Apocalypse speaks not only of fire and destruction; it pulls back the veil, it bares what has always been lying underneath. Beneath the floodwaters, beneath the inferno’s roar, lies a revelation. They are stories of uncovering—not chaos—but the unlit truths buried under the veneers of our comfort, truths we kept at arm’s length for as long as the years would let us. - Donavon L Riley

Link to full text: https://thewarriorpriestpodcast.wordpress.com/2025/01/15/0221-midweek-debrief-signs-of-collapse-and-the-path-forward/

In these times, when the world is hungrier than ever for quick fixes, we must ask ourselves: what if the trouble isn’t something to be solved at all, but something to be faced with a turn back to the heart of what’s real? — D.

It gets sacred in the places where you have been torn open, where you’ve bled and felt abandoned. This is the quiet power of Christmas: not that it erases the ache, but that it enters into it with a tenderness fierce enough to hold what’s broken. You are held, not despite the pain, but because of it. The grace that comes is not the smooth salve, but the living wound itself, kissed by the presence of God who never runs from the darkness but embraces it, calling it holy.

What's up with the talk about re-enchantment lately? Why are people interested in “re-enchanting the world”? What’s at stake in the question and what is expected by those who pursue it? What good are old stories and are we prepared to risk our lives to find meaning and purpose?

Perhaps God does not want us to be modern because modernity too often blinds us to the eternal. In our rush to build, invent, and achieve, we forget to behold, to wonder, to worship. We lose the ability to see the sacred in the ordinary: the bread on the table, the sun rising over a field, the child laughing in a garden. These are not obstacles to progress; they are reminders of a deeper reality, a reality that modernity often seeks to obscure.

What was once called “woke” has splintered into an anarchic patchwork of terms that don’t make sense unless you’ve swallowed the Kool-Aid and been dumped into a pit of postmodern nonsense. “Critical social justice,” “identity politics,” “gender studies,” “fourth-wave feminism”—the list grows like a mutant vine, changing shape faster than a bad acid trip. Every new label that’s thrown into the mix isn’t here to clarify; it’s here to disarm you, to scramble your mind, to keep the truth from ever getting a foothold. It’s all smoke and mirrors, folks. Nothing is what it seems, and the words we use to talk about the world only serve to keep us in the dark.

History is dead. 

Or, so I was told.

For a long time, I believed it.

Not because I wanted to, but I could see the world around me. It was plain as day that I did not live in the world of my heroes.

Myth and legend had ended, history had marched to its lackluster end, and we were all fated to live out our days in a lethargic, decaying, neo-liberal hellscape.

Consume product. Work for corporation. Vote. Die.

The banal reality of the modern west seems almost designed to crush the very souls of its populace.

We grew up in a world where nothing ever happens and there is nothing left to discover. - The Saxon Cross

Link: https://thesaxoncross.substack.com/p/mythologizing-modernity

Today on the show, ruminations on Irish poets, winters-bane, and mythic tales that lead to heavenly truth.

When, because of their fear, they do away secretly with such men, who is left for them to use save the unjust, the incontinent, and the slavish? The unjust are trusted because they are afraid, just as the tyrants are, that someday the cities, becoming free, will become their masters. The incontinent are trusted because they are at liberty for the present, and the slavish because not even they deem themselves worthy to be free. This affliction, then, seems harsh to me: to think some are good men, and yet to be compelled to make use of the others. - Xenophon, Tyrannicus part 5