I was struck the other evening with a sharp, painful stab of nostalgia. I didn’t see it coming. I was lying in bed catching up on the day’s Twitter chatter, when suddenly I caught a theme, reports from so many friends across the country announcing such joy on their campuses. Yes, I remembered, this is the season for graduation! Unexpectedly, I became deeply nostalgic.

I’m trying to depoliticize, unhook, maybe that’s a better word, from the incessant political chatter of our day. I’ve had it. I’m sick of it. I’m trying to shake the illusion that everything must be seen in terms of what is political. It doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum, it seems we have all come to believe that politics will save us from danger and grief. Politics will surely usher in a new age of harmony, prosperity, and justice—those are the kinds of shaky notions that underlie our kneejerk turn to politics for everything.

Too often on Good Friday, we lapse into abstractions, grasping for a way to make sense of this horrifying scene. We talk perhaps about redemption. We say that Christ bears the burdens of the world’s sin, our sin. We lean on this event for a strange strategy of salvation. Sometimes we simply turn our heads, walk away.

In his magnificent book The Love of Learning and The Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, Jean Leclercq calls St. Gregory the Great “a great pope, a great man of action.” Sometimes overlooked, though, he was also “a great contemplative, a great doctor of prayer.” I want to suggest this balance between these two sides of our lives is timeless, absolutely necessary. Tip one direction or the other and we get off balance.

Last night I finished Peter Brown’s monumental Augustine Of Hippo: A Biography. This is my second reading of this extraordinary work. St. Augustine, of course, is that towering figure from the fourth and fifth century who straddled the age of the Apostles and the unfolding of Christian Europe.

I woke up Saturday morning pondering whether we had become “a nation of no.” First we designated our polarized political parties as “parties of no”—they’ve each had their stint in that driver’s seat. After a flurry of intense activity over the future of health care, we came down to nothing, nada. Nancy Pelosi pronounced this as a victory for America. It was not a victory for America. It stuck us once again in the mud of paralysis. I am pondering this morning what we have become. We can’t seem to get anything done. It’s not that we are making the wrong decisions; we can’t seem to make decisions at all.

I am thinking these days I simply can’t control the world. “Duh,” you might say, “you’re just getting that figured out?” Well, yes, maybe, but I am convinced we all live with the illusion that we are in control. Or we think we need to be. We’ve got to make those we love into something more suitable to our ideal. We’ve got to shape the troubled world, surely, into something better than it is. We’ve got to reconfigure the thinking those who disagree with us. Of course we never measure up ourselves—we’ve got to get more fit and healthier, kinder, more knowledgeable, better at what we do, more everything. It’s all a heavy burden. We carry this burden with us every minute of the day. At least I do.

Big publishing news going on today. A long-awaited and much-anticipated book—Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy For Christians In A Post-Christian Nation—burst on the scene today. My preordered copy arrived from Amazon just now. This book calls on Christians, struggling to live as Christians in our Post-Christian world, to follow the model of the sixth-century founder of monasticism, St. Benedict of Nursia.

François Mauriac begins one of the chapters in his intriguing 1962 book What I Believe with a haunting scene of a Russian boy, now grown older, visiting the church of his childhood. “At times I try to imagine,” Mauriac begins…

I was thinking the other day how each human being is unique. So is each animal, of course, each leaf, each drop of water. There is a lot of sameness among people too, but when we focus on sameness, we tend to get lost in abstraction, something like the sea of humanity. I’ve been choosing these days to place my bets on uniqueness. Each of us is exquisitely our own person.

In my ongoing efforts to step aside from the madness in which we seem engulfed, I came across an incredible article by the novelist Mark Helprin in the most recent issue of First Things

I don’t think my mind is big enough, broad or bright enough, to be an effective apologist for the Christian faith. I turn often to the great apologists of the centuries, to Augustine, for example, to the best of C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, most recently to N. T. Wright, Tim Keller, and so many others.

There is lots of talk these days about the Benedict Option. What in the world is this all about? While the centuries-in-the-making secularization project has come to completion with breathtaking speed, the question for Christians is what now? Surely not withdrawal. Maybe another form of engagement.

Apparently we live in a world of alternative truths. We float around in our individualized bubbles, barely bumping into one another. We read and watch things that reinforce our own strongly-held beliefs. We spend time gathering various facts to reinforce our corner on the truth. While it’s almost impossible to admit, each of us lives in a bubble.

Is it ever possible to be satisfied, to be fully self-accepting, to be content? Don’t we carry around some notion of perfection rumbling in our heads—to which we never quite measure up? Always another thing to do before we can rest, another rung to climb before we are accepted. Why are we such restless people? Isn’t there some deep longing to find a resting place? Or is it just me?

As I begin this new year, I am trying to reshape my posture toward our tumultuous, chaotic, divided world. How can I possibly be more positive, more forgiving, more joyful, more content? With renewed energy, I have turned for help to my years-long practice of reading from the Psalms every morning. A good cup of coffee and the Psalms—this is part of my morning ritual. Does this ancient spiritual discipline, practiced by Jesus and Paul and our ancestors of faith, have something to offer our crazy world today?

At this time of year, I have always been an inveterate goal setter. I love the feeling of leaving the year behind, the whole bundle of joys and hardships, successes and failures, good memories and things you’d like to forget. It feels good to turn the page to the next chapter. It feels clean. What can I do better? How can I love more, see more, learn more, contribute more? How can I understand the world better, so that, perhaps, I can make some small dent in the problems we all face. I love opening a new chapter.

This book is getting a lot of attention these days. Though it was not written with the presidential election in mind, J. D. Vance reminds us of that forgotten population out there that rose up to elect a crass-talking, offensive, scary candidate who promised change for them. Vance is a proud Hillbilly from the Appalachian byways of our country, people from families and communities and regions devastated by dramatic, bewildering change. These are the ones left behind.

This is one of the most remarkable books I’ve read in a long time. Truly remarkable. Perhaps life-changing. We learn from biblical writers, poets throughout the ages, mystics, and so many others that the “world is charged with the grandeur of God,” to use Gerard Manley Hopkins familiar words. Such a world is God’s gift to us. This is exactly the kind of world Ann Voskamp opens up for us from each page of this book.

Our world is saturated with the human ego these days. We are swamped. It can feel hard to breathe at times. The constant display of ego makes us feel cheap, degraded, diminished. After the circus of purported public discourse—the presidential debates, for example—we wince. It’s more about the ego than it is about ideas or dreams or solutions. The ego has always been that monster under our beds waiting to pounce at any moment. Once loose it damages leaders. It corrodes our world. It messes things up, destroys things that are  good and decent. Our nation is paying a price for letting the ego out of its cage.