#629: The 'One Thing Necessary' in 2025
On quitting things and seeking God.
On my final episode of Mere Fidelity, we considered what we might tell ourselves ten years ago when we started the show knowing what we now know about the world.
I took as my launching point one of my favorite passages from Karl Barth (around the 30 minute mark), which is worth reflecting on at the outset of this new year:
"According to the present trend, we may suppose that even on the morning after the Day of Judgment—if such a thing were possible—every cabaret, every night club, every newspaper firm eager for advertisements and subscribers, every nest of political fanatics, every pagan discussion group, indeed, every Christian tea-party and Church synod would resume business to the best of its ability, and with a new sense of opportunity, completely unmoved, quite uninstructed, and in no serious sense different from what it was before. Fire, drought, earthquake, war, pestilence, the darkening of the sun and similar phenomena are not the things to plunge us into real anguish, and therefore to give us real peace. The Lord was not in the storm, the earthquake or the fire (1 Kg. 19:11ff). He really was not."
2024 began for me with my (then) pastor announcing that we would be pursuing a “year of simplicity” as a church. My year concluded with me taking the concept more seriously than he might have intended: I resigned from nearly every ‘side project’ I have been involved with the past decade, in order to try to focus on work that might prove more fruitful for the next twenty or thirty years of my life.
Cleaning out the cupboards of our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual lives is only the first and easiest part of the task we have been given, though: the real test is whether we can fill them with the kinds of goods that allow us to live with a deep and durable joy—and whether we can preserve the order of those goods so that our lives will be marked by tranquility and peace. We must walk the path of negation, stripping away the clutter that so easily gathers to us. But the void only brings to the surface of our souls other more subtle, hidden pathologies that have been present all along. It is not enough to simply say “no” to these as well: we must find new goods to immerse ourselves within, which are deeper and more enduring than those we have left behind.
The heart’s restlessness is an inescapable fact, a reality that we cannot escape until we rest in God. Yet its deep waters are churned more by some social contexts than others, not least because some environments make the settled, quiet disposition of soul that comes from resting in God possible. In Alexis de Tocqueville’s Pascalian-inflected theory of the heart, democracy uniquely agitates us, precisely because it leaves every path of life open. As he wrote about America:
Nothing is more necessary to the cultivation of the advanced sciences or of the elevated portion of sciences than meditation, and there is nothing less fit for meditation than the interior of a democratic society. One does not encounter there, as in aristocratic peoples, a numerous class that stays at rest because it finds itself well-off and another that does not move because it despairs of being better off. Everyone is agitated: some want to attain power, others to take possession of wealth. In the midst of this universal tumult, the repeated collision of contrary interests, the continual advance of men toward fortune, where does one find the calm necessary to the profound combinations of the intellect? How does each man bring his thought to a stop at such and such a point, when everything moves around him and he himself is carried along and tossed about every day in the impetuous current that swirls all things along?
And if true of democratically-formed souls, how much more true is Tocqueville’s depiction of a people whose lives have been permeated by the internet’s infinite expanses? In one of my favorite essays I have ever written (which was also one of my least read), I proposed that opening ourselves to the ‘holy tears’ of contrition is the only path toward stability in the tumultuous waters of this world—because, as I wrote then, the “the infinite sea of God is deeper and broader than the tumult of this world.” The restlessness of the soul cannot be overcome by anything other than: meeting God. There is only one thing necessary: to hear from Him and, upon hearing, to attend to Him with our whole heart and mind.
This is why it is not enough to embrace simplicity because we are tired or overworked or even because we want to invest ourselves in projects that we hope are more fruitful in 30 years than those we are currently undertaking: such reasons are the right reasons to quit things, but those right reasons only supply us with the occasion and opportunity for the real satisfaction our soul depends upon. It profits a man nothing if he gains the whole world but loses his soul—but it also profits a man nothing if he loses the world for the sake of his soul, but somehow misses God in the process. The one thing necessary is not quietness or contemplation or quitting Netflix or anything else, but—God.
Around the Web
I might have a post on my 2024 reading later this week. But I thought this was a helpful taxonomy for ordering your reading for this next year. And I strongly advise ordering it: having a plan is crucial for reading more.
I am seriously tempted to aim for 100 pages per day of reading, a practice that Matthew Walther outlines here. I have adopted some of his strategies for reading more and so unequivocally commend the essay to you. Go and try to do likewise.
Long-time readers know my deep affection for the work of Anthony Trollope. If you want to read a lot of edifying pages in 2025, might I humbly suggest taking up his fiction? And if you want to know what’s wonderful about it, this essay from David Anderson (no relation, alas) is a great place to start.
If you want to read more words on ethics and theology this year, might I suggest joining on as a full member of the newsletter? Don’t forget I add everyone as members for free, no questions asked. Just respond to this email.
The Penultimate Word
“Time is measured by a threefold division, past, present, and future. In all three we receive the munificence of the Lord. If you consider the present, it is through Him that you live; if the future, your hope that your expectations might be fulfilled is founded on Him; if the past, you will realize that you did not even exist before He made you. Your very birth you have received as a benefit from Him; and once born, another benefit was conferred on you in that, as the Apostle says, you should live and move in Him.’ The hopes of the future depend upon the same Divine action. You, however, are master only of the present. Therefore, even 1f you never cease to give thanks to God throughout your life, you will hardly thank Him for the present; and as for the future and the past, you will not be able to find a means of rendering Him His due.” — Gregory of Nyssa