Prose

Thoughts from the editor

Poems

Selections from great poets

Reality is Real, Because God is “I AM” 

This week I offer some words from John Senior in response to a video by “Big Think,” which has over 5 million subscribers on YouTube.  Titled “Is Reality Real?”, the well-produced video featured scientists telling us that the world we sense physically is, well, not really the world.   

This is a scientific-sounding echo of what John Senior and others called “the perennial heresy,” the philosophical proposal that life isn’t real, which gives birth to all sorts of nihilism and deadly errors.  It also jives easily with Eastern religious explanations of the “nothingness” of God.  “Realism” is actually one of the philosophical foundations of Catholicism, because the Church continues to defend your ability as man to not just sense reality with a rational intellect but also arrive at a greater knowledge of the Creator through contact with creation.  Senior is an inspiration to S&S because he sees in the common man a common sanity, and that his life in the real world is a medicine for the absurdities in academia and false religions:  

Anyone in his right mind can see that all of this around us and including us is not sufficient reason for its own existence.  Either there is an ultimate existent (which we call God) who is sufficient reason for existence or there is no reason for the existence of anything – which is radical absurdity and radical absurdity is not a reasonable alternative.   

So, how do we argue against the anti-realism that leads to the denial of God, meaning, and reality itself?  We don’t argue.  The proposal isn’t worth the time.  Instead, turn off the screen and go into reality with someone you love, as Senior recommends to parents:  

The first necessity is getting ourselves and our children into ‘naked’ contact with the world God made, not just in school as study but habitually in our whole way of life.  

Want more?  Consider Seniors books The Death of Christian Culture or The Restoration of Christian Culture.  They’re not easy or light-hearted reads, so maybe not for everyone.  But they are unmatched in their diagnosis and prescriptions of our modern sickness.  

The Village Blacksmith

Under a spreading chestnut-tree

     ⁠The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

     With large and sinewy hands,

And the muscles of his brawny arms

     Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long;

     His face is like the tan;

His brow is wet with honest sweat,

     He earns whate'er he can,

And looks the whole world in the face,

     For he owes not any man.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,

     You can hear his bellows blow;

You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,

     With measured beat and slow,

Like a sexton ringing the village bell,

     When the evening sun is low.

And children coming home from school

     Look in at the open door;

They love to see the flaming forge,

     And hear the bellows roar,

And catch the burning sparks that fly

     Like chaff from a threshing-floor.

He goes on Sunday to the church,

     And sits among his boys;

He hears the parson pray and preach,

     He hears his daughter's voice

Singing in the village choir,

     And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like her mother's voice

     Singing in Paradise!

He needs must think of her once more,

     How in the grave she lies;

And with his hard, rough hand he wipes

     A tear out of his eyes.

Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,

     Onward through life he goes;

Each morning sees some task begin,

     Each evening sees it close;

Something attempted, something done,

     Has earned a night's repose.

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,

     For the lesson thou hast taught!

Thus at the flaming forge of life

     Our fortunes must be wrought;

Thus on its sounding anvil shaped

     Each burning deed and thought.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

https://poets.org/poem/village-blacksmith