Midwestuary Notes #1: The Smallest Thing

Personal Reflections

I had two primary goals in attending the Midwestuary 2025 Conference: The Fellowship of the Spirit. The first was to meet in person the strange cast of characters who I call, when I am referencing any of them to my wife, my “internet friends.” I wanted these friendships to be embodied. It took me 6 years, mostly due to my having one of those disordered attachment styles that have been going around lately. But better late than never. The second was to gain clarity on what I ought to do going forward, in the little corner of the internet I hang out in and in my life in general. I don’t want to simply be a consumer or a commenter or a poster. And I also don’t want to engage in anything I might fear for myself to be a vanity project. What to do? And in the broader case of my life in general, I was seeking some sort of synthesis in things I had been paying attention to and thinking about. A focusing. My attention has been too spread thin, even on higher things.

I begin my reflection with what was probably my favorite talk from the first day: Rod Dreher’s commentary on Tarkovsky’s 1983 film Nostalghia. I am admittedly not familiar with Tarkovsky but I plan to change that going forward. In his talk, Rod describes a scene where the main character, Andrei, performs a strange favor for the holy fool of the movie Domenico: he ritually carries a candle across a drained pool. But he must keep it lit. And in order to keep it lit he has to give all of his focus to the task at hand. And in doing that, once he finally reaches the other side, he dies from a heart attack.

In doing so, Rod was seeing Andrei’s search for a sense of home, of meaning, of purpose or synthesis, resolved. The resolution, which was for Andrei a sort of salvation from his misery, came about because he was forced to give all of his attention to such a small and specific thing. There is certainly much more to be explored here, but I actually share this here for purposes of pointing out something we eventually discussed in our estuary group which was catalyzed by this scene Rod described from Nostalghia.

The estuary discussions far exceeded my expectations. Chesterton says in his excellent introduction to the Book of Job, where he is defending its unity of authorship against critics trying to prove there was obviously more than one author and therefore it is somehow illegitimate, “The Iliad may have been written by one man. It may have been written by a hundred men. But let us remember that there was more unity in those times in a hundred men than there is unity now in one man. Then a city was like one man. Now one man is like a city in civil war.” This is at least part of what the Estuary protocol and groups can offer and in the case of the conference, for me they certainly did. I was, and am to a degree, the man in civil war. We all are. This is the meaning crisis. This is internal family systems. But I think there can be something to the Estuary practice and protocol that gets us closer to being united to the people we are with not just in name but in spirit.

In light of that point, our group certainly did that for me. It was a great group. And Rod Dreher just happened to be apart of it. Towards the end of a great discussion, Cory drew a parallel between Andrei’s carrying the candle across the drained pool to the story of St. Christopher carrying the Christ child across the river and the journey across taking everything he had and St. Christopher almost not making it. It was an amazing connection. (There are some interesting key differences such as St. Christopher’s not dying and the river being not barren like the drained pool, but I’m not going to get distracted with a deeper dive into a comparative analysis here, though it does look a fun comparison to explore.) The connection between the two is obvious: the paradox of giving oneself to the smallest thing which ends up costing everything and ultimately brings about salvation.

I am starting to unravel this paradox as it relates to where we find ourselves among the metacrisis—the many crises. The meaning crisis. Birth-rate collapse. Breakdown of identity. Institutional rot. Cultural Decadence. Globalism. Wars and rumors of wars. The general feeling that something is very wrong. There is no solving it. And even scaling that down, I am accepting that whatever civil war I myself find myself in need of resolving, whatever synthesis I am seeking for myself, and for my family, especially my children, there is no solving it in the way one solves a math problem. God uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. One family that went right, one Holy Family, led to the salvation of us all. When the 12 Rules for Life don’t work, sometimes salvation is found in carrying a candle across drained pool. Or giving a cup of cold water to a little child. Perhaps Christ’s listeners might have had to go out of their way to find water sufficiently cold.

I am not saying one should make sure they schedule time for charity in their schedules, I am saying that one ought to be willing to forsake their entire schedule for the one tiny and utterly self-giving task right in front of them, because it might be their salvation. I think wisdom is found in foolishness. And so I walk away looking for the tiny and obscure tasks and acts of love and devotion. The ones that make no sense but are very costly.

You’ll notice, by the way, how easy this is more or less summed up in a statement made by one Grizwald Grim: “It all comes down to enmity of the womb. Anything that leans towards that you should avoid.” There is nothing smaller, on the scale of the human person than a baby in the womb.

It reminds me of an idea for a novel, though it doesn’t have to be a novel. The story revolves around a low status but otherwise very healthy and happy young woman who has found herself in a bit of a financial bind, or perhaps she signs up as an act of sacrifice, and so has become pregnant via surrogacy in order to grow and nurture the baby in utero until birth, where the baby will be handed off to the couple who have contracted out her womb. And then something happens. For whatever reason, the couple decide very late in the pregnancy that the deal is off, and she is contractually obligated to terminate the pregnancy, to abort the child in her womb. She begins the story in naïveté and ignorance (obviously) so she’s not yet seeing the moral horror here, but she is quite troubled. Nevertheless she more or less accepts the framework of the contract and begrudgingly plans on going forward with the abortion. Then either due to conscience or a dream of some sort, she realizes she can’t. When she begins to express this to the couple, the otherwise friendly and cordial couple go batshit crazy. Lawyers are involved. Jail time is threatened, etc. Again she plans on going forward. Again she feels, either via conscience or warning, she cannot. Perhaps there’s one more round of back and forth. I don’t know. Anyway, eventually she realizes she must run away and have this baby. There is a young man, or a group of young men perhaps (that would be fun, the group of boys whom don’t fit into the “civilized” society wherein the novel firs takes place), who find out about this or are asked by our protagonist for help, and instantly drop all they are doing to save this tiny little baby in the womb and help this young woman. And of course in focusing on this one tiny little baby, our young immature men turn into noble warriors.

I’m also imagining a time slightly in the future where MAID culture has gone a little further but the Church has gotten more clear on its pro-life positions. And so in this context, I have an autistic Catholic canon lawyer getting involved and thereby the Church joining in on the scandal of saving the little baby from the machine of the culture waging war on this young woman’s womb. But I would plan on involving a whole ragtag group of cultural outcasts in the quest. Perhaps the couple who hired her out have some reason that it’s very important to terminate their surrogate baby. Perhaps they are just evil. Anyway, you start to get the picture. I don’t want to spoil the story. And you see the pattern I’m pointing to.

I’ll end with how I see this pattern having manifest in a particular way as the reason I had strange online friends in the first place: the strange collection of those of us initially interested in the work of Jordan Peterson but continuing to talk and explore more on religion, politics, and everything else in the particular ways we see them amidst the unique struggles of our time. It has been argued that the strange online community, This Little Corner of the Internet, which led to the conference isn’t really, ontologically, a thing—that it is downstream of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and whenever Paul Vander Klay stops making videos, it is no more. I am generalizing what was actually a fairly good argument and critique, but, without caring to prove this philosophically, I will say that I think This Little Corner is actually a thing which has grown downstream of the theme I’ve been walking through in this post, as all things grow from seeds. This Little Corner is the outgrowth of one tiny thing. It wasn’t quite St. Christopher carrying the Christ child across the river. It wasn’t a Russian intellectual doing a simple but obscure task for a fool. But it was a Dutch Reformed pastor starting a silly Youtube channel for his disabled friend.