Letter #56: Hiding in Plain Sight

A Christian revolution in occupied territory.

Elder Klavan,

It’s weird, isn’t it—how you can be galumphing along making coffee, getting groceries, and at the exact same time feel like you’re living in Babylon before the fall. I guess it’s always like this. Life is a palimpsest, after all, a fearsome cosmic drama lacquered right on top of a normal Thursday where you’re running low on floss.

The fools chimping out in Harvard Yard, staging Kiddie Kristallnacht at Columbia, have a terrible agency all their own. They chose this. But they are also products of a snarled and poisoned culture, which they did not choose. That much is clear in the pale faces of the tenured cowards who pander to them, perversely desperate to conscript their students into the same cultured savagery they fell for in the dreamy decades of their youth. The logic of evil hollows children out and makes them into puppets, drearily intoning terrorist catchphrases and baying for human suffering on a scale they can’t possibly fathom.

One moment, two realities. An all-too-human historical development with knowable causes, brought about by willing participants in full control of their actions. And yet, at the same time: the grim machinery of a world in the grips of sin’s dominion, filled with starving prisoners whose minds are not their own. God makes souls most fully themselves by engaging them in love’s voluntary service; Satan melts them down and welds them in chains into a towering and gruesome image of himself.

But through the wreckage Christ goes walking, bright against the backdrop of death’s domain. You’re right: only he can save us now, not just because only he is God but also because only he is fully human. The rest of us are products of the shadowlands, and we have—all of us, in ways large and small—given our humanity over to the reign of the machine. It pains me to say this, since true scholarship and the institutions that produce it are precious to me, but the latest generation of Ivy League primitives aren’t bringing ruin and decay upon an otherwise healthy society. They’re hooting and picking at the morbid remains of one.

This is the position we find ourselves in, the tomb from which the church has to re-emerge. And you’re right too that it will look less like a particular monastery or catechism, and more like a decentralized secret society moving unnoticed in plain sight through open-air catacombs. You can tell when someone’s been “born again of the spirit,” and not by the potluck they go to or the street sign they hold, either. You can tell by the way their towering sorrow and their crazy joy puncture the monotonous ugliness of Satan’s world—because they have learned from their master how to be alive in the pit of the grave.

Love always,
Spencer