G.K. Chesterton once, now famously, saw a rhetorical question, "What's wrong with the world?" purported to have been in The Times, and answered it with a surprising twist: "Dear Sirs: I am." Today, in obscurity, I want to change that exchange, and imagine this:
"What's right with the world?"
"I am."
Now, I'm not advocating radical egoism; rather, I'm advocating an ideal, a hope, a reality in us that flashes off and on, like the star of the lighthouse amid the storms of the heart and the world. This trope, this lighthouse star is a way of life, a light in the world, a rightness in the world for wandering barques: I'm thinking of St. Therese of Liseux's "Little Way," the one Mother Theresa of Calcutta adapted for her own use, in a beautiful twist of fate: "Theresa" establishing the Missionaries of Charity following the spiritual path of "Therese" whose deepest desire was to be a missionary, but whose calling was a short, twenty-four year life in the Carmel desert. Their earthly paths, coinciding only spiritually and over a hundred-year span (they died almost exactly 100 years apart), nevertheless illuminate the working of God beyond our time-and-sense-bound apprehension. Both the Little Way and the way God uses these efforts, a dance between the willing self and God, can make me a "right," a small lighthouse star in this darkening world.
For those who've not yet read St. Therese's Story of a Soul, the Little Way is one of the Saint's childlike conclusions about loving God and loving neighbor, "on which all the law and commandments hang"; in one part of her soul, she laments her inability to go out and do great things on the mission field, in the world who so needs the rightness, the cleanliness, the love, of God. In her time, she felt the weight of burgeoning atheism, just as Mother Theresa felt the weight of rabid secularism resulting in the economic and social injustice and inequality of her time; now, what is the weight we feel?
Many from all perspectives and faiths are beginning to come together in a chorus: disparate public voices in the US—from Naomi Wolf to Tucker Carlson—are beginning to call our present darkness "the face of evil"; many with the potential to be lighthouses in this world are beginning to see that, pervading all areas of life, which Roméo Dallaire, a Canadian military officer, experienced full-front in Rwanda: " I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him" (Shake Hands with the Devil). Anyone left with any courage or sanity after the last few years, or the will to see reality, is now faced in their own communities with the disintegration of the human species of law: social, health, civil, criminal, constitutional, moral. These are of course symbiotic forms; when one begins to go, the others will follow, as any saint like Therese or Theresa knows; what is now making it so painfully obvious to the rest of us who, albeit imperfectly, deep inside desire what is right, and good, and clean, sourced in love?
Perhaps it is that which God wrote on the heart of every human being ever conceived, that which is the permanent lighthouse within us—that which tortures us when the wood and sails, and the captain of ourselves, are all warped—that which remains our mainstay and comfort in times of distress: the natural law. We are faced with that force which has lost its own face before God, that force of unadulterated solve et coagula, that spiritual version of the hopeless and pagan alchemic belief in the power to dissolve back in chaos in order to create, virtually ex nihilo, gold from base metal. None is a Creator like that beside God, and so it is a Satanic ape of the law from which natural law is necessarily derived: the eternal I AM. When we see people being pressured to harm themselves and especially their children, we naturally know this goes against our creaturely mandate to participate in life, in God's creativity: Abortion (recently described by one of our "lawgivers" as a "positive good"); harmful health mandates and "scientific consensus"-backed medical malfeasance thinly veiled as "loving others," targeting children especially; people in all walks of life being socially and civilly pressured to go against common sense, indeed against biological and spiritual reality, and "identify their chosen pronouns"; school-approved cross-dressing adults "twerking" in front of school children; institutions meant to educate instead "counseling" children to consider transgender procedures without the knowledge of their parents, procedures potentially cutting their life span by decades, not to mention their God-given fertility at an age when they barely know what that means. In other words, we are a short, fatal step from the insane, self-mutilating dystopias of Orwell and Huxley. Like the Theresian saints, these secular authors saw beyond, like the prophets of old, to the consequences of the breakdown of the moral and natural law, as the later Roman historians Livy and Tacitus saw in their own time. Livy said of declining Rome:
The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these-the life and morals of the community . . . then as the standard of morality gradually lowers, let him follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin, until he reaches these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies. (Preface to The History of Rome)
