The thread is unraveling.
Woven together in the ancient days, the pursuit of truth that required blood and sacrifice, the tens of millions who gave their lives to be one step closer to order–human freedom and flourishing–a thread of literature, and music, and philosophy, and Gospel, woven through the ages and protected with the sword and the law. For the ends of those threads cannot be sealed, are always frayed at the end waiting on the next generation to take them and weave them together, the great task of artists and teachers and prophets, to improve us ever still.
Yet, we now live in an age when men and women are clamoring to unravel the thread that has brought us to this place, the very thread that has allowed them to be free. Destroyers of civilization, never builders, never builders, just destroyers of what has come before them, unravel it just to unravel it, they say, what good is literature, what good are ideas, what good is freedom, what good is a document written so long ago, what good is a work of art, unravel it, deconstruct it, let the thread go wild, let everyone bring their own and we will weave them together no questions asked.
Mozart is no different than the newest pop sensation. DaVinci is no different than this urine splashed on a canvas and sold for a million dollars. The words of Solomon are no different than this poem about a menstrual cycle. Christ is just like the modern martyr, oh what’s his name, we forgot already, it’s all the same, no one thing can be better or more true or more right than any other thing so what’s the use in holding up the foundational ideas of civilization, what’s the use when the foundation itself is flawed. Throw them all out. Unravel. Unravel. Unravel.
With clawed fingers they dig into the thread and find their hold, then yank with all their might to tear it apart. And what was forged in blood and debate over centuries, what was born behind the walls of monasteries and in the chambers of geniuses, in the academies of old, is now unraveled not in blood–not yet–but during an HR video meeting, buried deep in legislation about something entirely different, on the law bench, from the pulpit, in the children’s classroom, unraveled!
Who will keep the tradition alive?
Who will protect the thread from being clawed apart by amnesiacs who cannot remember who they are, who cannot remember what happened yesterday, who only know how they feel right now in this moment, no different than an animal, hungry, sad, offended, rip it apart, the whole earth, rip it to pieces on my behalf to serve the moment I am in, the moment that will surely pass.
This is the war.
Not a war of guns and bombs, but a war to hold what is true and keep it from disintegrating into nothingness, nihilism, the vacancy, the void that God crushed with a word.
I will not go back to the void.
I will not go back to the void.
I will not go back to the void.