http://www.sensusdivinitatis.com Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:05:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.1 en hourly 1 http://www.sensusdivinitatis.com/2009/06/15/a-catharsis/ http://www.sensusdivinitatis.com/2009/06/15/a-catharsis/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:00:26 +0000 Ben http://www.sensusdivinitatis.com/?p=119 It is not life’s busyness that eats the life out of the soul, if by “busyness” one means simply having a lot to do. To be human is to have a lot to do. What wears down the inner life is the near-impossibility of sustained concentration on any one thing in a world in which everything under the sun (or at least a bewilderingly large portion thereof) is unrelentingly, rapidly, even simultaneously presented to the senses with demand for some kind of response (even where no response is expected). It is the fragmentation of mind that accompanies unlimited access to all things. It is, moreover, the barrenness that results when one’s most significant contact, at least quantitatively, is with virtual reality, insulated from the solid pleasures and stubborn challenges of pre-virtual reality: back porch conversation, rainstorms, weeds, machinery parts, street beggars, and handheld musical instruments. It is the lethargy, the listlessness, which strangely breeds when everything is instant (or trying to be), when one has forgotten how to be deliberate, and to write in pencil. It is not life’s busyness that eats the life out of the soul; it is the acid of catered sovereignty, of dwindling finitude. Wretched souls! who shall deliver us from it?

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