The Quantification of Living

Brief notes before a New Year

"Better living through chemistry" is the motto of Brave New World. It translates to: “you are nothing but a dead unit.”

Teachers are surprised children are not interested in understanding but in grades. In numbers. But that is all post-revolutionary education has told them reality is: numbers. Doctors are angered when patients rebel against the protocols on the computer screen: Since when did you imagine your choices or thoughts mattered? The managerial revolution cannot help but be offended by the exercise of free will, even as those who retain some are startled when the younger cohort show no spirit at all.

The great flaw of contemporary Church culture has been the de facto embrace of reductionist-materialist science. The mid—oughts fracas over "Intelligent Design" revealed how far even Christian minds had absorbed the deist clockmaker God. The idea that the transcendent is here even now, always now - if we can’t graph it on a screen we don’t want to hear it. It would be a good year for Christians who struggle with this to consider reading what may be the Inkling Charles Williams’ work most relevant to our day, Many Dimensions.

The idea that matter has qualities and is not just a quantity is the prime target of all culture, media, science, and education. For if matter does have meaning then there are such things as good and bad, beauty and ugliness, first principles and transcendent ends. If the stars have a "why" in addition to a "how" then there may be consequences to our preference for immersion in a binary world of digital artifice.

In this maelstrom of noise comes the New Year. A year of meaning in a System which denies multiple, manifold truths. And the first response to the horror of these realities is so often a false hope sketched in the language of war: of barren force which brooks no divinity.

Quantity cannot overcome quantity: both are just "might makes right," endless variations of force, law-as-force, efforts to establish mortal power over reality. 

Quality transforms quantity. Rhythm heals meaninglessness noise. Prayer transforms hopelessness. They all restore the meaning which lies in and all around us, and these acts of metanoia are within reach of the poorest soul.

Light matters. Dark matters. Warmth and cold matter. Goodness and beauty matter. The works of our hands matter. Our thoughts matter. Our hearts matter.

A New Year is not another day, but as Christians we are also not merely passive followers of an ancient script without engaging our hearts and attention.

St. Paul wrote: “For one judgeth between day and day: and another judgeth every day: let every man abound in his own sense. He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord. And he that eateth, eateth to the Lord: for he giveth thanks to God. And he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not, and giveth thanks to God. For none of us liveth to himself; and no man dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; or whether we die, we die unto the Lord. Therefore, whether we live, or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” (Romans 14:5-8)

Prayer, attention to God, and contemplation of Christ illuminate the particularity of what we each must do with our time (“let every man abound in his own sense”). Our work will be different; we all must do the work. For me the work is to hallow the time by attention to Christ; to honor certain interruptions which invite me to devotion towards God’s people and creations; and to know when to turn away from those interruptions which are the demands of busy-ness, hopelessness, and greed of a consumption pursuing mere control. After all, where our attention dwells so will our heart. Words which warn of peril as much as beauty.

May your attention be a light for yourself and others in the coming year. God bless you.