Glimmers of the New Jerusalem Amidst the Sprawling Shadows of Bablyon

A lament for the loss of the sense of place so important to our ancestors and to our own well being. Without it, we are rootless creatures, lost in the world.

From One Peter Five

By Michael Stack

Reflections of a Gen Z Man (or Gen Zer) in Exile

Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept: when we remembered Sion: On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our instruments. For there they that led us into captivity required of us the words of songs.
—Psalm 136:1-5

I remember the night that I first read about a little town called Pascua. This little town is not in a place where I can go right now, but it exists in the minds of visionaries. College has kept me too busy for the world of online Catholicism, which is usually a blessing. Afterall, no news is good news. When I finally broke that long fast, Josué Luis Hernandez’s article on the Pascua Project was the first item I found on OnePeterFive. As someone who has been a fan of OnePeterFive for many years, the article did not disappoint, and it exceeded my expectations for the day. I found myself moved by a sense of enchantment, a fresh energy coming over me as though I was reading my own deepest dreams mirrored back to me, but the greatest sensation was beauty. The beauty that I saw in Josué’s words was the hope of reclamation, one that I could dream of but had never dared to put into words. As a (barely) Generation Z young man, I have witnessed the creeping affliction of homogeneity that sweeps the land, robbing us of our sense of place, particularity, and heritage. As much as we Catholics like a good, scholastic thesis, I think that testimony is a truer path to the heart, so let me share mine.

I’m young enough that I don’t remember Bill Clinton, but old enough that I remember a time when the internet was a novelty and YouTube didn’t exist. I grew up in Seattle and Minneapolis, before enlisting in the Marine Corps. The military took me as far south as Texas, as far west as California, and even beyond the sea. After getting out, I lived on the North Shore of Lake Superior for several months before moving to Boise, Idaho, and I am now in my second year of living in Wyoming. It has been a blessing to see so much of this vast country, but a certain despair has come of observing the course of our national life. Although each place I lived had a unique culture, the sense of particularity declines year by year. In the Upper Midwest, we are descended largely from German and Scandinavian immigrants, who from their meager pennies raised up cathedrals on the prairie. In California, I was surrounded by the old charm of New Spain. I would attend Mass at the oldest parish in the state and visit the mission led by St. Junípero himself. Pulling aside the modern façade of beach homes and golf courses, one could explore the tales of Californio dynasties that shaped the land long before Yankees streamed West. Honolulu was at once cosmopolitan and a world away, a place where East and West meet in megamalls and nightclubs, yet where the heavy jungle air carries the romantic whiff of ancient Polynesian kingdoms.

For all of this, every new development is the same. Whether I am in Minneapolis, O’ahu, San Jose, or Boise, new apartment blocks go up in the same fashion and every new mall is a Starbucks, a Panda Express, and a Footlocker. It is as though the organic way of life was put on hold, and some distant programmer is using a copy-paste sequence to clone the same city block from coast to coast. In Minnesota, we make much hay of our German heritage, but I doubt if we could identify a single German food beside the bratwurst. When it comes to culture, we seem to aspire towards whatever trends are sweeping the country.

My brief time in Europe stood almost in direct contrast. Across Ireland, small villages still dotted the landscape.The elderly would still meet at the pub with their friends of the last sixty years, and children played in the streets. Absent was the rush of traffic that even our suburbs have. I felt a sense of timelessness there too. Around these villages stood neat patchworks of fields. No doubt generations of young and old men have cultivated them season after season as the tides of war and invasion, famine and prosperity, have ebbed and flowed around them. At the Cliffs of Moher, I could look west across the Atlantic, facing the chilly ocean winds and pondering the horizon as young men had done since before St. Patrick’s mission, before Columbus’s voyage, before titans of steel came out of the West bearing tanks and planes for the liberation of France. When I stayed with my aunts, I saw neighbors come over spontaneously for tea. My cousins’ cousins walked over to play, unaccompanied by adults.

Even in friendly suburbia, I didn’t see this in my childhood. By the Aughts, we were beginning to be divided within our neighborhood by politics, and families were not so close that a father would make sure to buy his house on the same block as his parents and brother, rather than 20 miles away in a good school district.

I got a similar impression in Portugal as I did in Ireland. Tight-knit villas were strung along the roads, and beyond them were rolling hills and cultivated fields. People would buy their groceries in their neighborhood, and they knew the workers at the bars and cafes. Ancient churches and abandoned palaces stood as a testament to the long continuity of faith and civilization on the western end of Iberia. In America, we praise the land for remaining primordial, but that is not the only way to be beautiful. When man lives upon the land, in dependency and friendship, but not in worship of it, he both protects it and cultivates it, taming it just so to bring out a deep beauty. Just as the striking beauty of a young woman is later exceeded by the deeper beauty that comes from motherhood, true civilization cultivates the land, exchanging shock and awe for the majesty of mature beauty. I have seen this in many places. I saw it most strongly in Ireland and Portugal. I also have seen it in the small towns of Minnesota, and the old plantation towns of Hawaii’s Big Island, in the terraced rice paddies of Java, and in villages deep in the river vales of Japan. It is something I hope to one day be true of our own sprawl, renewed and revitalized by a culture that plans with a total vision of the human commonwealth.

Josué’s proposal offers us a cure to the atomization of our day. I was born into a large family, and perhaps did not experience loneliness for the first time until my parents divorced and I found myself alone at home while all my brothers went to spend the weekend with my father. This was never really an issue in the Marine Corps, where you lived alongside your co-workers; where your free time and recreation was spent with them; where there was such a closeness that you would be assigned the title of “uncle” when their children came into the world. When I moved to rural Minnesota and began working a night shift, my chief companions were the dog and the woods. It is perhaps the most isolation that I have ever experienced.

At the end of my time in Minnesota, I enrolled in classes at Boise State University and set out into the West, as blind to my future as the day I left for boot camp. Having reached a very lax and noncommittal state of faith, I can only attribute it to God that I had the dumb fortune to choose that university. The Newman Center there was a place of community and faith. Like a regular community, people might have their particular friend groups, and sometimes the whisperings of drama would circulate. However, it was most importantly a place where the students tried to share in their lives as good brothers and sisters. They took their faith seriously, and our chaplain took seriously his title as ‘father’ to all these young adults who were far from home in a hostile, secular culture. In confession you could not doubt that he had conviction about the gravity of your sins, and you could not doubt that neither he nor Christ loved you less because of your sins. As much as a good priest and good congregation were a catalyst of renewal in my faith, so too was the community. No matter what time of day I went there, I found a familiar face and something social in nature, even if it was just a study group or a game of pool. I felt like I belonged whether I was only there for a cup of coffee or to put in a few hours of prayer. The students at the Newman Center became more than just people I saw on Sunday morning and at Bible study.

One of the great travesties of the modern parish is that it often feels like a once-a-week duty where you clock in just before the processional and clock out right after your St. Michael prayer. It cultivates a sense of isolation and mechanism in our salvific race and it often seems too daunting to even try to think about how to fix it. At the Boise State Newman Center, the presence of a real community prevented that from ever being a concern.

So there you have it! My long winded and purely anecdotal exposition of the creeping homogenization, unrootedness, and atomization which plagues our country, and especially Generation Z. The doubters and Modernists will come out of the woodwork to nitpick and naysay and explain why this is the best timeline time period, but I know my own heart. We, as Americans, are heirs to a beautiful and incredible cultural legacy, whether your ancestors were stodgy Puritans, rowdy Scots-Irishmen, jovial Bavarians, Spanish pioneers of the high desert, or the freedmen of the South. The folly of the modern age is not that we will perpetuate the sins of our fathers, as so many Left-Wing activists argue, but that we will forget the gardens they spent generations cultivating for our benefit.

Josué Hernandez has presented to us the stark losses that modern America has endured in the process of uprooting itself, and the loss of soul imposed upon us by our suburban monoculture. No age is without its struggles and trials but deep is the dread that in surrendering our traditional settled ways of life for the cheap comforts of modern civilization, I risk becoming the lesser son of greater fathers, that in my pursuit of careerism and the American dream the memory of old days, of old countries, should become a wisp in my mind, and the seed of love for one’s heritage and story should never be planted in the hearts of my own children, to stir their imagination and drive their hope for our lost home in Jerusalem. As a humble college student, I can not purchase a thousand acres for Pascua and bequeath Josué bricks and mortar to build homes, but I wish him luck. He and his fellows are undertaking a valiant odyssey to reclaim what was lost. Perhaps, when they succeed, others will be inspired in their own corners of the American dominions. Perhaps someday I will write Mr. Hernandez a Christmas card from Ville du Nord, Minnesota, while my children watch the snow fall softly not on some undistinguished skyline of nondescript high rises, but upon the fields and woods that their father has tended with his own hands. Afterwards, we will bundle up and trek through the snow to our little village parish and in timeless, eternal connection to the church in Florida, the church of tomorrow, the church of the patriarchs of old, we will welcome the Christchild into this world.

            ¡Viva Cristo Rey, y Viva Pascua Florida!