Letter #155: Something Will Happen
Something will be learned.
President Dad,
There’s a soft spot in my heart for the Spotify algorithm. Of all the specters that float robed in code above us, Spotify’s is the most competent and kindly. Maybe I’m sentimentalizing it, but I feel like this is the robot that will eat us last.
Or else it’s just romancing us into complacency with groovy tunes while it plots our demise. The tunes it finds are pretty groovy either way. And it weirdly keeps coming up with stuff I didn’t know I wanted.
Like this year, in a period of high anxiety, my Spotifriend must have noticed I was feeling a little tense. It fed me the dreamy jazz of berlioz, described on Instagram as what would it would sound like “if Matisse made house music.” The song I got served was called “something will happen.”
At first when it came on I thought, “what the hell is this?” I still have no idea how it got shuffled in. It’s just a loop of ethereal vocals layered over a sample from this random Willem Dafoe interview about taking creative risks. You want so desperately to succeed every time, Dafoe says, but the main thing is that “something will happen. Something will be learned.”
As the pressure of this election year has mounted, that funny little song has become my personal soundtrack, the smooth jazz chorus in the background of the angst: “something will happen...something will be learned.” Tomorrow something will happen. None of us knows what it is—not the pollsters, not the pundits, nor even perhaps the angels in heaven, but only God the Father.
The outcome will certainly change our lives materially, in ways welcome or disastrous. But whatever happens, all-consuming as it will no doubt seem, will really only be the backdrop of the main event, which is the formation of our souls. What Screwtape said of romantic love he may as well have said of this election: “Like most of the other things which humans are excited about, such as health and sickness, age and youth, or war and peace, it is, from the point of view of the spiritual life, mainly raw material.”
This moment, though significant, is only a passing way-station on a larger trajectory. The real history we’re living through is the one you and I have been tracking this month, the convulsive death of materialism in the West and the birth of something new, chaotic, dangerous, but vitally alive.
Whether the coming spiritual revival sweeps through America’s government or has to struggle against it may well be decided tomorrow, at least in the short term. But in the long term the task at hand will be the same as it ever was—to practice the high solemnities of joy amid the farce and buffoonery of a broken world. To sustain us in that effort, if we ask, we will be fed just the right food in the hour of our need—and not only by Spotify.
Love,
Spencer
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This was so spot on…not to belabor the whole Spotify thing. And it was so needed, at least for me. It’s so easy to get caught up in the spectatorship of the name calling, fear-mongering, poll watching, and gamesmanship of this whole thing that one can come to despair over the sheer ugliness of it all. I’m quite sure Screwtape and his nephew are having a field day. But, in the last analysis, it is our souls that matter, as you so eloquently note. In many meditation practices one learns to focus on a still point. And Thomas Merton posited a still point in our souls - the Le Point Vierge. Thank you for reminding me that what matters are those still points and to stay focused on those when in the middle of the whirlwind.
Yes, only God the Father knows what will happen tomorrow. And I take comfort in the fact that He will still be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent after the dust settles. Presidents come and go, but my King reigns forever. Amen.