abstraction from the physical structures to a spiritual ideal, and by observing that the physical realm operates according to non-physical laws, which laws must have their own reality.

Any of these, arguably, is more reliable that the physical world itself as a deliverer of truth.  You will find people who claim to have seen the spirit world in a vision or a near death experience.  You will find others who hold to the Platonic view of the world.  And still others construct reality on a foundation of abstractions – arguably, all of modern science, for a start – and build a monument of knowledge thereupon.

*Who stops to wonder – is this by design?

We have laid out three ways of knowing the spiritual realm, which is further proposed as the true realm.  The physical realm is but an echo.

The difficulty remains that – ordinarily –  we know the physical realm with a higher degree of confidence than the spiritual.  It feels more real because it is more obvious and less deniable.

There is a reason, after all, that apostates are made by imprisonment and torture.

So if there are three ways of knowing the spiritual, which are nevertheless nebulous to the populace; and if we have a systematic and reliable way of learning about the physical; what could ground us more firmly in true knowledge of the spiritual?

Here is my thesis:  The spiritual realm is the source of the physical.  It is often analogous to, but not an exact emanation of, the spiritual.

In some ways this sounds like Plato.  I said before – honestly – that I don’t know whether the world of Forms is real.  Nevertheless, we are not saying that there are forms, per se.  We are saying that, if one imagines that forms exist, it gives us a useful way of learning about the spiritual from our experience of the physical.

Indeed, suggesting that humans have a spiritual sense captures what we’re about here – that one’s physical senses are analogous to one’s spiritual sense.

But what if your spiritual sense is dull, or inoperative?  Or what if you simply don’t trust it?

What if you think Plato is interesting, but he’s mostly talking ho-bunk?

If, still, you wish to learn something about the spiritual realm, I suggest you can learn it by a careful study of the physical realm.  We’ll take some examples next time.

There is a reason, after all, that saints are made by imprisonment and torture.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

– John 1:1-2, 4-5

Supposing you had a real but indescribable experience – how do you go about sharing it with a friend or confidant?

Consider an epiphany you’ve had.  There was some problem, some riddle of existence which you could not answer.  Perhaps for days, perhaps for years, you sought the answer and could not find it.  (We are already speaking in metaphor, but hang with me).

And then, quite unexpectedly, you had it.  The answer.

Now the physical phenomenon of an epiphany might be described as a new neuro-pathway, the literal (physical) firing of synapses across particular neurons in a particular order which rendered the new thought to your consciousness (whatever that is).

For one thing, this is a quite dull and tedious way of telling the story of your epiphany, but let it pass.

For a second thing, it is anything but clear that thought is, our could be, a purely physical phenomenon.  Never mind this, too.

The salient point is that the truth discovered, the object of the epiphany, the objectiveness of the truth, is non-material.  Insomuch as we engage with it, then, we are operating in the abstract/spiritual realm.

So when you say something like, “And then I saw it…” or “That’s when the light bulb came on…” – which functionally mean the same thing – you are pulling an abstract experience through the filter of a physical experience.

Or, you are reaching up to understand the abstract by means of the physical, which is the thesis here.

Now what if (literally) God came to Earth and became (literally) man, and dwelt among us?  What if this God-man taught and demonstrated a doctrine which corrected our moral and intellectual (spiritual) deviancies, healed and exalted our wounded bodies (literally) so that we might transcend them to a greater reality?  How would you describe this experience?

You might call Him the Light of the world.  You might describe Him as irresistible, unassailable, like a light in darkness – in no way can the darkness overcome the light.  Just so, in no way could evil overcome Him or His mission.*

And if you’ll accept the Gospel and believe in Him, that same invincibility – on the spiritual level – is conferred upon you.

Next example…

*Arguably, even mission is a metaphor.

Our Mother is patient and kind.

The first joyful mystery is the Annunciation.  This, of course, refers to the moment when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would bear the Son of God Most High.

One often reflects on the magnitude of this announcement.  From then-Cardinal Ratzinger:

The salutation to Mary (Lk 1:28-32) is modeled closely on Zephaniah 3: 14-17: Mary is the daughter Zion addressed there, summoned to ” rejoice”, in formed [sic] that the Lord is coming to her. Her fear is removed, since the Lord is in her midst to save her. Laurentin makes the very beautiful remark on this text: “… As so often, the word of God proves to be a mustard seed…. One understands why Mary was so frightened by this message (Lk 1:29). Her fear comes not from lack of understanding nor from that small-hearted anxiety to which some would like to reduce it. It comes from the trepidation of that encounter with God, that immeasurable joy which can make the most hardened natures quake.”

Now see:  Could more than a day have passed since Mary prayed to God to send His Messiah?

Oh, how God answers prayers.

This thought has appeared elsewhere, but it warrants repeating:  The first Glorious Mystery is the Resurrection.

That’s the first mystery of glory.  A man rising from the dead.

And then there’s more…

My reflections during the Rosary are often in words, concepts.  But once, when I arrived at the Crucifixion of our Lord, words failed me, even within my mind.

Yet I had an image of Christ on the cross, so I just looked at Him.

The Luminous mysteries are unique in that they contain “The Proclamation of the Kingdom.”  But this is not a story proper – there is no clear thing happening, but a man speaking.

Still, it had to be done – Jesus had to announce the purpose for which He had come.  In that, I suppose the story, as it were, is as much about us hearing the proclamation as it was for anyone, in any time.

In other words, the Kingdom is always arriving.  What will you do with this?

“Joyful” mystery – finding of Jesus in the Temple.  Personally, I am struck by the interpretation of this event which says this is the nearest Mary came to experiencing sin, which is a loss of intimacy with God.  She, for a period of a few days, felt His absence most acutely.

The second Sorrowful Mystery – I am shaken by the fortitude of Christ at the pillar, being cut to ribbons by the centurions’ whips.

We were made – my God, You made us – with nerve endings that would give us awareness of the world around us, and also of our physical condition.  When something is harmful to our bodies, it hurts.

Here, after centuries of perfecting the art of torture, we see the full exploitation of this ostensibly useful feature:  Those nerves, down to the tenderest tissue, are slashed and ripped away from the Body.  What the body simply is, is torn away.  It is painful even in the abstract.

And for love of all the world, He does not quit, or complain, or break.

The crown of thorns represents the full ignorance of man.  You could not capture it more perfectly.

The Transfiguration sometimes strikes me – if one may speak this way – as one of the most important stories in all of Scripture.  It is the pre-resurrection assurance of glory.  It is one thing to have a voice from Heaven at the baptism – and that is enough! – but to have the same voice, and then to see the Man, resplendent in light.

It is everything short of rising from the dead.  It is a stone’s throw away from creating ex nihilo.

And finally, for now, the assumption of Mary.  By this point all of the mysteries have been lived out, before her eyes, except those which elevated her to her final glory.

She has seen the culmination and climax of salvation history, the entire hope of the whole history of her people.  The Lord Himself now dwells on earth as Holy Ghost, setting the world on fire.  There is no more doubt about the course of history.

What of her, then?  Was that enough, to live through all of this?

It might be enough.  And yet, all of that – all of it – points to something more.  Something higher.

So Mary will not descend to the grave, but is lifted to Heaven.  What a love our Lord has for her!  How she carries His original hope for all of mankind!

And I cannot begin to fathom the celebration that occurs at her coronation…

Let us add a little depth to the metaphor.

The human being – and the human race, by expansion – possesses two drives which we in the modern world call “Progressive” and “Reactionary.”

Left and Right, or “To subdue the earth” and “To heed the natural order.”

Now, the metaphor is that of Cthulhu, swimming.  The current pulls everything to the right, toward the natural order, terminating in a sheer fall – certain death.  Therefore, Cthulhu swims left, to escape the turbulence and danger of the natural order.

The further he swims left, the less imminent the danger.  He might finally relax in the water, even become playful.  Yet, dangers still exist, and since he knows everything to the right becomes more threatening, he swims left.

And now the water is much calmer, still pulling but requiring very little effort to resist.  Cthulhu might begin to impose his own design on the river, building a place to be seated by the bank or small dams to break the water.  He will lose the exercise of those muscles which preserved him in the rapids, in favor of skills that enhance his pleasure and comfort in these less troubled waters.

New dangers await.  Stagnant water harbors bacteria.  His muscles have atrophied – if he wanders too far down river, he will surely drown.  Other creatures compete for food, and even as the apex predator he can be overwhelmed by a mass of them.  Moreover, there is an indescribable sense of discomfort, of not quite fitting in one’s environment, which the great beast cannot understand.  That, quite simply, is that he was made to rule in stronger waters, to challenge himself, to conquer mighty forces.

Proceeding left has always brought him pleasure and comfort – progress – and so he swims further left.

The metaphor can continue, but it will become complicated, even convoluted – if it has not already, for your tastes.  Let us look and see something.

There is a sense of melancholy about this metaphor, I think.  That is, Cthulhu – the complete body of a human society – is never finally satisfied and safe.  And someday he will die, his body carried along, ever more rapidly over the edge.

The human restlessness is such that it will want to challenge the rapids at times, but not for long.  Wanting for some activity to challenge his mind and body, imagining even that his survival still depends on it, man swims ever Left, requiring that he impose his will more and more completely on reality.

Somewhere up the river, he thinks, is Utopia.  Then he will be happy.

Now, “up” is correct, but the river is two-dimensional.  The way out of the river is not upstream, but up, out-of-stream.

If this seems like nonsense, or incredible, or the perfect answer – welcome to religion.  Religion is the pull of humanity up out of the river of this world.  It is the third dimension, which might elicit these varied responses from two-dimensional creatures.  One’s subjective response does not render it void.

Indeed, a properly ordered religion must position itself up, out of the river, and from that height throw down a rope.  If Cthulhu – a human society – will grab it, he will be saved both from the dangers of the Left and Right.  And it must be a strong rope, held up by a mighty arm.

We come to some paradoxes then.

If leftism is subjugation of the earth – the drive toward civilization, away from natural order – then isn’t more leftism equivalent to more civilized institutions and behavior?

If rightism is respect for the natural order, then isn’t more rightism a drive toward primitive living, before industry, science, and all the rest?

They seem quite the opposite.

That is, conservatives seem to prefer everything that happened in America from 1776 through the 1950’s, give or take a few years.  Conservatives love ‘murica – liberals aren’t accused of that.

They prefer industry, they prefer making the most of all potent energy resources, they prefer capitalism and business, they prefer social traditions (very orderly, structured).

Liberals, for their part, are more closely associated with the back to earth movement, to doing what one feels, to giving the benefit of the doubt where certain practices go against the cultural grain.

They have been marching since the 1960’s, starting with the sexual revolution and gradually conquering the media, education, and politics.  In many cases, they have undone what existed, rather than build new institutions.  (Same-sex marriage is not a new institution – it is the loosening of an old one).

What gives?

If this big idea is correct about leftism and rightism, we have already alluded to the next layer:  Whatever leftism established a generation ago, rightism is now defending.  Whatever leftism is pushing, no one wished for a generation ago.

There is yet another layer.

In America there is a Christian tradition, one inextricable from its founding.  The Christian religion is properly ordered, so that it forms tight institutions, bright lines, and produces many goods on Earth.

For any progress to be made – and we are in the age of the Progressive – these institutions, this Christian grip on the structure of society, must be undone.  The work of leftism, in this case, is to erase whatever may be attributed to the natural order, or to God, in favor of what man might do for himself.

It is, indeed, a push to subdue the earth.  And men.

Meanwhile, modern rightism looks like a paradox, because it ought to be a drive toward the natural order – but it looks like a drive toward anachronistic technology and social structure, and filthy fossil fuels, and unjust wages.

Think of someone who is not conservative, if you want a true sense of rightism.  Think of a reactionary.

Here is someone who quite seriously would reinstitute a monarchy (with all of its quirks and flaws) and restrict the vote, and champion the formation of socio-economic classes because …

That is what happens in the natural order.  In nature, the fittest survive.  The powerful get what they want first, and the weak receive the crumbs.  If anything.

The natural order, you understand, is not about equality.  The liberal push for equality is necessarily a synthetic effort, because men are not equal.  And men are not equal to women in the natural order.  And no beast is equal to a human in the natural order…and so on.

The conservative is only defending what your forebears installed.  The reactionary looks at at fixed point further in the past, and identifies that as the true balance in human affairs.*

Christians will no doubt have observed something here:  Original sin is a move to the Left.  That is, the original disobedience of God was a play for power on the part of humans.  Humans wished to subdue reality, and know it.  Know it for what purpose?

“…then your eyes will be open, and ye will be as gods.”

It is enough to shudder.  But!

As punishment, God brought down the natural order on humanity – hard.  Women would suffer in childbirth, and man would raise produce only by the sweat of his brow.  And all would die.

Natural death is the far end of rightism.

So, it is correct to say that the Old Testament is story upon story of humanity in dissonance with the natural order, and suffering greatly because of it.  And God, by grace, and mercy and love, saving them.

The New Testament is widely seen – if not in these terms – as a move to the Left, and all of Christianity is sometimes mocked because of this transition.

But they should not spurn the transition so quickly.  By Christ’s sacrifice, God gave humanity an escape from the extreme Right, which was NOT the extreme Left.  It was neither, and both.  Step back and see:

If you were a two dimensional creature, how could we begin to explain the third dimension to you?  You would necessarily flatten all of our words and actions, so that you could understand them in your two dimensions.  We could not really explain it at all.

And you would be right, and wrong.  Mostly wrong.

That’s the role of Catholicism.  At its best, and its core, it says to all the world – “Yes, but none of this is quite right.  Look – you are going to live forever.  Forever.  Now, how does that change things here on Earth?”

It might make you more of a rightist.  And more of a leftist.

But mostly, it would make a resurrectionist, with your eyes cast above you, which neither the left nor the right can comprehend.

* And again, chronology is not critical in and of itself – it is something of a tape measure, to let us know how far left we’ve come.  The Reactionary might also push for things that are in the spirit of a monarchy, but have not ever existed.  In that sense, if he is successful, the Reactionary is looking toward the future, through the past.  Chronology is not strictly useful.

My hope is that you have no idea what I’m about to say.

You may read the subject and leap to social issues in early 21st century America.  You might readily think about the Catholic vote, and the present turmoil, and it might skip across your mind that neither party’s nominee for President is Catholic.  You might be thinking about the separation of church and state, and the role clergy should and shouldn’t have in influencing voters.

Word association is such that I might have no idea what you are thinking.

At any rate, as genuinely entertaining and exhausting as the current election cycle has been, and as contentious as social issues are (bleeding even into economic issues), none of these are my immediate objects.  In medical parlance, I believe they are symptoms of underlying conditions.

So we’re about to get “meta,” to take a deeper dive beyond the turbulence and drama of the surface, with the hope of understanding what fundamental forces are at work.

Now, to parameters and conditions:

• I concede that this is only my view.  Certain parts are drawn from others, because I find them convincing, but the synthesis of the whole (such as it is) is mine, and I am only a man thinking.
• I welcome discussion, correction of facts, and so on.  The condition is that it is non-partisan as possible.  Imagine yourself arriving from the future, or from an alien race.  What do we find here?
• None of this is likely to win you an election.  It’s not tactics, it’s not strategy – it’s a giant step back, to observe.
• The initial Catholic character of this flows from the previous points:  We are in this world, but not of it.  The world is fallen, things are not as they were meant to be.  But all of this world is passing away (and we rejoice at that).  What, then, is such a pilgrim to do?

If you are discontent with the current state of politics, perhaps a deeper understanding will give you peace.  Peace does not sell, but it does satisfy.