I found
this link on
my girl MaxedOutMama's blog. As usual, The Anchoress is stunningly profound. It's long, but worth every savory bite. The Anchoress replies to a
Wall Street Journal post of Peggy Noonan.we must do something else, if we are to stave off the Painless Coup. We are going to have to turn away from our distractions - the television, the radio, the magazines, the talkshows, the films, the fashions, the escapist entertainment, even the internet. We will have to turn away from these empty things - to make them smaller in our lives, where they and the popular culture now loom so large - and we are going to have to get quiet.
A good musician knows that music is not created only by playing notes, but by understanding the spaces between the notes, and their value. Just so, it will not be enough to simply repeat what is true - if that is all we do, it will only add to the din - there must also be silence, in which to do our other, more powerful work.
It is a cacophony of noise that fuels so many illusions, and allows those “chapters of trouble” to be so deftly written. The overstimulation of our senses has severely dulled our internal sensors. We have lost our bearings and our boundaries so profoundly that we are no longer guarded, interiorly, against scam-artists and tricksters.
She continues, correctly, I believe, analyzing the anomie (a sense of alienation and purposelessness) that Noonan suggests afflicts American society. For The Anchoress, as for me, the answer is clear:
We have to get those bearings back - to find our centers and get back in touch with our “gut instincts,” which are there for a reason. And the way to get back to the center - to our center, our “gut” - is through prayer and meditation and contemplation. Prayer has power. No force can stand against it. Not even the force of a generation bearing down and driving hard against everything that came before itself.
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