This is another one of those wild visionary rambles. You’ve been warned.
The global economic system is in collapse. There’s turmoil and increasing social instability in our world, particularly in the Western countries. Some very powerful figures are provoking it willfully and intentionally. It’s not hard to see that the US in particular is being set-up for the American version of the “Arab Spring.” If you had time to read certain CIA manuals and other sources on how to destabilize a country and bring down the government, you would recognize the patterns at play here.
I’ve proposed a parable: The Cult. Our language and culture isn’t the best at this, but I’ve tried to shape an entirely different understanding of moral forces at work in our world. Some of you struggle with it still. That’s no surprise and I can’t blame any of you for that; we were all born under a smothering blanket of blindness in a civilization that is wholly unlike anything before it. But that world is dying and we can’t drag with us all the baggage of the past.
The teaching and faith in Radix Fidem and Kiln of the Soul parish won’t work using the old descriptive legalistic approach to religion. It’s easy to get wrapped up in specifics and chase all the wrong things. That’s the siren song of the Fall, the lust for human primacy that corrupted Old Testament faith into Judaism. It’s the fabric of our society today and all the noisy nonsense about what we are experiencing. So long as you buy the big lie, you’ll chase false solutions. I’m not a prepper, not a survivalist, and certainly no militiaman. Were I any part of that, I would have left that mobile home park and moved farther into the wilderness off the grid, and I would have built myself a small fortress with a huge store of food, supplies and weapons. Instead, I moved into an urban apartment complex and have almost none of that prepper stuff (though I wouldn’t mind having some more canned food). It’s not that I am in no danger at all, but that physical danger is simply not much of an issue either way. Whatever happens with human governments and terrorism and militias is just background noise.
The divine mission and calling is not to survive, but to trust God for the whole question of human existence while I pursue this virtual pastoral ministry. So long as He needs me alive, no one on this earth can take my life. When it’s time to bring me Home, nothing on this earth can keep me here. Christ hung on the Cross until the mission of redemption was accomplished, and then He died simply by leaving His body. It’s our desire to become so close to the Father that we treat death as a relief, a joyous reward for pleasing Him. But it comes at His command.
The biggest threat to my ministry is not turmoil, armed conflict, or poverty. The biggest threat to my ministry is online for the simple reason that the ministry is online. It’s not actually me but my testimony that echoes of divine truth. Attacking me in my home won’t stop what I’ve started; the Internet never forgets. Attacking my online presence is a different story, and it’s currently a little more exposed and vulnerable than I like. I’m not building a physical fortress; I’m hoping to build a virtual dominion of Kingdom service that is exceedingly difficult to silence.
Most of the turmoil that we see in the news is drama. It’s real enough in one sense, but in itself the results of each dramatic episode will not change the reality of our human condition. This is the old “bread and circuses.” The Cult is trying to distract us through total absorption with all sorts of diversions. Mostly it’s aimed at trying to keep everyone too stirred up to pay attention to genuine heart-led faith or any other pursuit of the Creator’s glory. The moral battlefield is not where bullets fly and blood runs. That movie (The Matrix) had it backwards; reality is the big lie in moral terms. The future of moral conflict will be mostly virtual — cyberwar will be the primary path for subjugation. The rising Network Civilization will be totally different from Western Civilization.
But it gets more complicated. What I wrote about The Cult may be partially obsolete already. It appears there are some folks who seek to hijack some portion of the script, rewriting things based on this massive shift in human perception. At the very least, some of the servants of The Cult have departed from old methods, and the plutocrats we know about are in genuine distress. There is a new generation rising in those circles, same as with the rest of us. I confess that I can’t discern whether it’s just the servants or The Cult itself that is in turmoil. For the first time in human history, we have a generation of people born with an awareness and expectation of instant global communications. We can already see how it changes human behavior in the aggregate. Even if The Cult itself doesn’t change their commitments, they won’t be able to pursue them in quite the same ways because the mass of humanity they seek to manipulate won’t respond to the same precise bag of tricks any more. The task of enslaving humanity has quickly become a totally different game for them. There’s a new layer of abstraction that could make it both harder and easier.
In parabolic terms, imagine that the earth has fractured and whole continents have shifted in a very short time. Most of the people surivived and their relationships are unchanged, but it’s not the same world and only the most nimble ruling class can adapt quickly enough to maintain their position. As you might expect, there is turmoil in the ruling class, too, as some take advantage of instability to jockey for a better position. That series of tectonic shifts symoblizes the dramatic cultural shift brought on by ubiquitous global networking. The old national borders are gone, in the sense that they are meaningless relics of the past. We are also seeking to exploit this situation for the glory of God by restoring lost moral vision.
The moral perspective from ancient times stands ready to help us understand how reality works. “We war not against flesh and blood” it says in Ephesians 6:12, reflecting the ancient moral understanding. It doesn’t matter who the people are if you grasp the driving motive that shapes a consistent and discernible power in our world. We are in the moral stream or out, but it’s not about us. Get this and you are in a position to grasp your own divine calling in terms of a counter-force driving you to expose the moral truth. At that level of perception, you and I aren’t important — it’s what drives us, our convictions and commitments that matter. It’s a question of our moral identity. That’s what we really “are” in that sense, fungible manifestations of moral influence.
Whatever that means for anyone else who adopts some measure of what we teach, I am quite certain of what it means for me, and that’s exploiting the nature of human online engagement, the virtual society of the Internet.
What happens if current efforts to regulate the Net take on reality? How vulnerable is this ministry if someone blocks access, changes the contents or simply erases my account here? Those things could happen easier than you might think. If I put together a shadow server in my apartment, running just like a regular Internet server, but not exposed to the Net, when stuff happens it should take less than an hour to completely replace the virtual infrastructure of this parish. In virtual space, copies are just a matter of possessing storage space on a device, so that an entire virtual city can be multiple places at once.
Having a protected copy of the parish infrastructure requires a real server with all the implementations not possible on my little netbook. We can keep our working copy on a rented server account that is exposed to the Net. Should someone attack that copy, we simply replace the entire virtual church house and all the furnishings in the time it takes to push the data across the wires. For short periods, the home server itself can carry the full load if necessary (the details are too complicate to note here). The point is that my convictions demand I strive to work for this vision, this kind of preparation for tribulation.
At the same time, this home server will foster our continued work on ways to bring into our lives that vision for a virtual parish family. Maybe I don’t know exactly what that looks like for now, but we sure can’t find out without trying some ideas. I’m willing to schlepp through all kinds of things that don’t work on the way to what does. While it’s me doing the work on my end, this is really about the thing that binds us in moral space. It’s not as if we can’t individually proceed on our own, but Our Lord indicated it works a whole lot better if we come together for mutual support. That in itself is a major element in manifesting His glory, that we can congregate in a moral structure stronger than any other form of human association. And if you have a better plan, jump on it. It could work just fine without me, but while I yet breathe I intend to serve you better as virtual pastor. It is inevitable that “better” means “different from what we have now.”
Given what I can see and understand about the matrix of changes at work in our world, I am confident that I can ride out the worst of human misery and social turmoil for as long as God intends to use me. What concerns me is being silenced in the one most fruitful mission I’ve pursued in my whole life up to now. This is the ultimate adventure! You want in on this?
I hate the utter lack of physical contact with you, but somehow this virtual contact is working. God is blessing this; people are finding their own hearts and serving Christ in ways no physical church affords. I don’t hate those churches, but if you and I are going to bring back to human awareness how the heart-led existence is the biblical norm, we can’t trust them to receive the message, much less spread it abroad. Nothing I work with here suggests we should hijack those institutions, and nothing prevents visionary leaders among them from adopting some measure of what have here. But as a whole, mainstream Western Christian religion as an institution is just one more element in the secular meat-space context in which we pursue Our Father’s glory.
We belong to a new reality.
