Going back to a comment made earlier to me here about WCC being “only a temporary haven”: Yes it’s true, but I still don’t know how I could go back to society as it is permanently after what its been like to see “regular society” this summer.
At WCC we’re immersed in the real in a sense, what I think is about the only real expression of culture you can find anywhere. Against the division, individualism, and just plain anger that is so permeating our broader world, what we are blessed with stands in such stark contrast. Everything seems disintegrating in a world that doesn’t really even seem to believe in reality, absolutes, or really anything but self and the passions of the moment. The real is ignored, the Truth abandoned, and all else befalls “society” (in quotes because there doesn’t seem to really be enough of a society in general) from this lack of anchoring.
With the opposite, the depth of truth we await in wonder to discern, the Truth itself received and adored in a culture where we uplift each other to the same pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty, we have here at WCC the path to freedom in its truest sense. Freedom as it is found in the “life of perfect justice”, a life ordered to the Eternal, God himself, we live and have all this because we have experienced the real of God’s truth, goodness, beauty, and their unity, wisdom in the outdoors, in the insights of the Great Books, and our personal encounters with Christ in the Sacraments and prayer. And with all this, again, I just can’t imagine going back to the “society” set up seemingly to ignore the real.
That’s why I never want to leave the one place I’ve found all this, WCC, but with the aforementioned comment, I get now how it would be wrong to just stay here ignore the rest of the world, and keep the “real” to ourselves (though it is tempting). We’re in the broader world, and its our mission to bring it also to the truth. So through that thinking – how about taking what we have here and offering it to everyone to bring them also to the blessings we have? I still want to live like we do here in some sense (haven’t given that up yet even though I don’t know what that would look like) but M.R.s comment gave me the idea of a ministry (in potentiality):
Experience the Real.
- Expand on COR and take families into the real to “experience the real”
- Discuss and teach the basics of the amazing truths we’re just starting to understand here
- Showcase the basic community life things like singing, dancing, and the cultureal experiences of Gymnopoetics
In unity these are the basics of the experience of the real, the experience we are in at WCC, and I think they’re the antidote, if spread, to much of our current craziness. And they’re what many are looking and hungry for, for real community, real culture, the real itself.
Even among Catholics, I think the real as we have here is solely needed, to return to reality against the insidious artificial.
I still don’t exactly know how to put all this into practice, but for now its the dream. Hope to talk to everyone about it this year.
- A Sophomore who’s actually experienced very little of the real