The Machine Abides
I took a new turn on the way to work the other day and found the spot pictured above.
It’s a quiet place, but alive. The breeze tosses the grasses, insects fidget nervously in the air and the … what would you call that body of water? It’s more than a stream, but less than a river. Whatever it is, it’s burble sets the scene to fitting music.
The whole spots hums. This, it whispers, is more than a spot on earth, but a spot between the worlds.
Reflecting on this reminded me of the moment in Paul Kingsnorth’s recent essay “The Cross and the Machine” where he describes his first recognition of Nature’s spiritual force.
Trudging across moors, camping by mountain lakes as the June sun set, I could feel some deep, old power rolling through it all, welding it together, flowing from the land into me and back again. With Wordsworth, I was dragged under by “A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought / And rolls through all things.” Nothing humans could build could come close to the intense wonder and mystery of the natural world.
Most of Kingsnorth’s essay is devoted to recounting his spiritual pilgrimage to Orthodoxy, but near the end, he veers into a bit of cultural criticism. He contrasts the Christian promise of fulfillment through renunciation of self with a culture and economy built on the renunciation of limits which he dubs The Machine.
Standing in the spot I discovered the other day, other cars drove by, their drivers indifferent to this heavenly scene.
How was this possible, I wondered.
The answer, of course, is The Machine.
What Kingsnorth does not point out is that The Machine, while it does consist of cultural artifacts and all the trivial amusements of consumer culture, dwells primarily in the minds of those it has coopted.
We abide in The Machine and The Machine abides in us.
Minds colonized by The Machine tend to shut out Nature’s holy thrum. They have replaced it with the noise of perpetual distraction. So total is The Machine’s habitation inside the mind of most of us, we can no longer even differentiate this noise from The Presence that, if we are graced to do so, we sometimes detect in the silence. We cannot pause, cannot rest in our rush to consume. Like machines The Machine has made we drive relentlessly on rushing past the very spots which otherwise might hold out freedom and salvation from the mechanized world.