7 Takes on the Eve of Holy Week

My Chaotic House, Rebounding Church Attendance, Lily Philips, Substack Reels, #74 Rising, On Live Streaming, The Desecration of Aslan and the Redemption of the World, Read the Comment

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It’s Friday, I think. It doesn’t really matter because next week is Holy Week, and basically, I’m behind. Or maybe it’s just the usual.

one

One of my children asked me if our house was a wreck when they were all little. No, I said, it was actually pretty under control. Though you would never know it now, I’m a bit of a perfectionist, or at least I was. About three-thirty every afternoon, I made everyone run around and clean up before Word Girl. That was back in the day when we still ate supper all together. The kids would help with dishes and then we’d all go to bed. Every six weeks, I’d take a week off from school to clean the whole house from top to bottom.

The child who asked me this gazed around at the wreckage of our lives and asked, “What happened?” We have laundry hung everywhere, there are books all over the floor, Portia, the round, fluffy, vicious puppy, has shredded loo paper and strewn it everywhere, there are three or four backpacks flung down, and my kitchen is a wreck.

Well, for one, I stopped being general housekeeper/homeschooler and started writing articles, gardening, and just trying to stay ahead of the laundry. For another, I can’t control the movements of eight grown people the way I could six little ones and one vaguely absent-minded preacher. And not being in control means I have basically given up. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but I don’t know what else I would do. It’s called reality.

two

I spent much of the week slowly reading that long Bible Society report about the uptick in church attendance in the UK. I think you have to put your email in to get the full report but it’s worth it if you’re into that sort of thing. You can see some of the graphs on Ryan Burge’s X page also.

The big shock, of course, is that there are more young Catholics in the UK than there are young Anglicans. Actually, I’m not particularly shocked. Sad, yes, but resigned. If you take something lovely and throw it away on purpose, what do you expect?

At the same time I read this article on the Free Press about how the Hallow App is literally saving people. I think the thing none of us really expected was that God is real. Just because one generation completely apostasizes doesn’t mean their children won’t find their way back. In fact, they’ll believe in God even harder just out of rebellion.

three

Swinging wildly in the other direction, here is a video interview of Lily Philips in which she is asked about the age she was exposed to p*rnography—11, she was 11 years old. The interviewer asks if that shaped her in any way. Lily isn’t sure, but eventually says that she has never known life without it, so what would you expect? I hope, as the world re-Christianizes, that it will become unthinkable for anyone to view or produce that stuff. And I also hope the AI onlyfans thing goes straight back into the pit of hell where it belongs.

The thing is, unless the grid goes irrevocably down, we can’t get back to the world before ubiquitous and unfettered access to that awful content. We’ve been able to solve a lot of the inconveniences of being human, but sin isn’t one of them. Technical fixes aren’t what’s required. There would need to be enough people, all together, suddenly seeing something for what it really is. This can happen, of course, it has on occasion in human history, but it takes years and years of laboring in obscurity, heaps of prayer, persistent hope, and over all the grace of God. I have heard people say they hope “abortion becomes unthinkable.” I think at the same time, because the two so often hideously go together, p*rn would also need to become unthinkable.

four

This past week, noodling around the Substack app, I passed by several strange meta-like conversations about Substack itself. First of all, apparently Substack is trying to force us all to have Reels. I can’t imagine why they’re doing this, except that nothing is allowed to remain as it is. No one, as far as I can tell, is glad about this circumstance.

The second thing I saw was someone coming over and saying, in effect, ‘This place is so dumb and unsustainable. Where are all the advertisments? I can’t be expected to pay money to read all the content I desire.’ To which a lot of people responded with various funny comments and emojis.

And the thing that I thought was, I’m sick of advertising and also being the product that’s being sold. I want to be able to fix a value on something and pay for it like a normal person. I am a paid subscriber to several substacks that I enjoy reading—some small, some large—and I appreciate being able to come in at a low level and yet support someone and get something I value. It’s like how, in the olden days, you could walk up to a kiosk and buy a newspaper and magazine for fifty cents and read it and feel happy. But now, if you want to buy a newspaper or magazine, it costs you the price of seven overpriced cups of coffee. We’ve always, as the human family, wanted to read stuff for a little bit of money but not the moon.

Please, dear jinns of the Substack, don’t wreck it for us, I beg you.

five

Speaking of being awesome, Substack told me that I’m #74 Rising in Culture. I’m not in the top 100 Bestsellers in the Culture category… yet, but I’m rising. This must be God’s vindication of me over all mine enemies. Just kidding, I don’t have enemies, especially not on the eve of Holy Week.

six

Also, not to keep gabbing on about Substack, but I began, as Mz. Frazzled says, to have “big feelings,” about various conversations taking place about the relative merits of the ability to “go live” as I have been doing for the last couple of months. We don’t need this garbage, said some, we are people of the written word. To which a lot of people said, with a soupcon of guilt, yes of course.

Honestly, I’m not sure what I think about it. A few months in and I don’t like seeing myself on the camera, but I do like seeing your names and comments as they go by. After all, Matt and I have been “podcasters” of the old-fashioned variety, ye olde iPhone propped up, talking away about nothing for years and years. This is a little less focused because those who “hop on” can get a word in. For me, it’s more fun and interesting. Though, afterward, it is horrifying to scroll through the clipped-out reels to see if any of them can go on Instagram, another platform which I absolutely do not understand on any level.

Of course, it would be so much nicer if we could all just assemble in a Parisian cafe and talk to each other like normal people, but that’s not how things have gone and I am kind of at the point where I feel ok about using the unrighteous mammon of technology to make for myself friends in heaven where there will be no screens, but only the golden light of the Son, and plenty of days and years to sit around catching up.

seven

I’m going to get ahead of all the controversy and say that I’m not going to watch the new Narnia effort if Meryl Streep is the voice of Aslan. Unless someone pays me upwards of like ten thousand dollars, then I might think about it. And since no one is going to do that, you can just all rest in the knowledge that I won’t be watching it. It’s one thing to endure Megan Markle and Snow White and read lots of irritating books. It’s entirely another to watch something sacred-adjacent be desecrated. I think we’re all very familiar with that sensation, since it happens all the time. Only in this case, I can choose not to click and so I’m going to exercise that choice.

Instead, I’m going to watch the video posted below several times over the weekend as I prepare myself to consider again, the Passion of our Lord. For newer readers of this blog, the picture on this video was snapped on the last day in our old church as we were saying goodbye to it. It is now a mosque, as most of you know. Some person unknown to us happened upon the photograph online and paired it with this piece of music—you’ll see if you go read the comments. And this is why none of us need despair over the ugliness and unbelief in the world, for God arranges the smallest details of our redemption and his goodness endures forever:

Read the Comments below the line! See you on Sunday!