Hey - does anyone have $27.5 million?

Better make it an even $30M. We have some building to do...

Have you read the news lately? It’s awful. I checked in with the world over the Thanksgiving weekend. Has it gotten worse lately, or is that just the perspective of someone who hasn’t been paying attention in a long time? 

I don’t mean “worse” in the sense that “things are getting more dangerous.” Are they? Maybe. There have always been wars and rumors of wars. It seems that the cities are determined to chew themselves to bits, but haven’t they always? No, when I say “worse,” I mean the tone and rhetoric of people who ought to have a little more dignity. The lies, crass political maneuvering, and bitchy back-and-forth give me the impression that it’s all about to fall apart. It’s a huge reason why I’ve had no desire to go “topical” with this thing - it would be too easy to fall to the level of, “Can you believe what [that person] said?” It sure would make topic-generation easy…

Don’t get me started on social media. That’s a race to the gutter. I try to like and repost things of a positive nature so as to train the algorithms to keep it at least PG-rated, but still, spend a half-second too long in your scroll on any kind of garbage and the algos dutifully serve you up more of the same.

Yeah, I know. “Okay, grandpa.”

I, and most of my friends and family, would love nothing more than to get out. It seems impossible, though. The culture is everywhere we go. You can seek the good, you can live as a monastic within the city of Babylon, and the cultural rot and ooze seep through the cracks in your home. Here in our home, where we’re not just helicopter parents, but Apache attack helicopter parents, kitted out with a full load of JDAMs (yes, I know Apaches don’t carry them. Just stop.) We’re still fighting the culture. It doesn’t help that our oldest son has been diligently working on becoming a YouTuber. His “beat” is LEGO, which is an innocent as could be (although it’s only a matter of time before they start selling polyamorous throuple Minifig sets - “complete with surrogate non-binary twins!”). He is innocent, although he’s a 14-year-old boy, and you know how the world works. He said something “sucks” the other day, and while in and of itself, that doesn’t mean he’s a casualty of the culture, it means the lingo of the world has left a mark.

We went down to Dallas last week to see a family we haven’t seen in almost two years. My wife and I are godparents to one of their boys. We got to know them back at our pattern-disrupting Melkite Greek-Catholic church in Virginia, but we and they had to leave the DC area for work opportunities, like so many other youngish families who were killing themselves to just to live above the poverty line in that environment.

It was so good to see them again. I think our combined nine kids hit every age between about five-years-old and sixteen, and yet they all got along as though no time had elapsed, as though the combined six or seven feet grown made no difference whatsoever. 

Bob was there, too. He had recently joined the church in VA, but he had to leave to start work in Dallas. Seeing him there with our friends gave the impromptu gathering a feel of migration. Of great cultural tectonic plates shifting, and we’re just along for the ride.

“Spamalot” came up again. Not the Broadway show, but the Plan. “Spamalot” was the name of this crazy idea we had to build our own “intentional community” a la Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option” and, I think “Live Not By Lies.”

There were a few ginormous properties in Northern Virginia that begged for us to acquire and colonize. There were a few castles, believe it or not, but there was one property we had our eyes on: the Trappe Rd Estate. 

Could either of our families afford this $27.5 million property that makes “luxurious” look cheap? Hah. No. Not even close, but it’s definitely within reach of our wildest dreams. But what if we were to get enough like-minded families together, negotiate the price to something within our solar system, and then build a self-sufficient community? It could have a monastery, of course, outlying homes for all the community members, a church with a shiny onion dome, and restaurants and stables, among other things, for revenue generation. I mean, the basement of this place would make a ridiculously good five-star restaurant…

Critics could find dozens of reasons why this insular, contra mundum lifestyle would fail. I could do that - and I’m hearing nothing but downsides from similar “intentional communities” around the country - Ave Maria in Florida being chief among them. I’ve heard grumblings about the incredible Clear Creek Abbey, not too far from us here in Tulsa. And even the Amish, with their well-established communities, managed to produce enough dissidents to spark a grotesque reality show about their communities’ alleged hypocrisy and dysfunction. 

It’s a danger. I get it.

This is a wild and audacious idea that one can easily argue is a cowardly flight from the World, rather than thoughtful, productive, culture-changing engagement with it. Okay, I can see that, too, but when you’re trying to raise good and decent human beings in a culture that profits from the destruction of innocence, these ideals seem foolish. 

My kids aren’t soldiers. Not yet. They’re children in formation. As someone who’s been building in the midst of a battlefield for the better part of two decades, I’m fairly partial to having a quiet, life-giving environment in which to hear, respond and embody the good. I want our kids to be whole before having to engage with a world that couldn’t give less of a damn about your logical syllogisms and your outdated moral frameworks. 

The day-to-day challenges of life immediately push this vision to some far-off wish list. “Sounds great!” We say, knowing very well that we’re not going to do anything like this. But…what if we did? What if those of us who aren’t just fed up with what we don’t like took the steps to build what we do? How could we not do this? 

I want to say this is “Just a thought,” or as a certain radio pastor used to say on WMAL back in Va, “Not a sermon - just a thought.” But it’s more than that. Given what seems to be coming, how could we not do this?