Is This the “Real World”?

“Get to a safe place.” That’s what my guardian angel said. Now, I know better than to argue with my guardian angel. Even so, I was a bit confused. I thought I had already relocated to a safe place, an opportunity afforded to me by Divine Providence through the intercession of St. Romuald. Granted, it wasn’t the “Fortress of Solitude” I had read about as a boy (and envied) in Superman comics, but the location afforded near solitude, mostly quiet, and the freedom to pray, read, and write. I can go for weeks without reaching for my car keys. On a typical day, I don’t need to speak more than a few sentences to another human being. It’s an introvert’s dream come true!

After decades of living as if I were an extrovert (in the classroom, in the pulpit, at the podium, serving in the missions), I am finally living as the introvert God made me to be. I am not living in a cloister or in full seclusion as a hermit — I am a Jesuit, after all — yet I am happily living more ad intra than ad extra. I am trying to live (de facto if not de jure) a “vocation of withdrawal,” a formulation borrowed from Ann K. Warren, author of Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (1985).

The academic in me wants to interject some ad hoc terminology to help these ruminations along. The first is the distinction between IN-HERE and OUT-THERE, the weightiness of which I began to appreciate thanks to Carmelite nuns, who are the most “sequestered” of all female monastics in Catholicism. Years ago, I was visiting such a nun. Between us stood a medieval-style prison grill and a black curtain. She spoke of the fact that I was living OUT-THERE. No ink on paper could communicate the intensity of the mixture of horror, revulsion, and pity Sister had infused into the term. In her world, which is to say the cloistered monastery, she was blessed to be IN-HERE and was very glad not to have to live OUT-THERE. From my point of view, however, she was living IN-THERE, and I was living OUT-HERE — and she was better off. By far.

Another relevant distinction is between “the Real World” and “the Realm of Common Experience.” Whenever I taught an introductory course in philosophy, some freshman would invariably interrupt my lecture to share what he was sure was a sagacious observation. Drawing upon all the erudition and life experience his 18 years could afford him, he’d jerk a thumb to the classroom window and say, “Well, you know, Father, OUT-THERE, in the Real World….” That’s where I’d interrupt him. “No! The term ‘the Real World’ is an honorific. We reserve it for what we do in this classroom, where we treat of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. What you’re pointing to — that’s the Realm of Common Experience. That’s the theater of illusion, seduction, and addiction. Enter the Real World, IN-HERE, so that you can dispel the unreality of the Realm of Common Experience, OUT-THERE.”

In other words, I had already found, via academia, the IN-HERE/OUT-THERE and the OUT-HERE/IN-THERE dichotomy Sister had noted in the Carmelite cloister. Now, no longer an academic (but, I hope, a scholar) and not really a hermit (but still a religious and a priest), I have a profound and lively respect for the IN/OUT and HERE/THERE schema.

In prayer, reading, and writing, in my newfound IN-HERE, I have deeper access to the Real World, to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. I have gladly embraced my new “vocation of withdrawal.” I want to keep myself IN-HERE, in the Real World, and away from OUT-THERE, the Realm of Common Experience.

All of which brings me back to the monition from my guardian angel: “Get to a safe place.” I had to leave my place of seclusion because workers were scheduled to fell a dead tree next to my window. The chainsaws and woodchippers would run nonstop, disrupting my routine of prayer, reading, and writing. The trunk of the tree is at least seven stories tall. If there is any kind of mishap, the trunk could destroy the chapel and kill me. So, reluctantly, I reversed the steps of my withdrawal and went back to the Realm of Common Experience, OUT-THERE.

It so happened that I needed a haircut, so I decided to entrust my fate to the GPS and find a barbershop — not “salon,” a barbershop. There is — or, at least, there was — a recognizable culture about a barbershop. The barber would have a simple name like Gene, Joe, or Ralph. There’d be old photos on the wall, usually a mix of family photos, sports teams, race cars, and advertisements for hair products like Wild Root. Waiting customers would sit side by side in narrow chairs. In front of them would be a low table, mounded over with old magazines — Sports Illustrated, of course; maybe GQ, if Joe’s son had joined the business; and People, courtesy of Joe’s wife. The latter was meant to keep entertained the mother who brought her young sons to Joe’s shop.

The barbershop I found that day was manifestly old school. The faded paint had been there long enough to prompt me to muse, “If only these walls could talk.” Nonetheless, the barber — let’s call him Gus — had made some concessions, or at least some accommodations, to the Zeitgeist. Gone was the low table laden with magazines. Instead, taped on the mirror was an index card spelling out the name and password of the shop’s Wi-Fi network. All the men waiting there seemed to be at least as old as I, and I’m in my early 60s. Each was hunched over his phone, thumbs waving and gliding as deftly as a teen’s in a high school study hall. I quietly asserted (at least to my own satisfaction) my cognitive and moral superiority by taking out a small notebook and a fountain pen from my coat pocket and documenting my Weltschmerz.

The only truly young person in the shop was a boy of 11 or 12. He was getting his hair cut by the younger of the two barbers, the arms of whom were heavily tattooed. He had scissors in one hand, a phone in the other. Occasionally, he’d put the phone down and give his full attention to the boy in the chair. But he’d always take up the phone again, one-handed, using his thumb to control the screen, his eyes darting between the phone and the boy.

“What’s that boy thinking right now?” I wondered. What if I asked him, “Hey, what do you make of all the old men — except me! — locked into their phones? How about the guy cutting your hair with one hand and manipulating his phone with the other? Does this seem normal to you? Is this the Real World?”

Of course, I didn’t ask him. And I’m not sure I would have gotten an answer. The boy seemed not engaged with his surroundings. He didn’t move or speak. His eyes were open but not focused. He seemed not present to what was going on around him. Perhaps that was for the best. Could he really have been edified to see a line of old men mesmerized by electronic devices? But maybe I’m asking the wrong question.

Smartphones were ubiquitous before this kid was born. He might think it’s unexceptional and unobjectionable for a person, even an older person, to be captivated by a device at every opportunity. But what about the old men in the shop? None of us geezers grew up like that. Maybe I should have asked those greybeards, “When did you get hooked? And did you notice the kid in the chair? What does he think about what you guys are doing? Ever wonder about that?”

After the boy left, I took note of the two large TV screens in the shop. One was mounted over the wall of mirrors, the other behind the row of waiting customers. Both were tuned into the same streaming service, showing a dramatic series I’d never heard of. Before each episode began, the screen noted (warned? promised?) PROFANITY. NUDITY. SEX. VIOLENCE. GORE…and…SMOKING.

Once I was shorn by the senior barber (who, for the record, did use both hands while cutting my hair and trimming my beard), I went to a nearby coffeeshop to have a snack and read for a bit. That this was a Friday in Lent limited my options. That this was simply a Friday nearly guaranteed my disappointment.

While waiting for my order, my eyes were drawn to a carefully decorated illustration on a chalkboard behind the counter. Clearly, someone had put serious time and effort into this artwork. There was such a bright array of flower baskets in the illustration that, at first, I thought it must be an advertisement for some Easter-related activity. Then, amid the flowers and the elaborate lettering, I descried the words PROTECT TRANS JOY.

I picked up my order and sat at a small table. The technopop blaring overhead wasn’t conducive to making progress in Étienne Gilson’s Elements of Christian Philosophy, so I finished my coffee and bagel and left.

Where to next? I typed “library” into the GPS. What better place to read and write? I don’t know what I was expecting of the library, but surely not a Gothic structure nestled among ivy-covered buildings on a charming New England college campus. Yet, was it unreasonable to expect the building to resemble some of the connotations of the word library? Alas, the building was a squat and featureless rectangle. To call it Brutalist or Bauhaus would be to accord it too much character. It was just an enclosed space. Nothing more.

No, that’s not quite right. It wasn’t just an enclosed space. It was a disappointment — and not due to the absence of charm or character. It suffered privations. Qualities and features that should be there qua library were nowhere to be found. It looked like a cross between a Soviet Siberian daycare center and a minimum-security prison that contained books as an afterthought. It looked like a place where unwanted people could be discarded or at least stored for a while.

A quick scan of the bulletin board outside the front door was illuminating. There were duplicate ads for the monthly support-group meetings for “Parents Navigating the Gender Journey Together.” There were a variety of ads offering to support “Mental Wellness for Older Adults.” The most vivid of these included an exhortation to JUMP BACK INTO LIFE! The accompanying illustration showed a windblown elderly woman happily freefalling in a sky dominated by a rainbow-colored cloud. She was without a parachute. This would be her last jump back into “life.”

I looked in the window and decided not to enter the building. Scattered throughout were very young and very old people sitting at low tables. All were hunched over electronic devices. No one was reading a book. No one was writing. There was nary a piece of paper among them. I just couldn’t bring myself to enter. This whole arrangement seemed to betray the very notion of a “library.”

Where to now? It just so happened that the library abutted a crowded parking lot in front of a large shopping mall. Maybe I could walk off some angst, distract myself with some window shopping, or find an interesting little snack. Against my better judgment, I entered.

I grew up in the Golden Age of Shopping Malls in the 1970s and 1980s. Malls were then Peak Capitalism’s ideal “third space.” You could walk, socialize, browse, eat, watch a movie, spend money — all in a venue offering constantly changing variety. You could never be bored at a mall. And mall life made it easy — at least for a while — to forget about everything else.

I thought back on those days. There would be swarms of teens. Recent retirees would don their expensive jogging suits and “power walk” around the mall, especially on weekday mornings, while the kids were in school. On this day, however, I saw none of what I recalled from my younger days as a shopping-mall denizen. First, I was surprised by how empty it was. I could have whipped through the mall on roller skates and not have worried about hitting anyone.

I was also surprised by how many shops were shuttered or vacant. The big outlets such as JC Penney and Target were still open. Very few shops not part of a chain were doing business that day. Yet the mall still acted as if it has a future — at least a near-term future. For example, although Easter was still weeks away, there were ads for local Easter events. Among them, a notice for a nearby Easter Egg Hunt. (To be precise: Busqueda de huevos de Pascua.) Further proof that this is not the world I grew up in was the large colorful poster inviting families to “Family Yoga Night with the Easter Bunny.”

I decided to get something to drink and then sit down to collect my thoughts. I went to one of those chain outlets that offers fruit-based juices, smoothies, and the like. In my day, the person behind the counter would be a teen working to save money for a big purchase of some kind, say, a stereo or a car. Today, sporting the same garish uniform I remember seeing in my adolescence, was a woman in her late 30s. She looked tired, worn, and miserable. She had frazzled, unkempt hair, and the circles under her eyes indicated insomnia. The irony was not lost on me that the woman selling me a drink that promised to improve my health and vitality seemed to be lacking those very qualities. I’m not a mind-reader, but it wasn’t difficult to conclude that she was not “living the dream.” I took the Blue Frosted Something-or-Other from the poor woman — which she had made with one hand, while scrolling on her phone with the other — and looked for a place to sit down.

As empty as the mall was, every chair or couch was occupied. And each of the occupants, from the very young to the very old — every single one of them — was hunched over an electronic device.

Almost enough time had passed for me to return home safely, with the tree taken down and the workmen and their roaring machines departed. But not just yet. I decided to try my luck at a promising coffeeshop near my home. It had first caught my eye when I noticed a sticker on the front window depicting handcuffs and captioned MAKE CRIME ILLEGAL AGAIN. In my subsequent visits, I found the coffee and food to be good, and the service quick. Of at least equal importance was the ambient noise level. The overhead music was not an affront to the senses and sensibilities, either in volume or in content. The clientele was not overly loud, but sometimes there were too many of them. Seating is very limited. Mirabile dictu — this day I found a table and a chair. There was room for me, my journal, and my pens.

I felt a pressing need (or was it a desire?) to write down and reflect on what had happened during my odyssey. But why? Toward what end? I wrote down a fair bit of a narration of the events but not much in the way of reflection. Now that a few days have passed, I have more to say about what I saw, what it means, and what might be done next.

It does not require a special kind of perspicacity to note that the Realm of Common Experience is sick and sickening. We live in a fallen world, after all. Even so, those powers and principalities that are so very anti-human (and, therefore, anti-Christ) are arrayed against us with tools and efficiencies unimaginable even a generation ago. Consider that C.S. Lewis warned about the burgeoning failure of public education before and during the Second World War. Why Johnny Can’t Read was published in 1955. Why Johnny Still Can’t Read was published a generation later. Along the way, a string of Why Johnny Can’t books documented his inability to add, tell right from wrong, and — my personal favorite — preach. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business came out in 1985, well before the advent of the commercial Internet. Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses was published in 2005. The list seems endless. (I tell myself that though I find this literature fascinating, I am not guilty of the sin of morose delectation.) I don’t think I am here merely adding to the long litany of lament.

Consider this from Alan Jacobs: “I believe we keep on re-diagnosing, and describing the same diagnosis in slightly different terms, because we don’t know what to do. Some people, of course, know what to do: they opt out. And that’s why we don’t hear from them: we remain in the places that they’ve opted out of…. We should, I think, be alarmed that our condition was properly and thoroughly diagnosed by a series of important thinkers half-a-century ago — and yet our malady has only progressed.”

Shouldn’t Christians know what to do? At least some of us? Is there no other choice but to hold on for dear life and hope Our Lord returns sooner rather than later?

Let’s turn again to Jacobs. In a different context, yet addressing the same theme, he wrote, “A total escape from dopamine culture and surveillance capitalism probably isn’t possible for any but the most radically countercultural of us. Yet, equally, abject submission isn’t inevitable. It turns out that resistance isn’t futile after all.”

Jacobs made this observation while discussing his honor students at the school where he was teaching as of 2024. They had apparently not succumbed to the illusions, seductions, and addictions prevalent in the Realm of Common Experience. What they all had in common was that prior to university they had been enrolled in classical Christian charter schools. From that fact we may surmise that they (and likely their teachers, peers, and parents) had Christian faith. And read good books. A lot of them. Including the Bible. That these students had serious habits of faith and reading is the first consideration to keep in mind as we respond to the question, “But what do we do now?”

Now consider this from one of my favorite curmudgeons, Nicolás Gómez Dávila: “The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld within the world.”

That the Church should not conform herself to the world is a monition as old as the New Testament (cf. Rom. 12:2). Perhaps the claim that the Church’s function is not “to adapt the world to Christianity” comes as a surprise. After all, St. Paul speaks of restoring all things in Christ (cf. Eph. 1:10), which became the motto of Pope St. Pius X, the great champion against Modernism: Instaurare omnia in Christo. How can these two saints be reconciled to Dávila?

Here’s one approach: Yes, of course, God’s purposes for creation are not fulfilled unless and until such a restoration is complete. That completion, that consummation is achieved by Christ Himself as He fully and finally expresses His sovereignty over all creation. That will be His work and His victory.

So understood, what is the proper work of the Church in terms of the here and now? Dávila said the Church must “maintain a counterworld within the world.” I take that to mean the function of the Church is to disciple individuals — as well as communities of many sizes — as pockets of resistance to the world, where “the world” is understood as those areas of creation still in rebellion against the Creator. The Church must form individuals and communities as a “sign of contradiction” (Lk. 2:34). They must be witnesses to the truth that there is another way to live, a way that is not impossible, and the fallen world’s way of proceeding is not the only way.

Just as the world is constituted by processes, structures, commonplaces, and commitments, so too is the Christian counterworld, which includes but is not limited to Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the lives of the saints.

So, now it’s our turn to form, live in, sustain, and hand on a counterworld (or counterworlds) within the world. What might that look like? I think we would do well to heed the advice of St. John Climacus, a seventh-century monk and abbot, who urged, “Flee, be silent, and pray always.” Let’s address his advice in reverse order.

– Pray always. So says Our Lord (Lk. 18:1). Not “Pray more” or “Pray better” but “Pray always.” In our time, that seems impossible, doesn’t it? Most Christians in the contemporary West can’t get themselves to a church for an hour on Sundays. How can they be expected to pray always? I answer that it is, in fact, possible, desirable, and necessary, if we understand the distinction between “prayer time” and a “prayer life.” The former may be understood as a regularly scheduled period of prayer — Sunday Mass, a Holy Hour, Vespers, etc. The latter may be understood in terms of the work The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, in which he maintains that a constant awareness of the presence of God may be cultivated, such that even mundane tasks can become acts of devotion.

– Be silent. This is a particular challenge in our age of endless distraction. Let’s recall the categories of IN/OUT, HERE/THERE. Even if you find yourself OUT-THERE in the worldliness of the world in rebellion against God, there is yet an IN-HERE in the sanctuary within your soul. There is in each person an innermost citadel accessible only to that person and to God. You can and should meet Him there, from time to time, especially when undergoing temptation or torment. Christian literature on this topic is vast. I recommend He Leadeth Me by Walter Ciszek, S.J.

– Flee. This might be the hardest for those living in the world. Not everyone can go “off the grid.” Not every devout soul can or should become a hermit. St. John Vianney’s repeated requests for a life of seclusion were always denied, yet he did very great good in parish life and is now the patron saint of parish priests.

Many who know well the need for a counterworld must remain in the world, to earn a living and feed their families. A retired academic desiring a “vocation of withdrawal” may have to go to the city hospital for dialysis three days per week. How can he flee, even if he wants to?

Again, the categories of IN/OUT, HERE/THERE can help us. Christians must form intentional communities, forming an IN-HERE against the pervasive and intrusive OUT-THERE. It’s not enough to acknowledge that we happen to sit next to each other in the same pew on some Sundays. We must come together to share Bible study on Thursdays, and then go to Mass together on Sundays and discuss the homily afterward. We must exchange and discuss books, share meals and recipes, form a homeschool co-op, play touch football, pray the Rosary, plant a common garden, and celebrate birthdays, feast days, and anniversaries together. We must form a common IN-HERE against the OUT-THERE, especially if we can’t flee to the mountain or island of our dreams.

OUT-THERE, or the Realm of Common Experience, is no friend of the Real World of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. It is, in fact, opposed to it. The Real World is creation as it is founded, being sustained, and being perfected by Christ. Anchored in the Real World, at least some of us, at least some of the time, should go OUT-THERE, for the sake of the lost who know they are lost and don’t know where to go.

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