Episoder
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First, credit to Paul Kingsnorth and Mary Harrington for the topic. They are a wellspring of thought-provoking inspiration.
Now… The great post-Enlightenment revolution that promised to unshackle the mind from superstition and lead us into an age of reason has, in its end, given us a world gripped by its own decadence. We've spent centuries in a brave, frenetic race to divorce ourselves from a truth deeper than the mind's ability to comprehend, all the while building false towers of science and technology in our bid for ultimate control. The moment of "Enlightenment" became the moment when everything was atomized and reduced to measure, to numbers, to a dull, materialistic existence that only ever seemed to lead to greater alienation.
And yet, something is quietly, even powerfully, shifting in the modern psyche— something ancient, something true— quietly rising from beneath the hushed noise of the last few centuries of materialism. This great experiment, built on the Cartesian delusion that we can break the world down to parts, and rule it, has come undone. The fruit is rotten, and we are tasting it. In the places where God’s Spirit once spoke boldly, now we hear only hollow claims of progress, identity politics, and the fractured whims of individual will.
It is a decadence wrapped in high-minded idealism, filled with the weight of ideological contradictions, and riddled with deep uncertainty about the value of life itself. What does it mean to be alive, to breathe, to be rooted in the soil of a tradition older than our years? The materialist vision cannot answer this. It can only ask what we measure, what is efficient, what is quantifiable. The invisible world—the reality we once understood through myth, symbol, and holy ritual—is nowhere to be found. So what happens when we become too hollow and thin for the mind to live within? What happens when we’ve spent so long pushing all that cannot be captured and boxed away with our devices that we begin to lose the thread of meaning? We fall back into that original quiet.
The grand boast of materialism and its undergirding ideology of reason—that things can be measured, controlled, quantified—has fallen short. We see it on every front: in our politics, in our so-called “progress,” in the increasing unhappiness in even the richest corners of the world. Technology, once hailed as the liberator of mankind, has enslaved us— tricked us into thinking that convenience and speed will fulfill our deepest needs. It hasn’t.
The moment we thought we could measure everything is the moment we forgot to measure the things that truly matter: the things which can’t be touched, counted, or digitized. The things which seem absent, yet are alive—beauty, grace, spirit, and the truth that reality is filled with breath and meaning. There is more to the world than the observable, more than the definable. We've become trapped by a glass box, in which we try to describe a world we don’t truly know. We’ve severed the connections to what keeps us bound to the earth, to the sky, and to each other, yet, it is these very connections that once gave meaning and direction to all things.
Now, as the material world itself crumbles, we're awakening, though perhaps still blindfolded, to the return of the enchanted, the inspirited. What is spirituality if not this spirit—the anima of the world—that still beckons from the depths of every sacred moment and still cries for our awakening? There is nothing more real than this reality which encircles us but which we cannot measure.
Make no mistake, we are entering a second Reformation, one far deeper than the last. This Reformation will not only sweep away the dead husks of a religious world corrupted by doctrine and political authority; it will strip us of the hardened, synthetic shells of meaning we have so skillfully manufactured through modernity’s broken lens. This coming return is not a blind return to the old ways for the sake of nostalgia or tradition but a return to the living essence of the world itself. It is a return to the truth that things do indeed have a nature— a depth beyond appearance, a truth that reaches far beyond the shiny falseness we’ve pursued so recklessly in recent centuries.
Yes, nature speaks to us; it speaks without tongue but with thrum. There is a steady whisper carried on the wind, on the waves, in the forest’s hushed prayer— an enchantment buried within the hills and riverbeds, in the old myths of creation and destruction, woven through our ancestors' rituals and belief. It hums through us still, even as we have dismissed it for ages. And in time, just like the land’s reclamation after a long drought, so too will this truth reclaim what it never lost, never relinquished: its vitality.
This spiritual truth is no abstraction, but an ancient reality— a reality that calls us back to connection. It stands directly against the fragmented, isolated subjectivity we’ve deluded ourselves with. True liberty lies in participation— not in self-will, but in participating with creation, with the divine, and yes— with the community of beings that stretch from the rooted earth to the high heavens.
And at the crossroads where this battle is fought, we, who are bound together under the vast canopy of all-encompassing truth, must hold firm to a belief older than reason itself. A belief in the rootedness of the world’s soul, in its holy consistency even when everything is shaken. For the war between materialism and the spiritual reality of things is a great one— but in the end, it is not we who will make the final blow.
Here, beneath the weight of this upheaval, something is beginning to stir in us. Those whose hearts have long been scattered in search of meaning, lost amidst the vain promises of secular ideologies and blind constructions of the world, are awakening. And when the material system finally meets its end— as it surely must— we shall rise, like the returning spring, to breathe once again in a world both real and divine, where nothing is lost to us, and nothing is ever wasted. And as we rise again from the ash of this failed revolution, the chains of the modern world shall fall from us, undone by the very power they tried to dismiss.
In this second Reformation, we shall live, with eyes wide open to the light of what we were never meant to forget: That there is something more— much more— than what we see. And in that understanding, we shall begin to measure not by counting or dividing, but by receiving and participating. And so the Age of Enchantment shall return— and this time it will endure. —D.
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Steel, Cloth & Waging the Hidden War
I saw a read a missive on Substack recently by Matthew Herman Hudson that critiqued the claim that Christianity needs “less passive monks and more active knights.”
To think the monk’s labor is passive, a withdrawal from the struggle that defines this world, is to see with dim sight and hear with a stopped ear. Such a view shrinks the spiritual into a shallow mirror of the material. For even at the surface—the realm of flesh, stone, and letters—monks have been the lifeblood of the church since the days of Constantine. Their hands copied the scriptures, built the churches, tilled the land, and served the sick. Their words taught reformers, kings, and common folk. They crafted counterweights to pride and sloth, not in lofty disdain but in painful and deliberate denial of the very excess that tempts every human soul.
And beyond this visible realm, their prayers, chants, and unbroken vigils batter the gates of heaven. Who among us, walking through modern light and noise, even fathoms what such prayers hold back or call forth? To imagine monastic work as lesser, as idle musings beside the knight’s charge into battle, is to misunderstand both knight and monk. Both are bound to a fight, but one’s battleground may be inward and the other outward. The monk guards the foundations of the world as the knight wields his sword for its survival.
This misunderstanding, I suspect, comes from an itch born of modernity. The world, skeptical and blunt, distrusts the unseen. Machines hum; steel cuts; the airwaves tell stories of heroes whose weapons clatter in the din of war. The subtle weapons, the fasting, the kneeling, the holy words whispered in silence, appear useless. The hero of the world must spill blood to prove his worth.
But have we grown so blind to old truths? The Scriptures speak plainly of the contest in heaven, of the war not against flesh and bone but against rulers, powers, and dominions unseen. Christ Himself withdrew to deserts, mountain tops, and gardens, not to shirk His call but to strengthen His heart for the final sacrifice. Did He not fast for forty days, battered by Satan’s temptations, standing firm as the Adam who would not fall? And what of Paul, whose words on the “full armor of God” still rattle through the Christian soul? Truth girds the waist, righteousness shields the heart, and the sword, sharper than any iron blade, is the Word that cuts clean through falsehood.
The fight we call “spiritual” is as bitter and unrelenting as the clash of armies, and if anything, its weapons bite deeper. Knights wield steel to cut down men; monks take up the cross to mortify the self. Do not mistake mortification for weakness—it takes far greater strength to defeat oneself than to kill a foe. And here, within this daily death, lies the heart of the monk’s work. For in dying to pride, lust, and every grasping passion, the monk undermines the kingdom of hell.
Even the ancients knew the gravity of this unseen fight. Long before Christ spoke in Judea, pagans grasped after heavenly hierarchies. The Norse sagas spoke of Asgard and Jotunheim, a layered cosmos bound by struggle. The Greeks warred their gods in stars and clouds; the Hebrews placed thrones, dominions, and seraphim at the peak of creation. And when the Son of Man walked the earth, He did not abolish such truths but fulfilled and revealed them. In His name, Gabriel still delivers messages to the lowly, and Michael still hews down the prince of Persia.
This cosmos—full and flaming with meaning—is as far from our machine-built wastelands as heaven is from hell. The rise of secular power has not silenced the fight but drowned it in noise. Modern warfare no longer follows battle cries but clicks and transactions. Souls are not struck down in combat; they erode under streams of temptation, thin and ceaseless. Bread is discarded; circuses now shine on screens. The world whispers the lie that this life’s struggles—our afflictions, temptations, and triumphs—are without weight, part of a meaningless drift.
But the church, bound to her Bridegroom, stands against this drift. Her steeples, which once towered above every town, do not symbolize pride. They mark the upward pull of belief, the meeting point of earthly toil and heaven’s calling. Every sacrament is an act of defiance—a claim that water holds rebirth, bread and wine turn flesh and blood, and words have power when spoken by authority. Each stained window, chalice, and vestment serves as a battlefield where meaning is reclaimed from chaos.
Knights, monks, saints—each took their stand in different ways. In times of barbarian invasion, it was the knight’s steel and flesh that shielded Christendom. In ages of spiritual decay, it was the monk’s robe and ink that sustained the heart of the faith. Today’s war may appear less bloody, but it is no less brutal. Our enemies are not outside the gates—they are in the walls, in the language, in the symbols twisted from their God-given roots. Against this flood, the church must hold her ground.
Men look to their forefathers in this war because meaning requires anchors. Tradition gives us strength not out of nostalgia but because it is forged in the fires of centuries. The Mass does not dull the heart—it sharpens it against the world’s cheap imitations of beauty. Ritual and liturgy, misunderstood as empty repetition, are in truth ancient weapons. The words of the Creed hold more power than the clamor of politics; the reading of the Scriptures breaks chains unseen. To kneel, to stand, to lift hands in the prayers of old, is to rehearse the movements of warriors in God’s cause.
To stand at this crossroads of belief and conflict is to recognize what is demanded of both body and spirit. We wear this armor not to triumph by our strength but by God’s mercy. Ritual becomes not an adornment, but the scaffolding holding us firm against forces that grind bones to dust.
And where does that leave the modern monk, the warrior in a world awash in screens and sirens? It leaves him with the same call as those before: to fight, though his battlefields are hidden and his victories unseen. His prayers build unseen citadels; his abstinence wounds the empire of the flesh. And for the knight whose heart burns with zeal to act—he, too, must be guided by the monk’s hand.
For God, in His wisdom, never set monk against knight or tradition against zeal. He wove them together as differing weapons in His vast arsenal. The knight, armed with sword and shield, must learn the humility to lay them down when called to prayer. And the monk, hands clasped in vigil, must trust that his brothers at the gates wield their weapons not for glory but for God.
Whether in chainmail or a rough robe, on the battlefield or in the cloister, every soldier in this kingdom wages the same war. For as long as there is a heaven and an earth, a Christ and a church, there will be a fight to preserve their bond against those who seek to sever it.
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Manglende episoder?
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Apocalypse speaks not only of fire and destruction; it pulls back the veil, it bares what has always been lying underneath. Beneath the floodwaters, beneath the inferno’s roar, lies a revelation. They are stories of uncovering—not chaos—but the unlit truths buried under the veneers of our comfort, truths we kept at arm’s length for as long as the years would let us. - Donavon L Riley
Link to full text: https://thewarriorpriestpodcast.wordpress.com/2025/01/15/0221-midweek-debrief-signs-of-collapse-and-the-path-forward/
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In these times, when the world is hungrier than ever for quick fixes, we must ask ourselves: what if the trouble isn’t something to be solved at all, but something to be faced with a turn back to the heart of what’s real? — D.
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It gets sacred in the places where you have been torn open, where you’ve bled and felt abandoned. This is the quiet power of Christmas: not that it erases the ache, but that it enters into it with a tenderness fierce enough to hold what’s broken. You are held, not despite the pain, but because of it. The grace that comes is not the smooth salve, but the living wound itself, kissed by the presence of God who never runs from the darkness but embraces it, calling it holy.
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What's up with the talk about re-enchantment lately? Why are people interested in “re-enchanting the world”? What’s at stake in the question and what is expected by those who pursue it? What good are old stories and are we prepared to risk our lives to find meaning and purpose?
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Perhaps God does not want us to be modern because modernity too often blinds us to the eternal. In our rush to build, invent, and achieve, we forget to behold, to wonder, to worship. We lose the ability to see the sacred in the ordinary: the bread on the table, the sun rising over a field, the child laughing in a garden. These are not obstacles to progress; they are reminders of a deeper reality, a reality that modernity often seeks to obscure.
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What was once called “woke” has splintered into an anarchic patchwork of terms that don’t make sense unless you’ve swallowed the Kool-Aid and been dumped into a pit of postmodern nonsense. “Critical social justice,” “identity politics,” “gender studies,” “fourth-wave feminism”—the list grows like a mutant vine, changing shape faster than a bad acid trip. Every new label that’s thrown into the mix isn’t here to clarify; it’s here to disarm you, to scramble your mind, to keep the truth from ever getting a foothold. It’s all smoke and mirrors, folks. Nothing is what it seems, and the words we use to talk about the world only serve to keep us in the dark.
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History is dead.
Or, so I was told.
For a long time, I believed it.
Not because I wanted to, but I could see the world around me. It was plain as day that I did not live in the world of my heroes.
Myth and legend had ended, history had marched to its lackluster end, and we were all fated to live out our days in a lethargic, decaying, neo-liberal hellscape.
Consume product. Work for corporation. Vote. Die.
The banal reality of the modern west seems almost designed to crush the very souls of its populace.
We grew up in a world where nothing ever happens and there is nothing left to discover. - The Saxon Cross
Link: https://thesaxoncross.substack.com/p/mythologizing-modernity
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Today on the show, ruminations on Irish poets, winters-bane, and mythic tales that lead to heavenly truth.
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When, because of their fear, they do away secretly with such men, who is left for them to use save the unjust, the incontinent, and the slavish? The unjust are trusted because they are afraid, just as the tyrants are, that someday the cities, becoming free, will become their masters. The incontinent are trusted because they are at liberty for the present, and the slavish because not even they deem themselves worthy to be free. This affliction, then, seems harsh to me: to think some are good men, and yet to be compelled to make use of the others. - Xenophon, Tyrannicus part 5
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Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. - George Carlin
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"Humanity had thought itself sufficient, and even now we think we can escape our destiny by our own efforts. Escape!--that is our only thought. To escape from the insanity, the hell of modern life is all we wish. But we cannot escape!!! We must go through this hell, and accept it, knowing it is the love of God that causes our suffering. What terrible anguish!--to suffer so, not knowing why, indeed thinking there is no reason. The reason is God's love--do we see it blazing in the darkness? -- we are blind." Fr. Seraphim Rose
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So what will we do? Will we remain on the shore, dipping our toes in the water now and then, or will we plunge in, fully, recklessly, trusting that this river will carry us where we need to go? That is what true love is—it is a surrender, a letting go of our need to control, to manage, to predict. It is a wild rumpus, a leap into the unknown, a cry that travels through forests and over fields, and shakes the very earth beneath our feet. And in this love, we will find that indifference has no place. It cannot survive in the rushing waters of a soul that is fully alive, fully attuned to the presence of Love, the Christ-Savior - Donavon L Riley
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You may remember the Green Knight arriving at Camelot after fifteen days straight of feasting. King Arthur has asked for a story so that the tribe could remember itself but none of the assembled have the gumption to respond. A deeper story was required. Perfectly on time, the Green Knight bursts through the door. In the act of being beheaded but then continuing to live, the Green Knight brings a terrible but familiar, biblical question:
“Who will lose their life to find it?”
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I go on a walkabout through life and death, saying what needs to be said, taking our human condition seriously, and being thoughtful about the big picture.
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The basic question in this vortex is whether man can be liberated from fear. This is far more important than arming or supplying him with medicines—for power and health are prerogatives of the unafraid. In contrast, the fear besets even those armed to the teeth— indeed, them above all. The same may be said for those on whom abundance has been rained. The threat cannot be exorcized by weapons or fortunes—these are no more than means. - Ernst Junger, The Forest Passage
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