The Catholic Catholic: Familiar Frameworks for New Ideas

You've heard of the Catholic church. But what on Earth is a catholic Catholic? Simply put, it's the term that best sums up the years-long culmination of my spiritual path, inasmuch as the word "catholic," in its non-ecclesiastical form, denotes something universal, broad, or all-embracing.  

And I mean that in a spiritual sense, not a political one. The point is that what began as the journey of a questioning young kid born into the Catholic church has resulted in a weary middle-aged man who's come back home by fitting his years of worldwide spiritual exploration into a big-"c" Catholic box. 

I feel at home in the Catholic church, even if I can't hold a literal belief in its teachings. That's a tough place to be in, but it's the only alternative to starting my own church -- which could still happen, but time will tell. Either way, I'm compelled to do something, whether it's sitting in someone else's church on a Sunday or launching my own, because I know at this point that my lifelong spiritual yearning isn't just going to go away.

It would be so much easier if I could just fit myself neatly into someone else's prefabricated box, but I've never been that way, spiritually or otherwise. And when it comes to religion and spirituality in particular, I know from experience that I don't fit in any of these boxes:

• I'm not an atheist, because I firmly believe that our material existence is balanced out by our spiritual existence; they are the yin and yang of our experience in this universe. 
• I'm not a liberal Christian, because even though I'm a firm believer in living out the values of the Sermon on the Mount, social justice is not an end in itself and leaves us spiritually hungry. 
• I'm not a rules-and-regulations Christian, because rigid dogma is only a small step away from Pharisaism and ends up missing the point of the spiritual life that I think Christ wanted us to follow and cultivate. 
• I'm about as far away from a literalist, evangelical, faith-alone, sola scriptura Christian as a person could possibly be.  

I'm no fan of Paul, either. I think he taught a message that often ran contrary to Christ's, and I think he undid much of the work Christ did toward encouraging people to live out their faith and toward treating women as equals -- the latter of which was, of course, something unheard of in those days. The irony, naturally, is that without Paul's missionary zeal that spread the message of Christ to the Gentiles, Christianity would have been a weird, obscure offshoot of Judaism that probably would have died out in a few generations.  

That leaves me with a Christianity that boils down to the Gospels and the epistles of James and John, along with the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. For me, that's enough to build a foundation of something that looks "Christian" enough for me to stay in the fold, as it lets me hold on to the ethical teachings Christ left behind while leaving ample room to understand his spiritual teachings and admonitions in a more universal sense. 

It's not my business to tell others they're doing religion wrong, but I do think an overweening literalism is one of the biggest problems modern religion faces. The story of Adam and Eve, to cite one of endless examples, doesn't have to be understood literally in order to derive a greater lesson from it about our origins, our relationship with the divine, and our human frailties that cause us to repeatedly stumble and fall. When fundamentalists insist on a literal reading of such allegorical passages, it only alienates modern minds who then wonder how people could still believe in such primitive fables when we now know so much about the beginning of the universe and the evolution of species from a scientific point of view. 

But the thing is, evangelicals and fundamentalists on one side, and the atheists and materialists on the other, are both reacting to the same literal reading of scripture, unable to see that literalism isn't the only possible or permissible approach. Even some of the Church Fathers, including the revered St. Augustine himself, argued that if a passage of scripture defies science and reason, then it should not be interpreted literally. 

Think of it this way: If the faithful believe that Jesus is God incarnate, and Jesus spoke in parables to illustrate spiritual truths, then why would the same God have not likewise used stories to illustrate spiritual truths in the Old Testament, as in the Creation and Flood stories?

Christ-collective-consciousness

That brings me to Bernardo Kastrup. The computer scientist-turned-metaphysicist has in recent years laid out a complex theoretical framework that seeks to unite our modern understanding of physics, especially quantum physics, with spiritual truths that reimagine old teachings in new ways. 

Like Jung before him, Kastrup subscribes to the idea of a collective unconscious, a pool of common knowledge and experience typically expressed through archetypes to which all humans appear to have an innate access. Acknowledging that we all have subjective conscious experiences of what it's like to be "us," while science still can't explain how consciousness even works, Kastrup takes a view of consciousness that looks something like the Tao or the Hindu idea of Brahman and unites it with a perspective on the quantum world, where our old assumptions about how the material world works fall into chaos. If consciousness objectively exists, but the basis for neither it nor our material existence can be found at the quantum level, then Kastrup argues that consciousness, along with the subjective experience of our own existence, must come from someplace else. And that "someplace else" must be a kind of universal consciousness for which we all become like receivers, tuning in to our own unique frequencies. That means consciousness is a basic building block of our universe, no different from, say, gravity. 

Thus, this universal consciousness and the universe itself are more or less synonymous, and our conscious existence is the universe experiencing itself through our senses.

Although Kastrup doesn't promote his idea from a religious framework, it's pretty easy to take his concepts and imagine us all as individual souls that have separated from a larger whole, with the ultimate goal of finding our way back home. As Alan Watts so beautifully expressed it, we are pieces of God playing hide-and-seek with himself. We incarnate to learn things, to experience the world, to love, to lose, to feel the entire range of human emotions, and then we take our experiences back with us after this life, either adding them to the base of knowledge of the collective unconscious or coming back to live another life. 

If this idea seems far removed from any known concept of Christianity, I'd say that it is and it isn't. The way I see it, Christianity is universally true in that it guides us toward eventual reunion with the divine and offers comforting answers for why things are the way they are in our often difficult lives. If we pick up our cross and follow in the way of Christ, we will experience difficult trials, but we can take comfort in the knowledge that by following in his ways, we will find the Kingdom of God within us (Luke 17:21). Contrary to what the Calvinists and evangelicals say, we are not totally depraved. Nor are we, in the words of Martin Luther, irredeemable dunghills whose filth can only be covered with the snow of God's righteousness. To the contrary, we can become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4) and achieve a mystical union with God, in a process the Eastern Christians call theosis. 

Whether humans can achieve such a state or not, it is nevertheless a worthy ideal to strive toward. It's the path that the Sermon on the Mount sets us on, and even striving to walk that path is sure to better us and the world alike. Recall that Christ himself once said, "Is it not written in your law, 'I have said you are gods'?" (John 10:34), and "Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). He was calling us to be our best selves, even if we stumble and fall as we try. 

God, then, becomes something like a symbol of human perfection, rather than a judgmental entity who weighs our sins and determines whether we deserve heaven or eternal torture. If, as the apostle John tells us, God is love (1 John 4:16), then how could it be otherwise? True theosis, true union with God, is what leads us home to our source, where we can reunite with the universal consciousness and find rest. 

At most, I believe our souls may undergo a time of purification for our failings in this life -- I firmly believe that the Catholics got the concept of purgatory right -- but the idea of a place of never-ending anguish and torment is utterly incompatible with any concept of divine love and mercy. 

How to take it all on board

Now, this largely metaphorical perspective on Christianity becomes problematic only if you insist on taking scripture at a completely literal level. Even before I read Kastrup, I came to believe that the feeble human mind would be completely incapable of ever grasping anything of the spiritual realm. At best, religious traditions can offer their best guesses. They can only show us the mere shadows of spiritual truths, as in Plato's Allegory of the Cave; they are only the finger pointing at the moon. 

The problem is, organized religion takes its best guesses and repackages them into dogmatic truths that can't be questioned or challenged. Then you're forced to believe things that compel you to surrender your common sense, on pain of being thrown out of your particular religious tribe. The alternatives are to follow your own solitary path, mix and match beliefs to hammer out something that works for you, or remain silent about your inmost beliefs while remaining part of a religious community. 

You can also scuttle religious belief altogether, of course. But I'm with Jung and Kastrup in thinking that humans are hardwired for religious belief. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and philosopher Blaise Pascal have both said in their own ways that humans have a God-shaped hole in their heart, and that hole will always be filled by something that becomes each person's personal god, whether it be money, political beliefs, self-worship, or something else. Given the trajectory our world is on, as traditional religious belief declines, I think it's far more prudent to hold on to some kind of transcendent belief -- an idea that there's something bigger than us, to keep us humble by reminding us that we're not in control of very much. The Buddha and the Stoics were both right in observing that we suffer when we try to control things that were never in our control in the first place. Whether you subscribe to the Four Noble Truths or see yourself as a humble servant of the Almighty, we are keeping our egos in check and, as a result, our expectations of the world around us in a realistic context. If we can't control the world, at least we can control our reaction to it.

But how do you take on a religious belief if you don't believe it in the first place? Kastrup argues that that's asking the wrong question, as it's rooted in the idea that we're obliged to take on a literal belief of whatever spiritual system we adopt. Instead, we should treat religious doctrines right from the start as myths -- not myths as mere fairy tales, but spiritual expressions that point to truths beyond what our logical minds can grasp and our languages can express. Thus, whether a religious doctrine is literally true becomes irrelevant. What it points to, in a way that we can't grasp through logic or express through words, is what matters. When Chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching states that "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao," this is precisely what it's talking about. Kastrup believes that adopting this approach will open us up to the great wonders and possibilities we've lost along with our old religious beliefs, making our modern lives feel less claustrophobic and desperate and maybe even giving us a glimmer of existential hope.

What Kastrup is asking us to do is what fundamentalists and all religious literalists fail to do, which is to create a healthy separation between our emotional and intellectual minds. In his book More Than Allegory, Kastrup argues that "if a religious myth resonates deeply with your inner intuitions and survives a reasonably critical assessment of its depth," then you can "take it onboard as if it were literally true." But he warns that one should not attempt to rationally conceptualize the meaning of the myth, as that would strip it of its intuitive power; nor should one try to take on the myth as intellectually true, as that leads to fundamentalism. It is enough, rather, to see the myth as a literal truth on an emotional level.

This is where atheists tend to fail in their criticism of religion. At least in America, a lot of atheists seem, in my experience, to be refugees of fundamentalist and evangelical backgrounds, and their sweeping rejection of religious belief often, and unsurprisingly, comes off as a knee-jerk reaction to the literalist religion they were programmed to believe in for so long. In a reaction to what they perceive as the psychological tyranny of their former lives, they throw the Baby Jesus out with the bathwater. 

I mention this because I came close to joining the ranks of the atheists at one point on my spiritual journey. I wondered how grown, intelligent people could believe such nonsense. Eventually, I realized that the secret is that religious belief is not an either-or proposition. Yes, if you attempt to intellectualize everything in holy scripture, it will collapse in on itself, in a messy heap of impossibilities and logical contradictions -- and that's if you're not already appalled by all the bloodthirsty vengeance and wrath of the Old Testament God. 

But if you can embrace the idea -- just the idea -- that an all-powerful God would humble himself to take on human form and suffer and die on our behalf, out of his infinite and unconditional love for us, then you've learned a valuable lesson in what true, selfless love looks like, and how you can cultivate that kind of love in yourself and radiate it out to others -- even those you don't deem worthy of it. Little wonder that the Gospels have collectively been called the greatest story ever told.

Inasmuch as all religions attempt to point us toward the same unknowable universal truths, so we can take on virtually any religious path, as long as we strive to view that religion as literally true on an emotional level, and not on a rational level. But Kastrup makes a strong case for using Christianity as a framework for our spiritual life. His journey has been similar to my own, and I'd like to quote at length from More Than Allegory, as the passage resonates strongly with me and, I think, illustrates how people can take on a religious belief in the manner he argues for:

I was raised in a largely Catholic extended family and exposed to the Christian myth and liturgy from childhood. […] However, as I grew up and became more critical, things changed. By the time I went to university at 17, I was already dismissing the Christian myth as mere fiction and continued to do so for many years thereafter. The scope of my interest in the Christian world became reduced, or so I told myself, to the history and architecture of Europe's medieval churches. Yet this modest interest was enough to maintain a tenuous, delicate link to the myth.

Each time I went to a church and watched the faithful in prayer, I caught myself wondering how the Christian myth could have such a strong hold in the souls of so many otherwise rational people. It didn't make sense to me, and the whole thing felt like a puzzle I couldn't solve. As my interest in and knowledge of psychology grew, my curiosity in this regard became even more acute. "How? Why? What is it in this myth that has such a grip in the mind of Western civilization?" To simply dismiss the whole thing by labeling it delusion would be, or so I felt, a lazy and unsatisfying way out. It would represent a puerile refusal to acknowledge an undeniable and rather remarkable psychosocial fact, so one wouldn't need to understand it. With the risk of sounding arrogant, I was too thoughtful to take such a dull-witted exit.

One day, I had an experience that answered all those questions to my own satisfaction. I happened to be visiting one of Europe's oldest and largest churches: Cologne Cathedral in Germany. I had no specific agenda during my visit. I was just there absorbing the "vibe" of that amazing place. As it happens, my gaze got caught by the large crucifix above the golden shrine of the Three Kings. There was the figure of a man, nailed to a cross, in a dramatic depiction of great human sacrifice. At once something flipped inside me, like a sudden shift of perspective. I had gotten it. I had been suddenly "carried over" directly to the transcendent cognitive space the icon was pointing to all along. I knew what the Christian symbolism was attempting to convey. "The event of the symbol is a stunning, unexpected moment when something … in the world takes your breath away," explained Cheetham quite accurately. Could I articulate my epiphany in language? I could try, but I know that it would be completely misunderstood no matter how carefully I chose my words. I know it because I would misunderstand it completely if someone else tried to describe it to me. The insight escapes language and can only be conveyed, precariously as it may admittedly be, through the religious myth. All I can say is this that sudden epiphany confirmed the validity of the Christian myth to me and, simultaneously, shredded it to pieces. It was an "Aha!" moment that, while making clear why the Christian myth is what it is -- it simply couldn't be any different -- it also showed that the truth has very little to do with the myth as expressed in words. Although this may sound like a contradiction, my living experience wasn't contradictory at all: It made perfect sense at a non-intellectual, heartfelt level. I had glanced at the cylinder beyond the shadows.

The experience I am trying to describe wasn't rapture or ecstasy. It was simply an insight of understanding that escapes the boundaries of the intellect and resolves paradoxes; a syzygy or coniunctio, as Jung called it. It was like a subtle but powerful shift of perspective that instantly placed me where the myth had been pointing to all along. 

What Kastrup describes here is not unlike the Zen experience of satori, a flash of enlightenment that peels away the curtains of illusion obscuring our view of the reality beyond our material existence. I've had one experience similar to that on my spiritual journey, one in which the Virgin Mary made herself known to me. Like Kastrup's experience, it wasn't exactly a moment of rapture or ecstasy -- but it wasn't a purely intellectual experience, either. As I reached out to touch a likeness of Mary one day in a Catholic chapel, I felt a rush of warmth flooding over me, a feeling that I can only describe as compassionate, unconditional love. Any of the great religious mystics throughout history would surely nod in understanding of what I'm talking about.

Mary has pulled me back into the Catholic/Orthodox family over and over, and while I don't look back at my experience as supernatural evidence of the historical existence of a figure named Mary of Nazareth, it did confirm my belief in what the religious figure of the Virgin Mary means to me and my spiritual life. She's my mother, whether she ever actually existed or not.  

"A religious myth can create the conditions for a direct experience of a transcendent reality," Kastrup wrote. And my experience lends credence to his argument. "If and when the experience actually happens," he continues, "the myth dissolves itself. But once the experience is over, the religious myth remains an important link, a reminder, between ordinary life and transcendence." In other words, you've gone beyond belief. You become like Jung, who, when asked whether he believed in God, replied: "I don't believe. I know." His knowledge came from a different place from mine, but he likewise arrived at an understanding that didn't rely solely on what someone told him to believe.

Thinking different

Dogma and literalism, I think, are for people who have never had an inner experience like that. Without having had a peek behind the veil to witness the deeper truths that religion points us toward, you need the guardrails that dogma provides, because all you have is someone else's tradition handed down to you from someone else, and all you can do it take everything on blind faith. You're handed a bunch of rules and told the consequences for not following them. 

And then what happens? You become obsessed with personal behavior and sin and you miss the whole point of the spiritual life. Hence all the Bible-thumpers who try to compel you to follow their rules by rattling off scripture verses to scare you into avoiding a hell that you may or may not believe in. Hence, too, all the online Q&A websites where you'll always find people, usually young and inexperienced in religion, asking endless questions about whether X is a sin or whether I'll go to hell if I do Y. As if the only purpose of your spiritual life and religious experience is to avoid angering a petty regulation enforcer in the sky. 

And yet this is how so many of us function. Ask the average believer why he believes, and you're likely to hear "So I can go to heaven when I die," or, worse, "so I don't go to hell."

We can do better than that. Religion ought to lift us up, inspire us, not make us feel miserable about ourselves and self-righteous toward others. 

And so it is that I've once again returned to the familiar comfort of Catholicism, which I use as the framework for my own understanding of the divine. Following Kastrup's advice, I accept its teachings as fully literal on an emotional level. From a rational point of view, I have a deep admiration for its history, its rituals and traditions, the beauty and reverence of (some of) its religious services, and the soaring architecture that makes you feel like you're in the presence of the divine. Catholicism gave shape to Western civilization, too, and there's something to be said for offering up one's appreciation for that incredible gift, which tragically seems in grave danger of slipping away.

Granted, I'm no fan of the current pope, who wants to destroy the beautifully reverent Traditional Latin Mass that the church used as its primary method of worship for some 400 years. Like most of his misguided Vatican II generation, he wants to conform the church to the changing standards and beliefs of contemporary secular society, rather than having the church stand firm as a corrective when society loses its way. 

But the church is bigger than one person. Even the Holy Family had to live in exile for a time, but eventually Herod died.  

So I'll stick around as long as I can stomach things. If new mandates pop up that restrict freedom of public worship, I'm out. The Latin Mass is my backup option at this point, and I recall that the SSPX was the last to close during the lockdowns, if it ever closed at all. But if Francis succeeds in killing off the old Mass, then I guess I'd be altogether finished letting someone else "do" church for me, and I'd have to step up my own efforts to create a physical church of my own. 

Given my dodgy health and my more important responsibilities as a dad, a husband, and a wage-earner for my family, I just don't know if starting my own church is ever going to happen. But I do have a book in me, and that may actually materialize this year. I even have the name of the church all set to go: Ekklesia Pankatholikos, Greek for the Pan-Catholic Church. What we know as Christianity took root in Greece and under the influence of Greek culture, and I think that connection deserves to be emphasized and celebrated. 

With Paul's influence, the belief in Jesus as the Jewish messiah crashed head-on with existing regional pagan beliefs about dying and rising deities, like chocolate mixing with peanut butter, to create a universal religion that took on even more pagan influence once it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. So while Christian figures, scriptures, and traditions form the basis of the EPK, the pan in "Pankatholikos" signifies an openness to other beliefs and traditions, in hopes of revitalizing religious belief within the modern world while using familiar faith traditions as a foundation to build upon and hopefully draw people in. I envision one of its selling points as being a BYOD religion -- bring your own deity. We've got what you need to get started, but go ahead and add what you require to give the belief system relevance to your life and experience. If you feel the urge to swap out the Blessed Virgin for, say, the goddess Athena, have at it. Do what works for you.

I envision the EPK as a meeting place of many of the religious and spiritual traditions and ideas that I've picked up on my lifelong journey. Taoism has a very prominent place, along with the Sacred Feminine. Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Buddhism, pandeism, and, yes, paganism all have their place as well. And the central narrative of the EPK focuses on a character that may surprise some. There will be more details to come, but suffice it to say for now that the EPK thinks outside the box in some significant ways.

I invite you to join me on my continuing journey.

Reflections on a Silent Day

Artist: Bharati Iyer.

My first day of silence for 2022 was an interesting experiment. But I wonder if such an exercise has more of an impact on people who are used to either talking all day or having their lives filled with chatter. Surely the sudden shift into silence has to be far more jarring for people who engage in lots of small talk, who have a TV droning in the background all day, or whatever the case. Aside from our barking dogs or our chatty 10-year-old who randomly fills our house with outbursts of unexpected noise, we don’t have a particularly loud house to begin with.

From a personal standpoint, I didn’t notice much difference. I always have chatter going on in my head anyway, whether I’m talking or not. If anything, I was more aware of the aches and pains in my body, so I guess it is true that your other senses sharpen when you take one away.

My daughter, trying to be helpful, handed me a pencil and a notepad when she got up in the morning, but I didn’t really need it. When I needed to communicate with my wife, I texted her or typed out a message in a blank Word document. I also had to engage in an email exchange for work, and my kiddo got a laugh out of playing a game of charades with me later in the evening. Doing all of that felt like cheating on the purpose of the day, but on the other hand, that was all the “talk” I engaged in. I did reflexively say “Ow” once when I banged my head on the basement ceiling in the morning, and I told the dogs to “Stay” when I went outside the front gate to retrieve the mail, not thinking about it until immediately afterward.

I’m not looking for reasons to dispense with the exercise in silence, but for starters I think I may shift it to Saturdays, which is a day when I start working first thing in the morning, rather than halfway through the day, as I do on Fridays. Not speaking on a Friday left my wife with no one to talk to in the morning while we were cleaning up the basement together. Our kiddo, despite being homeschooled, isn't always around to engage in conversation, and our current house guest is often tied up with her own stuff.

I actually felt bad that my wife was having a one-way conversation with me for most of the day. For one thing, the tons of snow we've received here in North Idaho were rapidly melting with above-freezing temps and a steady rainfall on Friday, making the roads slushy and in many cases impassible. My wife had to run out to the store while I was working, and she came back to tell me her harrowing experience of being blinded when the windshield got sprayed with a load of slush, and how she spun out of a couple of times to and from her destination. I would have had to break my silence had she gotten into an accident, and I didn’t need her worrying about whether I’d be willing to do so. (Naturally, I would, but I didn't want the concern to be there.)

So my experiment didn’t feel fair to her. As it is, she mostly talks to the people she knows only by text, so it’s not like she has anyone to speak with if I go quiet -- except for the kiddo if she’s around, or our guest if she's around, or the dogs, but they don't talk back. So I’ll have to weigh any ongoing silent days against the needs of my wife and daughter. If something important comes up, maybe I just try again another day or start talking as needed and split the silence across two days.

I was thinking during the day that if I had a driving motivation for keeping silence, other than just enjoying the quiet and working on my listening skills, maybe that would make a difference. When I was looking up resources on how to successfully do a day of silence, I was inundated with search-engine algorithms throwing up page after page of information on taking a day of silence in support of the struggles of gays and lesbians. Apparently this is a thing. Well, the LGBT crowd has every major institution of power squarely in their corner, so they don’t need my help. But that did get me thinking about other people who are being silenced in one way or another in our current climate. 

And then I hit on an idea. I could devote a weekly day of silence, on a rotating monthly basis, in solidarity with others facing oppression. Something like this:

Week 1: For all who have been bullied or silenced by cancel culture. Whether your opinion has been “fact-checked” by propagandists, you’ve been kicked off social media, you’ve been ordered to “check your privilege” or “be less white,” your life has been threatened by woke rage mobs, or you’ve lost your livelihood for having the wrong opinion, I stand with you and sympathize with your forced silence.

Week 2: For all who have been compelled against their will to put on a mask, get a shot, or show their papers. If you’ve been made to feel like a leper or an untouchable, been denied entrance to a public place, been bullied by busybodies terrified of a virus with a 2% death rate, or made to feel like an extremist because you don’t treat the existence of immune systems as a conspiracy theory, I stand beside you in the face of those who silence and marginalize you.

Week 3: For all traditional Catholics and those in contemplative orders whose religious practices and observations are under attack from the highest levels of the church. By extension, I stand with all, regardless of religious or spiritual path, whose peaceful spiritual practices and beliefs are under threat for whatever reason. (To be perfectly clear, if you’re some kind of intolerant violent jihadist, you do not have my sympathies.)

Week 4: For all those who have been compelled to say something against their will. Compelled speech is anathema to free speech.

And for those months with an extra week: For all those willing to shut off the chatter in their lives, look deeply within themselves, and find the inner strength to stand fast to their own principles in a world where those who scream “tolerance” the loudest are the most eager to shut you up. Turn off your TV, stop letting others tell you what to think, live your own truth, and cultivate the mental discipline to fight for what you believe in, even if you’re the only one who believes in it. Being at peace with your own worldview, when it emerges from the sacred silence in a world where you've blocked out the loud and incessant demands of others, is something worth celebrating.

Now that’s a good list of causes to stand up for. And it may be what keeps this experiment going.

The Value of Silence in a World of Noise

Cardinal Robert Sarah.

Noise is a tyrant. The noisier the world is, the more we feel compelled to pay attention to its ongoing petty dramas and obey its bothersome decrees. 

Worse, noise takes us out of ourselves. We never have to look inward and confront our true selves so long as we have the distraction of noise to let us ignore our inner work. 

I'm a quiet person to begin with. I live in my head. I've always felt like a silent observer upon a world consumed with noisy distractions. I'm terrible at small talk. I'd rather listen to meaningful debates and discussions -- and maybe even, if I'm in the right mood, participate in them. 

But for the most part, I hate talking. I really do. If I ever lost any of my physical functions, I wouldn't be all that put out if I could never speak again.

I'm flummoxed most days by a world that never shuts up. It feels like we're running away from the truth, deliberately pushing aside the silence, terrified of what we might find there.

Cardinal Robert Sarah would agree with this assessment. I'm reading his book The Power of Silence as preparation for beginning my own weekly day of silence. This is something I've vowed to do for quite some time, but for 2022 I've made it a resolution. 

Cardinal Sarah and I probably have different conceptions of the divine, but I agree with him when he points out that so many of the great religious figures across history have sought out God in silence, from Jesus in the desert, to the Carmelite contemplatives like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, to the Desert Fathers whose self-imposed solitude deepened their already rich spiritual groundings. 

One thing I used to love about attending Quaker meetings was the profound silence. There was no one singing, no one reciting scripture, no one giving a sermon -- just a group of faithful people sitting in a circle, looking inward, rising to speak if they felt the Spirit moving them to do so, and then returning to reflective silence. In the few years I sat with the Quakers, there were many meetings that passed in complete silence, and those were some of the most profound gatherings I ever attended. There was in those quietest of meetings a palpable presence of something holy and divine, something that would have gone unnoticed in the chatter and clatter of a typical church ceremony. The whole point, after all, was to listen for the still, small voice within (1 Kings 19:11-12), in hopes that we could "be still and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10).  

Lectio Divina can take us to a similar place. The ancient practice involves meditating on a passage of scripture, sitting with it, plumbing the depths of its meanings. A literal surface reading of scripture is scarcely ever enough and in fact often leads to a kind of rigid fundamentalism. Many atheists, ironically, become the mirror image of their fundamentalist opponents by dismissing a literal reading of scripture as nothing but a trove of outdated absurdities. Well, of course the modern materialistic mind would see scripture as such, if you lack the desire to dig deeper in an attempt to understand what mysteries and existential truths the readings are capable of conveying to us, no matter the time and place.

I find it telling that the modernists leading the Catholic church today are attacking the very faith traditions that encourage silence and reflection. The low Latin Mass passes in de facto silence, as the priest, his voice unamplified and his body turned toward the altar and crucifix, speaks the Mass in Latin and receives responses only from the altar boys. The current pope and his underlings are deliberately attempting to end the Latin Mass, where people gather in reverent silence and prayer to watch the priest prepare the unbloody sacrifice of Holy Communion for those present. There's a similar attack under way on the contemplative monastic orders, those whose lives revolve around sacred, prayerful silence and a deliberate separation from the world. It boggles the mind to confront the fact that if Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross were alive today, their contemplative lives would be in the crosshairs of the Vatican. Of course, back then Teresa had to deal with the Spanish Inquisitors -- proof, perhaps, that some things never change. 

Cardinal Sarah recently said of the building crackdown on the old Latin Mass:

What was holy and sacred yesterday cannot be condemned to disappear today. What harm does the Traditional Mass cause? What harm? If they can learn to meet Christ in a Mass celebrated in silence, in respect for the sacred, they must not doubt it. Everybody wants to grow in God. Why stop him?

The good cardinal's words reflect those of Pope Benedict XVI, who lifted restrictions on saying the Latin Mass when he was the pontiff. He pulled no punches in his criticism of those who attacked the traditional form of worship, used in the Catholic church universally for more than 400 years before the Second Vatican Council rejected it in favor of a modernist approach to religion that has largely failed as an experiment: 

For fostering a true consciousness in liturgical matters, it is also important that the proscription against the form of liturgy in valid use up to 1970 [the older Latin Mass] should be lifted. Anyone who nowadays advocates the continuing existence of this liturgy or takes part in it is treated like a leper; all tolerance ends here. There has never been anything like this in history; in doing this we are despising and proscribing the Church’s whole past. How can one trust her at present if things are that way? 

I like the Latin Mass precisely for its reverent silence. If the current papacy succeeds in taking the Mass away, it will do a grave disservice to many who find their connection to the divine in the calm and quiet. It would indeed inflict profound spiritual harm on those who desire nothing more than their own method of devout worship, many of them after finding no depth or fulfillment from a modern Mass that was designed in large part not to offend Protestants and to play nice with the modern world.

I myself remember the tacky folk Masses of my youth and teen years, and I'm old enough to remember when churches shoved their Mary statues into closets, seemingly embarrassed by anything that made Catholics Catholic. One Eastern Orthodox observer at Vatican II said he was assured by another attendee that "we'll get rid of Mariology very soon." Those were the fruits of the council, and that's why it was such a misguided failure. Yet people with those very same attitudes still preside over the church today -- including Pope Francis' own secretary of state, Pietro Parolin, who stated flatly last year that "we must put an end to this Mass forever," meaning the Latin Mass.

Little wonder that people my age and older are falling away from the faith, with both weekly church attendance and priestly vocations in freefall, while the young are flocking to the Traditional Latin Mass. It seems as if the modernists are mounting a last-gasp effort to impose their view of the church on everyone by denying them their traditional worship, as if the Latin Mass, by virtue of its very existence, is an indictment of where the modernists went wrong.

In any event, the irony couldn't be more rich that this pope, who possessed such promise by holding himself out as a pastoral shepherd who reached out to people on the margins, would be so hostile toward the less than 1% of Catholics who choose to attend the Latin Mass. He has proved himself to be a rigid, bureaucratic bully, looking the other way at the church's myriad actual problems and challenges while focusing his wrath on some of the most devout and well-catechized Catholics you'll ever come across.

It's a pity that Cardinal Sarah, aged 76 as of this writing, will probably never become pope. It's far more likely, in fact, that we'll get another tradition-hating Pope Francis, given the large number of cardinals he's appointed. Traditionalists are therefore going to face a hard road in the immediate future. Little wonder that people resort to sedevacantism or convert to Orthodoxy.

But enough about that. As far as sacred silence in my own life goes, I can only say that although I'm happy with my little family, if I could have pursued an alternative path in life, I think I would have retired to a monastery and taken a vow of silence. So I intend to do the next best thing and deliberately fast from all unnecessary communication for one day a week. My family has asked that I not do it on my days off from work, which is a fair concession. That means it'll have to fall on a day when I use my computer to earn money for my family. And that, in turn, will impose a discipline on me to only use my computer for work, avoiding the temptation to aimlessly browse the Web, needlessly answer emails and texts, and the like when I take a break. I envision that any need for verbal communication away from the computer will be handled by writing it down. 

This is a work in progress, and I imagine there will be tweaks along the way. But I have a strong urge to give it a try. If Gandhi found a weekly day of silence spiritually edifying, then I think it's fair for me to hold out hope that such a practice will yield some good benefits. At the very least, I think it will reveal, even to an already quiet person like me, just how much mindless noise we fill our lives with every day. And I hope that in the end, it will make me more mindful of the things I say and do, and more receptive to the needs and desires of others. 

After all, you can't be a good listener if you never shut up.  

7 Goals for 2022, Provided the World Doesn't Collapse

As I mentioned in my last post, I've come to peace with the reality that civilization is burning down and there's probably not anything that can be done to stave off a total collapse. I don't know if it'll happen in a year or a decade, but it's coming and it's inevitable at this point. We've just gone too far off the rails. We're too atomized, too fearful, too obedient to the forces that manipulate us for their own ends. 

Too many people are OK with resegregation, with reverse racism, with subordinating biology to feelings, with creating a new class of untouchables and banishing them from society, with the politicization of science to manufacture and enforce specific social and political outcomes and to protect the ideologies and financial interests of our institutions of power, the likes of which we haven't seen since Galileo butted heads with the medieval church. 

Too many people are incapable of independent thought. Too many people hand over their brains to the leaders of the tribes they identify with and the ideologies they're told to embrace. Too many people are too self-absorbed with whatever micro-identity they choose to make themselves feel special in a world that doesn't care about your feelings or how special and unique you are. And we're all compelled to nod our heads and celebrate as others play pretend, denying the evidence of our own two eyes, as if someone can simply identify into manhood or womanhood like they were interchangeable costumes.

We've become surrounded by legions of masked zombies, conditioned to believe that immune systems are a dangerous right-wing conspiracy, who scream at us to respect their pronouns and check our white privilege, while their Woke High Priests threaten to cancel us for violating their dogma, unless we bend the knee, rebuke our wrongthink, and confess our Original Sin of being born white. 

And thus it is, in a culture where everything has to be hyperpoliticized, that logic, reason, individual liberty, personal autonomy, and the right to free thought and free speech are giving way to authoritarian superstition and irrational hysteria, as we sink into a new Dark Age.  

And it's all being accelerated by a sanity-shattering climate in which humans are discouraged from even making human contact, as we're relentlessly conditioned to see every other human as a walking disease -- as if our bodies lack the ability to fight off a respiratory virus with a whopping 2% death rate. 

Had I known a decade ago that the world would go so utterly insane, I probably would have opted for another pet over a child. I dread to think of the world my poor daughter will have to grow up in. So in 2022, I intend to simply do more of what's in my control to do, in hopes of making her life tolerable and our family's existence an act of quiet defiance against the status quo, inasmuch as I intend for us to live as normal a life as possible, in spite of the madness raining down all around us.

My goals for the new year, then, are as follows:

To be as good of a husband and dad as I can. That means hoping my body holds out so I can continue to provide for my family, but also making sure I balance work with personal time. My wife works tremendously hard to keep our house functioning, and I probably don't thank or support her enough for all her selfless dedication. My daughter, meanwhile, needs plenty of dad time. She comes to me to learn, to ask questions, to feel secure, to have fun. She likes playing card and board games, and she wants me to join her in some of her videogame worlds. I need to manage my time so I can do that. I know how much it will mean to her. 

To be a better Stoic. We began exploring the ancient philosophy in 2021, and I think I need to keep at it. I see how angry my daughter gets at the stupidity in the world outside our door. I used to be the same way, just filled with rage at everything and everyone. It's hard not to feel that way. I've managed to find a somewhat better balance by tuning out the divisive propaganda of the 24/7 news cycle. Whatever will happen will happen, whether I complain about it or not. I used to crap all over social media griping about the state of the world, but it didn't change anything. It only served to stress me out. So why do it? No one cares, just like no one will read this blog post. But at least this is my only outlet now, and it's a rare outlet at that. I'd rather focus on what I can control and find the equanimity to tune the rest out, to the best of my ability. 

To be more mindful of personal spending. Because I'm not getting any younger, and you never know what financially trying times lie ahead.

To simplify. We have a big house that's full of clutter. I have a strong desire to purge.

To try to at least maintain my current level of health. Every day is a challenge when you feel miserable all the time, you never know what affliction awaits you next, and you've given up hope that the doctors will ever figure things out. But I intend to hang in there for as long as I can. My goal is to at least see my daughter grow up. 

To indulge my new hobbies of mixology and sartorial peculiarity. We're trying out a new cocktail a day, and I got a drink-a-day book for Christmas. I enjoy experimenting with various flavors and adding a bit of spirits to our meals. I've discovered that I enjoy gin, tequila, and vodka, but not so much whiskey, brandy, and rum. I already knew I enjoyed port wine, sweet reds, and some kinds of beers. So I'm just expanding my horizons to see both where things go and what flavors are out there.

As for the sartorial part, I've taken recently to wearing bow ties. I don't like neckties, but my daughter gave me the idea of trying a bow tie with my Sunday church attire. I like the way the experiment is going so far. I feel a little better about myself when I dress up and figure it might even help me feel less ill all the time, as a good frame of mind counts for a lot. And I've already noticed that people seem to treat you with more respect if you dress well. They're more likely to strike up a conversation. Or maybe it's just the peculiarity of the bow tie that acts as an icebreaker. I guess time will tell.

To continue my spiritual growth. Though I was born and raised Catholic. I've come to terms with understanding Christian teaching in a metaphorical way. It's impossible for me to take any of it literally. I continue go to church because it's comforting and familiar, and I'll probably continue to go to our local Latin Mass until the horrible, petty little bureaucratic bully of a pope that runs the church kills off the traditional Mass once and for all. I may split my time between the Latin Mass and the Byzantine Catholic liturgy, though the Byzantines live over in the jackboot people's republic of Washington, whose proto-fascist governor could at any time declare that papers be shown and useless masks be worn as a condition of entry even into a place of worship. We have none of that nonsense affecting the Orthodox church here in North Idaho, which is like the Byzantine Catholic church in all ways except that I'm not invited to communion with the Orthodox -- and I don't think I have the stamina or the patience to go through the long catechism classes that the Orthodox require before I can partake in what Christ offered freely to everyone at the Last Supper. 

I'll probably continue developing my own theological system that incorporates Taoism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, the Sacred Feminine, and a little bit of Hinduism and Christianity, mixed with bits of Jung, Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurti, the idealistic pandeism of Bernardo Kastrup, the notion of a universal consciousness, and more. I have a book rolling around in my head that lays out all the tenets. I envision an intertwined three-part story that involves new scripture, an academic explanation, and an imagined conversation in an abandoned church between the Virgin Mary and Lilith, whom I envision as one of the most maligned and misunderstood characters in all of Judeo-Christian history and legend. I was going to join an online seminary program in 2022, with the end goal of taking holy orders in a few years, with the laying on of hands, apostolic succession through the Old Catholic order, and all that comes with it. I'm already an ordained minister and hold a Th.D. degree, but the idea of being an actual ordained priest holds great appeal. I just don't know if my dodgy health will hold out. Even if I started an actual church as a priest, there are periods stretching for weeks at a time where I can barely get myself vertical. So I just don't know, physically, if I could do it. That's something I need to weigh before I take the next step.

Meanwhile, my daughter, who considers herself a Taoist like her mom, is also thinking she might want to give Wicca a whirl. Being the most spiritually knowledgeable one in the house, I'll have to be the one to get her up to speed so she can properly assess the belief system and see if it's something she'll want to pursue. 

I also plan to keep up our daily Zen habit of drawing ensos, to help us embrace imperfection and spontaneity. And I intend to finally go through with my plans to devote one day a week to being silent, in an effort to remind myself of how much mindless chatter we all engage in, and to cultivate my own mindfulness. I hate talking anyway, so I don't think this will be too hard.

---

That's seven goals for 2022, and that's plenty. At a bare minimum, I just hope I can stay vertical and sane for another year. 

Fingers crossed.

This Is Fine

We're coming up on two years of people acting like Chicken Little over a virus with a whopping 2% mortality rate. I'm pretty sure I've had The Black Plague of Our Time two or three times now. I survived, like the overwhelming majority of people do. 

And yet the world out there is full of media-brainwashed and perpetually enraged people, looking at those of us who haven't forgotten that immune systems exist and blaming us for keeping the world from getting back to normal, when we're the ones who've been saying all along that if you want "normality" back, then stop hiding behind a useless mask and go out and demand it. 

Granted, I imagine that if I watched the daily news and heard nothing but new variants and cases cases cases, absent of any context -- like the astronomically high survival rate, or the fact that heart disease and cancer deaths dwarf the number of C-19 deaths, yet there's no one breathlessly reporting on that every minute of every day -- I'd be in a never-ending panic too. But turn off your TV, and your only reminders of TBPoOT will be when you venture out and see all the obedient mask zombies who themselves have taken their orders from their idiot boxes. 

The problem isn't the virus, or those who resist the narrative and the mandates. The problem, as usual, is those who mindlessly conform. Those who are told whom to blame and obey without reflection. Those who are fine creating an entire class of untouchables over a virus with a 98% survival rate. I look forward to seeing "Unvaccinated Only" lunch counters in the near future as our trigger-warning, safe-space, wear-your-seatbelts, risk-averse, hypervigilant, bubble-wrapped society falls off a cliff in a fit of screaming hysteria. 

At least where I live, and at least for now, people are pretty chill about just living normal lives again. If I'm stuck doing business with our local freedom-loving merchants and being otherwise confined to my house and ordering the stuff I need from Amazon, so be it. I'll wait the world out till it gets this insanity out of its system, if it ever does.

In other words...

Go ahead. Burn the world down. 

I look back on my nine years of blogging now and laugh at how much emotion I invested in political crap I never had any control over. And the current load of crap likewise isn't going to end until the media stops talking about it. 

So go ahead.

Act like you're not a racist when you're the one cartoonishly overrepresenting minorities in advertisements, tokenizing minorities in movie roles and hiring practices, and telling white people to "check their privilege" -- i.e., telling a group of people they don't get an opinion because of their race. 

Please, tell me how your vision of "equity" is not outrageous racism when, instead of seeking equality for all as Dr. King envisioned, you turn old inequalities on their head and call that progress, as if the remedy to blacks to the back of the bus is whites to the back of the bus. Didn't your mama ever tell you that two wrongs don't make a right? Have you even read the Fourteenth Amendment?

Go ahead and tell me how you support women and value science when you insist that men can identify into womanhood just by saying they're women. Tell me about how men can have a uterus and women can have a prostate. Compel me to use "they" as a singular and to call men "she" and "her" when they clearly are neither. 

As long as you're compelling me to play pretend, I'm a 13-year-old handicapped black Japanese lesbian android dog. Prove I'm not, you small-minded bigot.

And as long as we're celebrating body identity disorders rather than telling mentally ill people to get help, let's help anorexics feel good about being anorexic. It's the exact same concept, after all.

Meanwhile, remind me how "male" and "female" are not biological realilites but mere "social constructs" and costumes you can change at will, since all humans are just amorphous interchangeable blobs with different plumbing. Please, please, prevent me from stating the glaringly obvious truth that I can see in front of me with my own two eyes. Don't let me proclaim that the emperor has no clothes. Go ahead. Keep on gaslighting me.

Speaking of womanhood, show us how utterly demented your value system is when you try to cancel "Baby, It's Cold Outside," hearing it as a rape song when its female character is actually being playful and coy, essentially saying to her date, "Propriety says I shouldn't stay, but I actually really want to." And then you turn around and praise the vulgar, degrading porn of "WAP" to the heavens. I'm sure you'll lecture me on feminism anyway. 

And speaking of Christmas, keep on letting tiny minorities dictate what we can do, say, and think. When 90% of the nation celebrates Christmas, please do insist that I say "holiday" instead so I don't run the risk of offending 10% of the population. (Funny how this word-policing never happens at Easter, still mostly a religious holiday, and one that often falls adjacent to Passover, a major Jewish holiday, which Hanukkah is not. But no one said the social-justice warriors acted with logic. In fact, they pretty much run on irrational emotion.)

When a tiny group of people think they're something they're not, you'll compel us all to say "pregnant people" instead of "pregnant women" because a few loose screws think men can actually get pregnant. And please, speaking of "WAP," let's reduce women to their body parts, calling them "people with vaginas," to make the Gender Propagandists and a few deluded people feel better about themselves.  

And of course, force us to wear useless, porous masks and get vaccines as a condition for participating in society over a virus with a 2% death rate.

Here's the problem in a nutshell: Minority rights are one thing. Minority rule is another thing entirely. The former is a hallmark of a free and open society; the latter can only be achieved through bullying authoritarian control of the majority. The last time a minority controlled the majority so thoroughly as we see now, it was called apartheid. That didn't work out so well. Tyrannies never do, whether it's a tyranny of the majority or of the minority.

It's like one wise person recently observed: It used to be that if five people wanted to play basketball and four wanted to play volleyball, the majority won and we played basketball. (And then we might squeeze in a game of volleyball, just to be fair.) Nowadays, if eight people want to play basketball and one person wants to play volleyball, we don't play anything at all, because everything is black and white, all or nothing, and we can't risk offending the non-basketball-identifying person. In fact, let's hold the volleyball fan up as a forgotten hero, struggling under the weight of the privilege of all the evil basketball fans who are oppressing his will.

And oh, do tell me how it's OK to impose your gender-neutrality on a gendered language. That's how you end up with the non-word monstrosity Latinx in place of Latino and Latina. No one asked for your linguistic colonialism, but being the perpetual white savior you are, you're going to impose it on Spanish for the language's own good. You never could shake that habit of thinking you speak for all minority groups, could you? Half a millennium ago, the ignorant Indians needed the Bible. Now the ignorant gendered Spanish language needs Latinx when it never even asked for it or knew it needed it.

You see, Puritanism never dies. It just takes different forms. Now, instead of confessing in a church, we grovel on bended knee before the High Priests of the Woke as we atone for our ideological sins, lest we be excommunicated from our livelihoods. Woe to the one who holds the wrong opinion, for he -- ahem, they -- shall be canceled. But alas, there is no true redemption here, especially for those contaminated by the New Original Sin of being born white. 

Seriously, burn it all down. I don't care anymore, and I can't stop you anyway.

In the midst of all this insanity, I've taken to spending my Sundays at Latin Mass. And even there, I'm happy to say that after years of wringing my hands over finding the right religious/spiritual community for me, I'm OK not believing in a literal sense what 99% of the other folks there do. I believe there's something bigger than us out there, beyond this Earth and this life, and I think all religions are taking their best stab at what that is. They're all certain they've found the answer, and they argue with each other and condemn each other, when no one really knows the answers, since obviously none of us are dead yet. But I found peace in a crappy childhood sitting in the quiet beauty of our local Catholic church, and after all the years of struggle to find a spiritual home as an adult, I find I'm content just to sit in the quiet of a Latin Mass and contemplate the Big Questions silently in my own head. That's enough. And if you take the Bible as a series of metaphors, allegories, and symbols for humanity's quest to struggle with its own shortcomings and find redemption, then the overarching story still holds some value. And Mary can still be my spiritual Mom, the way she always has.

I still prefer the relaxed reverence of Eastern Orthodox worship and its comparative flexibility in regard to individual situations to the overly regimented, rigid, and foolishly legalistic Catholic approach. But having already been baptized and confirmed Catholic, I also don't have to endure a yearlong catechism just to fully participate in the service. That counts for something. Besides, if you present yourself for communion, the priest just assumes you're a Catholic in good standing and a state of grace. It's only the Orthodox who look askance at you as you approach, wanting to know who your bishop is before you'll be administered the Eucharist. Who needs that kind of control-freak drama? 

But either way, I'm not there because I'm obsessed with sin and hell. I'm there because I find church a peaceful refuge from the hysteria and stupidity of the world at large. Besides, Latin Catholics are good political allies to have in these times, at least until Pope Francis shuts down the Latin Mass for good. There aren't many churches you can go to where there isn't a face diaper in sight and no one hectors you to put one on or show your papers, Nazi Germany-style. One of the Latin Mass priests recently made an ironic joke about "freedom-loving Washington" in contrast to Idaho, where the appellation actually fits. I like him. I like the church. Yeah, they're uptight and Pharisaical about proper dress and crying kids and being properly disposed to receive communion, but I would expect no less and find their hyperserious joylessness all kind of a funny affectation. As if Jesus would criticize someone for not wearing a clean, pressed cloak of the finest cloth. As if he'd turn anyone away who sought him out in the Eucharist. 

The rad-trads totally miss the point of Christ's message. But then almost all Christians miss the point in one way or another. The evangelical nutters worship Paul and apparently think Jesus was just blowing hot air when he expected his followers to actually live out the values of the Sermon on the Mount. Just head up at the altar call and say you believe, and then you can act however you want for the rest of your life because your ticket to heaven is irrevocable. "Sin boldly," as Martin Luther once put it. 

Yeah, keep me a mile away from those people. At least the Catholics think your salvation can be lost, so they regularly confess their sins and try to stay on the straight and narrow, which means that at least some of them actually make an effort to pick up their crosses in imitation of Christ. 

And forget the liberal Christians, who reduce Jesus to a feel-good hippie, recoil from any and all theology like it was a flaming pile of dog crap, pretend that the Bible doesn't actually condemn gay people, and worship transgenderism more than they do the Almighty. Also, put on your masks for the rest of eternity, because yay faith and logic alike. Why bother going to a church like that when you could just attend a Democratic Party-sponsored political rally?

 This is fine. 

All of it. 

As much as my health sucks, I don't know how much longer I'll be vertical on this planet anyway. I feel horrible for the garbage my daughter is going to have to endure in her lifetime. But there's not a damn thing she or I can do about it. 

And when you can't do anything about it, you might as well come to terms with the fact that you can control what you control and let the rest burn down.

And then look out at the stupid world and say... that's right...

The Microsoft Surface Duo: When Being Different Isn't Enough

You won’t see me doing product reviews very often, because I don’t really care about the bells and whistles that those reviews tend to focus on as buying points. I want a product that’s reliable and, if possible, different. That’s pretty much it.

I’ll start this review by lamenting how the vast majority of cell phones today are all design riffs on the same boring black rectangular slab. So when AT&T decided to shut off service to my Moto E4, I had a choice to make. What kind of phone should I get next, and is there anything that breaks out of the stylistic boredom of most phones today? Understand that I wasn’t looking for something different for the purpose of impressing anyone; to the contrary, I hate being like other people so much that I’ll go out of my way to not be like them if I can help it.

There’s also a practical consideration: I break my phones with alarming frequency, and I wanted something that didn’t leave the screen as naked and exposed as most phones do. That ruled out paying up for one of the nice new Google Pixel phones, which come with some impressive specs for a not-unreasonable price. 

You’d understand where I’m coming from if you’d ever seen my old E4. It looked like it’d been through a war zone, with dented edges and a spiderweb crack across about a third of the screen. But by God, it still worked, and I intended to ride that thing till it died.

Well, AT&T beat me to it, turning off my phone service, in October of 2021, because the company plans to end 3G support next February, four months in the future. Never mind that my phone wasn’t even 3G; it worked on our local 4G towers just fine, and the taskbar display always clearly showed 4G. I never even saw the phone register a 3G network. But the phone wasn’t on AT&T’s list of “approved” devices that it would allow to function on its network past February. So whether my phone was actually 4G-compliant or not was irrelevant.

So what else was out there that I could stomach? The first thing to catch my eye were the new-ish foldable phones, like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip, and the old Motorola Razr flip phone reimagined as a smartphone. I loved my old Razr dumbphone. I go all the way back to Nokia candy-bar phones, and before that a car phone in a bag that necessitated hanging a metal coil antenna on a rolled-up door window. So when the old Razr came along, I was thrilled with the form factor, that satisfying snap when you shut it, and the fact that my screen had a built-in protector.

But my research left me less than thrilled with the new foldable smartphones. That seam in the middle of the display just spelled trouble in my mind, and sure enough, I saw that lots of people reported cracks from repeated folding, and the cracks ended up blowing out their displays. Surely there must have been a way to make a phone with two separate screens that would butt up against each other when the device was opened, rather than trying to drape one display across a fold. For the four-digit prices the manufacturers were charging for these folding phones, this seemed like an unacceptable design flaw. And I won’t pay that much for a phone on principle, anyway.

Then I found the Microsoft Surface Duo. Now that was a nice-looking phone. It folded like the Galaxy and Razr phones, but it consisted of two separate screens joined by nice, strong metal hinges that let the screens swivel a full 360 degrees. You could situate the screens side by side and run a different app on each screen, or you could fold the phone all the way open, having only one screen face you – good for resting against your ear when taking a call. 

You can run one app on each screen (right, YouTube and Maps),
or you can stretch one app across both screens (left).

Or you could position the phone at pretty much any point in between. You could tent it, or you could set it up on its end like a book, or you could set one screen on a flat surface and position the other one for viewing, like a little baby laptop.

Tented and laptop-ish.

The problem, again, was the astronomical price. These things went for upwards of $1,400 when they first came out. I paid less than that for the laptop I use for work every day. Heck, it’s about 14 times what I paid for my old Moto E4.

But then I saw that the prices had fallen drastically since the Duo’s release. When I saw one for half price, and I’d just received a performance bonus from my client that would cover the cost, I decided to take the plunge.

And boy, was it a pretty little device. It was dazzlingly white instead of mind-numbingly black, with the iconic four-square Microsoft logo situated prominently front and center in an eye-catching reflective silver.

It was no less attractive when opened. Unlike the tall, skinny rectangles that most slab phones are, this thing had a 4:3 aspect ratio with one screen open, and a 3:2 when fully unfolded. Not too big, and not too small. Unfolded, it was nearly identical in its dimensions to my old Android tablet. 

Size comparison versus a Galaxy Tab A.

I’ve always preferred the size of tablets to that of phones, but obviously you can’t stuff a tablet in your pocket. Microsoft seemed to have solved that problem by basically making a tablet that folds down the middle and makes calls to boot! I was always envious of the European markets that seemed to have abundant options for buying nice, big phablets, but good old American corporate greed dictated that you could buy a tablet if you wanted more screen real estate, but the tablet couldn’t make calls. For that, you needed to buy a second device for your pocket. Idiocy. But again, Microsoft seemed to have addressed that gaping hole in the American market with the Surface Duo.

I say “seemed” because Microsoft really dropped the ball on this device. The company could have released something totally amazing, with the potential to redefine the smartphone market. But the thing is just way too glitchy.

For starters, touch responsiveness is poor. You’ll often have to press multiple times to get something to work, and hopefully you can succeed before you lose your patience and start angrily mashing your finger into the display. Not that I’d know anything about that. Call me crazy, but I expect an expensive phone to just work when I give it a command.

Second, things just lag, and sometimes they completely freeze. Apps won’t open or close, or the desired action will follow several seconds after you input the command. On top of that, you never know when, or even if, your display is going to flip from portrait to landscape when you turn the device. It’s a crapshoot.

Speaking of which, the back screen is supposed to go to sleep when you have the phone folded open. But it doesn’t always do that, and you’ll have to reopen the phone until it figures out which display you’re looking at. And then even when you get the back screen to go black, sometimes it’ll reactivate, and you won’t even know it until you’re trying to type something on your active screen and you can’t figure out why the keyboard is unresponsive or disappears. Then you flip the phone over and you realize your palm has been inadvertently interacting with the other screen.

Speaking of keyboards, I don’t like predictive text, and I couldn’t get it to turn off on the stock keyboard, no matter what I tried. Even when I rebooted the phone and went back to check that the switch was indeed turned off, I still got predictive text. The only solution was to download Gboard from the Play Store and make it my default.

One of the most perplexing things of all was the squashed display that the phone gives you for text and call alerts, and for dropdowns. When the screen is so big, why mash the notifications into an area smaller than what my old E4 served up?

There were lots of peculiarities like that. There’s one speaker, and it’s not great. There’s also just one mediocre 11-megapixel camera that doubles as front- and rear-facing, depending on which way you turn the phone.

Then there were the things I could live without but that probably proved a dealbreaker for others. One of the biggest drawbacks for a lot of people, I have no doubt, is that the phone shipped with an outdated chipset and came installed with Android 10, even though Android 11 had just recently been released. In addition, there’s no 5G capability, no NFC for touchless payments, and no option for wireless charging. For the price this phone originally retailed at, you’d expect those things to be a standard part of the package.

The things I didn’t like were the lack of a removable battery, no headphone jack, and no expandable storage options. I realize these “features” are becoming commonplace on phones nowadays, which is another reason I held on to my old E4 for as long as I could.

See, I understand that manufacturers don’t make phones for me. For example, I wanted a dual-SIM phone so I could have a main line for friends and another that could pick up the inevitable spam calls after I needed to give out a number on a form somewhere. But here again, American corporate greed won the day, as the phone providers didn’t want to sell phones on which consumers could possibly give part of their business to another company. Dual-SIM phones are easy to come by in Europe. Here, not so much.

I’m also still holding out for a device with massive internal memory, so that I can take my entire music library with me, in lossless form if I choose. But since most people seem content either handing their data off to someone else’s cloud or pulling song files they don't even own from an app’s library, I doubt I’ll ever find a handheld device with 1 or 2 TB of memory.

I also prefer a physical keyboard to a virtual one, but with the demise of BlackBerry, I’ve completely given up on that option. (Side note: Why do they call physical phone keyboards “QWERTY keyboards”? All keyboards are QWERTY keyboards, whether real or virtual.)

I’d go old school and just settle for a dumbphone, but I tried that with a Light Phone, and it was an unsatisfying solution. I like having a browser to look things up on the go. I like having maps and navigation. And I prefer full-keyboard texting to T9 tediousness. I like having a weather widget, too, though I could sacrifice that if I needed to. But I don’t use apps much, aside from a note-taking app where I’m always jotting down ideas. I’m just not a power user. I don’t use my phone as an entertainment device (though maybe I would if I had a phone with enough memory to stuff all my music on one), nor am I someone who sticks his face in his phone all day posting updates and selfies to social media. The most I’ll do is take the occasional picture when I see something interesting.

Since there’s no viable market for people like me, I don’t expect to ever find a phone that checks off all the boxes I want. So I’m content to settle for good enough, with a design that stands out from the stultifying conformity of the ubiquitous black slab being a nice bonus if I can find it.

But when one of the screens on my Surface Duo developed an aggressive green flicker after about two weeks of use, I couldn’t overlook its quirks and flaws anymore. I’m sending it back for a refund. It makes me sad, because I really like the form factor of this device. I love the size of the screens, and the fact that you can do two things at once on it, and the fact that you can position it pretty much any way you want. A de facto folding tablet that makes calls? That’s amazing. This thing held so much promise, and Microsoft just blew a golden opportunity.

So for me, I’ll be firing up an old Moto E5 Play that I had sitting around. I think I stopped using it when the speaker developed a really annoying rattle. But even with that defect, the thing is still more robust and reliable than a Surface Duo that cost far, far more. It actually has a headphone jack and a removable battery, and I can put up to 256 GB of extra memory in it. It’s not perfect, but at least I know I can rely on it to respond when I ask it to do something, and the display has held out for far, far longer than just two measly weeks.

My problem is that I tend to be an early adopter. I love finding things that challenge the boundaries and push the norms. Back when I still watched television, I had DirecTV when most people still had cable. I also bought a 5-inch Dell Streak, which was more or less the precursor to today's slabs, back in a time when everyone wanted tiny little phones. “You’re going to look stupid holding that massive brick up to your face,” people said — and now everyone is scooping up phones that make the old Streak look dinky, as manufacturers put out bigger and bigger 6- and 7-inch displays.

So I gambled on the Surface Duo, knowing that first-generation technology quite often comes with wrinkles that have to be ironed out in future iterations. But some technologies just fizzle out, regardless of the promise they hold. The Dell Streak was a great idea that was poorly executed, and I think the Surface Duo will end up being the same. The second generation of the Duo adds a better camera, a side display for viewing the time when the device is closed, and 5G and NFC capability. But I’m not convinced it’ll be enough to save the device.

I might try another first-gen Duo, in hopes that the green flicker on my device meant that I just got a dud. I really liked the phone, despite its obvious bugs. But for now, a rattling speaker on a boring $100 black-slab phone will just have to be good enough.