You’re busy. You work, you raise a family, you care for people; and by doing so, you try to do the right thing—and yet, you still you feel empty, restless, or cut off.  You shoulder the burdens with a Stoical dignity and utter reassurances to yourself that "such is the lot of a noble soul." 

That is your consolation prize in the face of life's hidden disappointments.  

But what if that feeling is itself a sign of something even higher than one's own wounded dignity?  A sign that tells you something is wrong beneath the surface: the ground where meaning grows has been stripped of some nourishment that you need for true happiness?  That your life of pointless sacrifices actually does have a point after all?  Is happiness even possible for people like you?

What makes this tragic is that the causes of this malaise are well-known.  Modern habits that demand streamlined efficiency or reduce everything to usefulness have made life thin and technical.  People have become commodities and freedoms sweet-sounding nothings.  When people live in such an abstracted state (and mistake it for "reality"), they lose the habits that let them recognize what matters and who matters.  They lose their innate capacity for living freely.  In the process, means crowd out ends; and people forget what they truly want and who they truly are.

There is nothing new to learn here.

Even so, the crisis persists for lack not of knowledge but of will and it is cowardice of the soul--- once termed acedia or spiritual sloth--- of some kind that drives most cultural and personal unhappiness today.  Through a religious sense, it is also the source of theological deafness of most modern people [where the "talk of God" has no meaning to them] because in so far as you are alienated from the natural world, then it only makes sense that the Super-natural, which is to say the spiritual world, goes on to elude you too. 

What, pray, is water to a fish?  The medium it only realizes once it chokes on the air?  So, it is with the spiritual life and the life of sin.

Few, but the worst of sinners, will understand this mystery.  I am one such sinner and for this reason alone you should listen to me.

To take you out of the water for a bit, this blog will expose you to short readings, simple exercises, and practical reflections that help you read the signs of your life, reconnect with the natural world (and by extension your natural self), and find how to know yourself, which sages in the past have taken as the first step towards wisdom.

The goal is modest but urgent: to gain the promised fruit of introspection, you must till the soil and tend your garden.  Do not mistake the barrenness of your life for what life ultimately has to offer!  That would be like a gardener blaming the "bad seed" for not growing into a beautiful flower while utterly ignoring his neglect of the plant! 

Turn away then from the modern way of understanding what counts as "real" or "valuable", if only to humor me, for we have given modernity its due. Instead, turn to other sources who recognized signs more fully in ways that we often overlook. 

Surprisingly enough, one of the Dominican students of St. Thomas Aquinas, John Poinsot (1589-1644), was an early theorist of this discipline called "semiotics" (excuse the jargon) that elaborated the study of sign systems and conditions of meaning that promises a unified way of understanding the world (including, I must add to my doubting Cartesian readership, your own self!).  "As above, so below" was an adage of a different time.  Let us see to what extent we can crawl out of our carapace once we observe the absurdity that is "I".

Brothers and sisters, we must become that appreciative fish who was reeled out of the water and yet thrown (quite mercifully) back in!  To understand your errors by the light of Divine Mercy is to be that appreciative fish who was given a second chance, again and again and again.

The spiritual life is to be attentive to such signs and to take stock in the messages therein.  But alas, you must develop the ear for them...

Let us then get a different perspective.

Be well!

On the Science of Signs and Signification:

The "Leg Work" of my spiritual reflections on Signs (both in nature, society, and religious tradition) derives from the following scholarly milestones:

Part Ia. A Lexicon of Thomistic Semiotics

Part Ib. A Semiotics Index of the Thomistic Corpus

Part II. The Isagogue of John of St. Thomas (for the Summa Theologiae)

Part III. Tractatus de Signis (by John of St. Thomas) [& Its Reception by Modern Semioticians]

Part IV. The Biblical Commentaries and Sermons of St. Thomas Aquinas

Part V. Patristic Commentaries on "Signs and Wonders" [More to Come]

Part VI. Research in Biosemiotics: Phytosemiotics & Zoosemiotics (or, Ethology)

Part VII. 'Signposts in a Strange Land' --- Meditations on Walker Percy's Literary and Scholarly Output

Part VII. Re-reading Aquinas' Summa Theologiae through the Cosmovision of Christian Logos

Appendix A: The "Religious-Turn" in Wittgenstein Studies

Appendix B: An Annotated Bibliography of Semiotic Literary Criticism

A Timeline:

Post-Pentecost Cycle:

Stage 1: A Close Reading of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae (Pars Prima) w/ Marginalia of Semiotic Terminology

Stage 2: An Annotated Commentary of John Poinsot's Isagogue [For Synthesis of Thomistic Philosophical Theology]

Advent-Candlemas Cycle:

Stage 3: A Close Reading of John Poinsot's Tractatus de Signis [w/ Notes and Commentary] alongside "New World" tracts on religious missionary experiences related to theological discourse.

Septuagesima-Lenten Cycle:

Stage 4: A Compilation of Aquinas' Sermons and Biblical Commentaries w/ Semiotic References (w/ Inter-Textual Commentary)

Easter Cycle [Novel Research]:

Stage 5a: Begin Annotated Bibliography of Semiotic Literary Criticism w/ a Focus on the interstices of Natural Theology and Foundational Theology (!)

Stage 5b: Begin Annotated Bibliography of Biosemiotics w/ a Focus on the interstices of Natural Theology and Foundational Theology (!)

Stage 6: A Critical Study of "Parson-Naturalists" of the English Reformed Tradition alongside the Jesuit Missionaries [Reflections on Nature & Grace, Faith & Reason, Religion & Science, etc.]

Ongoing Contributions:

A Compilation of Patristic Authorities on the Topic of "Signs and Wonders" and the Miraculous

Outlining Scientific Journals and Books on Biosemiotics, Phytosemiotics, and Zoosemiotics/Ethology

Book Reviews in Semiotic Literary Criticism

Annotated Bibliography of Cleric-Scientist Publications

The Role of Professor John Senior in the Formation of Clear Creek Abbey

A Necrology of Clear Creek Abbey