Fie. Hark. Alarum!

Three words sing out to me at this point in my life. Fie. Hark. Alarum! I thought that I’d pulled them together, directly, from Macbeth, but I was mistaken. I think I brought them together in the early hours of another late night, broken free from almost every good habit I ever possessed, to fall into a new year with the kind of absent minded aplomb that is utterly innocent, when it isn’t wracked with anxiety. But there is an unnerving certainty about all things right now. I’ve finished The Benedict Option and I’m working through Strangers in a Strange Land. Dreher’s position is unfairly and uncritically questioned as alarmist. His faith is a beautiful, rich, living thing that is imbued with so much hope that it’s infectious. His approach is solid, serious, but playful at times, so obviously in love with the case studies he documents, and it’s hard not to follow him into that same love. Chaput’s writing is more winding, lyrical, although they cover much of the same ground, with much of the same inspirations and concerns. The undeniable current of anti-Christain sentiment in the West. The unrelenting deconstruction of gender, marriage, family and nature and value of human life in and of itself. The cult of technology, consumption and consumerism. The ongoing ramifications of the sexual revolution and the separation of intimacy and procreation.

And then, a wonderful discussion between Jordan Peterson and Camille Paglia, covering much of the madness that grips the modern age, from a somewhat different perspective, attacking the neo-Marxist obsessions, such as a single model of masculinity that can only be cancerous, aggressive, domineering, misogynistic. The divorce of our humanity and our history, leaving each generation progressively unmoored and unaware of the incredibly rich traditions that underpin and upheld Western Civilisation for so many centuries, thrown out in the interest of the Orwellian subjugation of minds, hearts, beginning with language itself.

I had a misplaced sense of security. I thought that my presence in a governmental system of education would not only ethically sound, but morally superior, to pursuing a teaching position in the private or Catholic sector. But the lunatics have taken over the asylum and the inevitable distortion of clarity, culture and continuity has reached us in ways that will only become clearer in the months ahead. I thought I’d be fine. But I came too close already, to bringing harm to little ones; to scandalising children who deserve a truth and simplicity that can escape the twisted delusions of demagogues, who see schools and students as the process by which their oddest of Utopian visions can come to life. A world in which outrage, hypersensitivity and state sanctioned, callous ideologies that are contrary to life itself reign supreme, trumping common sense, science, faith, complementarity and the beauty of the human condition. I came to close to trusting the discernment of autocratic governmental bodies that insist that to inculcate, is to care.

The Benedict Option falls into my lap in a year when so many aspects of our lives have culminated in a sense of silent urgency. There are deep desires, serious needs and challenging circumstances that need something else, something more, that call us beyond the lives that we’ve known for so long. Our personal circumstances have inadvertently dovetailed with the political and social realities that make the deliberate communities that Dreher details incredibly appealing, and perhaps inevitable. Fie. Hark. Alarum! I think of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s rendition of You Gotta Move. I feel it in my bones, that sense of restlessness, coupled with the culminating needs of our own magnificent seven that tell me things can’t be as they have been. Some of the ramifications are awful, utterly heart-rending, whilst others fill me with a sense of hope and certainty that we can find a new way of living and being that draws together so many disparate threads to create a new life, a new whole, while there’s still time.

So fie, hark, alarum is a good place to start. Where it ends, God only knows.