Latest / The Catholic Current / Novel Prophecies Pt. 7 - Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.) 8/28/26

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Novel Prophecies Pt. 7 - Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J.) 8/28/26 · The Catholic Current

0:00
This is The Catholic Current with Father Robert
0:03
McTague. So, very blunt
0:07
formulation that J.F. Powers often used was God doesn't like crap. Like, it's got to
0:11
be sort of, uh, he said it, not me.
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So I'm just— but this idea that it has to first of all
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be good fiction, and then we'll talk about, you know, its other merits. But if
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you— if it doesn't work on that level of craft and, and form
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and plot, then it won't work on a theological
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level either.
0:33
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of
0:37
Jesus, your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world
0:40
and the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross
0:43
Studios, your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app.
0:47
We proclaim the fullness of truth with clarity and charity.
0:50
As always, let's start with prayer. In the name of the Father,
0:53
Son, and the Holy Spirit. Almighty God, through the intercession of Saint Ignatius Loyola,
0:57
we ask that you pour forth your Holy Spirit upon us, a spirit of discernment,
1:01
that we might hear your voice and obey your command. In the name of the
1:04
Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Hey friends, it's Friday here at The Catholic
1:08
Current. You know what that means? You and me, let's talk about this, walking through
1:12
a complex issue together. I am continuing with our series called Novel
1:16
Prophecies. This is part 7. I'm pleased to say that
1:20
people have been responding very warmly. They like the idea of me walking through
1:24
some important future-oriented fiction so
1:28
that we can look at our own times and our near future.
1:32
In a clearer light. And this is a short story.
1:35
Now you can buy it online, or I'm
1:39
also going to have Mr. Producer— excuse me, Mr. Engineer— link to the
1:43
PDF if you just want to download the PDF. If you buy it online,
1:46
it's 50 pages. If you print it out on the PDF, it's, it's only
1:50
25. It'd take a half hour, 40 minutes
1:54
to read, and it's called The Machine Stops by
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E.M. Forster. Didn't know about this. I stumbled upon
2:02
it doing research for, for the series, and it was published
2:05
in 1909. And that should stop us
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in our tracks because of what he
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foresaw. Now, 1909,
2:18
radio in the home, certainly not a thing.
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Telephones are still relatively rare.
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Television, computers, the internet unimaginable,
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and yet he's writing about something that sounds like it could be written
2:36
today or in our near future. Now, there are people who were sounding the
2:40
alarm regarding our unhealthy relationship
2:45
with technology. I think of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves
2:49
to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,
2:52
and that was written in the '80s, and it was Telling Cautionary
2:56
Tales About Television. And then later there's a book called The
3:01
Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,
3:04
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again.
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I can go on and on, but this is 1909.
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I am boggled by that. So I'm just going to read
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to you the, the opening paragraph of this short story.
3:24
Listen to this. Remember, written in 1909,
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probably with a dip pen or a fountain pen.
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Foster writes, imagine, if you can, a small room,
3:36
hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee.
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It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp,
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yet it is filled with a soft radiance.
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There are no apparatus for ventilation, yet the air is fresh.
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There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my
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meditation opens, this room is throbbing with
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melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre,
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by its side a reading desk— that is all the furniture—
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and in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh,
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a woman, about 5 feet high, with a face as white
4:15
as a fungus. It is to her that the little
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room belongs. Isn't that boggling?
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This is, you know, a century before when we
4:27
nested during COVID And there's
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an electric bell ringing. As the woman touched a switch and
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the music was silent, I suppose I must see
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who it is, she thought, and set her chair in motion.
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The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery,
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and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still
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rang. Who is it? she called. Her voice was irritable,
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for she had been interrupted often since the music began.
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Listen to this. He says she knew
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several thousand people. In certain directions,
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human intercourse had advanced enormously.
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Now, we know this on social media where, you know, you've got 1,000
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friends on Facebook or, you know, 10,000 followers on
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YouTube or X and so on. You know,
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I, against my better judgment, I have a personal Substack
5:26
account and the only thing I put there are my sermons and
5:30
the Catholic Current. And every now and again you see, you know, so-and-so is
5:34
following you. And so-and-so was following this Substack,
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that Substack, and 300 others.
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I said, oh, how is it possible?
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I mean, if it were your full-time job and you work 12
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hours a day, 7 days a week, how could you follow 300
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Substack accounts? And yet here
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we are. So she's disgruntled because someone
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has interrupted her music. Remember,
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there's no instruments, there's no musician, and remember, there's no
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radio yet. And he first saw this,
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so she, uh, she touched the isolation
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knob so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched
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the lighting apparatus and the little room was plunged into darkness.
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Now remember, this is before electric lighting in the home was a common thing.
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Uh, be quick. And she said it was fully 15 seconds
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before the round plate that she held in her hands began
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to glow. A faint blue light shot across it,
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darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her
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son who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see
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her. He foresaw FaceTime.
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He first saw FaceTime. So they start a conversation and her son
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says, I want you to come see me. And the
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mother says, but I can see you. What more do you want?
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And he says, I want to see you not through the Machine.
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Now in this story, Machine has a capital M, just like we
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capitalize Internet, you know, as if it were a
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proper name. And she says, oh, hush,
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you mustn't say anything against the Machine. Why not,
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Mother? One mustn't.
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So there is a reverence
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for the Machine that provides everything
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for her. Jumping ahead, she talks about all the buttons in
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her little beehive of a room. There was the button
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that produced literature, and there were, of course, the buttons by which
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she communicated with her friends. The room through it contained
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nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the
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world. And she's talking about the crazy idea
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her son has that they should meet in person.
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She says the clumsy system of public gatherings
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had long since been abandoned. And she's giving
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lectures, and she says neither she nor her audience stirred from
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their rooms. Seated in her armchair, she spoke while
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they, in their armchairs, heard her fairly well and saw
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her fairly well. And so there it is.
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You've got Zoom. And then she's
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complaining that she didn't like her bed. She said
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the bed was not to her liking. It was too large, and she had a
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feeling for a small bed. Complaint was useless, for beds were of the same dimension
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all over the world. And to have an alternative size would have
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involved vast alterations in the machine.
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Well, and then she, uh, she has a little analog
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book, and it's called The Book of the Machine.
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And in a certain sense, it kind of reminds me of AI.
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It says, in the Book of the Machine were instructions against
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every possible contingency. If she was hot or cold
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or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word, she went to the book and
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it told her which button to push. The Central Committee published
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it. In accordance with a growing habit, it was richly bound.
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Sitting up in the bed, she took it reverently in her hands. She glanced round
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the glowing room as if someone had been watching her. Then, half ashamed,
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half joyful, she murmured, O machine!
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And raised the volume to her lips. I'm thinking of a very
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good Catholic family I know. And their oldest girl
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is a very, very sweet, devout girl. I think she's a sophomore in high school.
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And her mother had to admonish her and said, sweetie, put down
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the phone when I'm talking to you. And the girl said,
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okay, Mom, but can I leave
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the phone where I can still see it? Oh,
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machine. And she pressed it to her lips.
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I think that's the direction they're going. I mean, I remember several years
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ago some, you know, brain surgeon in
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California had required all 6th graders to get a tablet.
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And they told— the parents told the girl, said, hey, it's the weekend.
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Have a life instead of the tablet. And they took the tablet away. And she
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reacted like a meth addict and assaulted her parents
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and destroyed the house to the point where the police
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had to come and taser her. Because she had
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become that addicted. We see
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this in our own lives with people whom we love, people whom we know,
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and yet E.M. Forster saw this in
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1909, and he has a
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remedy. I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTeague, your host every day at The Catholic
11:01
Current. Remember, our rallying cry at The Catholic Current is Christus Mundo, Mundus Christo— bringing
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Christ to the world and the world to Christ. We do it because our Lord
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says so, for the greater glory of God, the love of our neighbor, labor in
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the salvation of our own soul. After the broadcast today,
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go to thestationofthecross.com, get our resources list,
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download our audio as podcasts. If you can find audio, you can find
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Take us to your family and friends. Together we'll take it to the whole world.
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Back in just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
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You're listening to The Catholic Current with Father Robert McTague
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from the Station of the Cross Catholic
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Current.
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Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus,
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your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and
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the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross Studios,
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your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app.
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Cross Catholic Media Network. By subscribing to iCatholic Mobile,
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you help fund programs that defend our Catholic faith. Here we are
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Friday at the Catholic Current. You know what that means— another round of Let's Talk
12:59
About This. We walk through a complex issue together. We're up to part 7 in
13:03
my series called Novel Prophecies, and we're reviewing a short story
13:07
written by E.M. Forster called The Machine Stops, written in
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1909. And I want to emphasize
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how the foresight, the prescience that Forster had.
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Now, how bad is machine addiction
13:23
today? Well, let me, uh, give you another example. A tragic story came
13:27
out of India recently. It looks like a teenage son and his
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parents went off a cliff together. Well, how did that happen?
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Well, he wanted a new iPhone I forget if he was 16 or 19
13:39
years old, and his parents said no. So he ran to the
13:43
nearby cliff and threatened to throw himself off because there was just no
13:47
reason to go on living if he didn't have the latest iPhone.
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He went to throw himself off and his father tried to stop him.
13:54
He got dragged off the cliff too. Wife and mother saw father
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and husband and son go off the cliff and she threw herself off
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the cliff. And you say, well, but Father, that's— this guy had something
14:06
else wrong with him if he was going to throw himself
14:11
off the cliff because he couldn't get a new iPhone. Okay, fair.
14:14
But in the gaming world,
14:18
uh, there is about to be released the hot game that
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supposedly everybody who's anybody had been waiting for for years,
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Grand Theft Auto 6. Just leave it alone.
14:30
Don't look it up. And the Army is offering a recruitment bonus
14:34
for soldiers. We will give you a 4-day
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weekend to do nothing but play Grand Theft Auto 6
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if you re-enlist. If you give the Army another
14:46
2 or 4 years of your life, you'll get a 4-day— I
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mean, that seems to be a better deal than, you know— no, I'm not gonna
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say it. I'm not gonna say it. Um, we're in trouble,
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and Foster foresaw the
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trouble that we're in. Let me give you, uh, some more examples.
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So she, um, she sleeps
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in her little hive cell, and not because of, you know,
15:13
things like sunlight. Listen to this: she made
15:17
the room dark and slept. She awoke and made the room light.
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She ate and exchanged ideas with her friends, and listened to
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music and attended lectures. She made the room dark and slept.
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Above her, beneath her, and around her, the Machine,
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capital M, hummed eternally.
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She did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her
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ears. The earth carrying her hummed as it sped through
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silence, turning her now to the invisible sun,
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now to the invisible stars. She awoke and
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made the room light. So, you know, when Gen Z says, you know, go out,
15:54
touch grass, she would be horrified at
15:59
the idea because light and dark, the cycle
16:03
of hours and rhythm and seasons, it's all gone.
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It's all gone. The machine provides
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a cocoon for her. And in that cocoon is
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all the material stimulation she could want
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to the point that she's
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forgotten any other way of life.
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There are students I've taught who
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did not exist before there was Amazon.
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Think about what that means, taking Amazon for granted. Again,
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I'm going to— indulge me, please. I'm going to read a paragraph.
16:44
The main character, by the way, her name is Vashti.
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She said— of course, Forster writes, of course she knew all
16:51
about the communication system. There was nothing mysterious in it.
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She would summon a car and it would fly with her down the tunnel until
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it reached the lift that communicated with the airship station.
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And the airship station was part of a system that had been used
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for many years long before the universal establishment
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of the Machine. And of course she had studied the civilisation
17:15
that had immediately preceded her own, the civilisation that had
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mistaken the functions of the System, that had used it for bringing people
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to things instead of for bringing things
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to people. Those funny old days when men went for change
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of air instead of changing the air in their rooms. And yet
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she was frightened of the tunnel. She had not seen it since her last child
17:39
was born. It curved, but not quite as she remembered.
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It was brilliant, but not quite as brilliant as the lecture had suggested.
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Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience.
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She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up
17:57
again. She shrank from the terrors of direct
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experience. I remember talking with students who had found Miss Wonderful
18:05
or Mr. Wonderful, and they would do all this texting
18:09
back and forth. And I said, you know, that device in your
18:12
hand, it communicates voice too. Oh no, no, no, no,
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I said, a phone call would be too
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intimate. And that reminds me of— try to phrase this
18:24
delicately— a friend of mine refers to it as the devil's
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pixels, you know, pornography. And sometimes you
18:33
talk with a heartbroken spouse who discovers that her husband has a
18:37
porn addiction, which is horrifying for everyone. And she
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would ask, well, what do those women have that I don't have? And I
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said, that's absolutely the wrong question. It's because of what you
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do have. It's because you're real,
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you're 3-dimensional, you're finite. And you have
18:56
priorities and limits and preferences because
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it takes effort to get to know you and appreciate
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you. Ultimately, because you're a mystery.
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Where the pixels, that's just
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2-dimensional. It's flat. It's non-demanding.
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It's always available. And if
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someone gets bored, there's always another one.
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There's always novelty. There's always something
19:29
else one click away. You never get
19:33
to the last page or the bottom of the internet.
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And we've set people up to be addicted
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to that. We have rearranged brain
19:45
chemistry Well, we, you know, when I
19:49
studied some brain chemistry when I was teaching medical ethics
19:53
and we had to talk about electronic addiction and pornography addiction and so on,
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and especially when your brain is very young, when it's adolescent, it hasn't
20:01
stopped baking yet, so to speak. And if you're a male
20:05
and, you know, so by design you are especially susceptible to
20:10
visual imagery, God help you. You got to be really
20:13
careful what you see. But the neurologist would say that nerves that, uh,
20:18
fire together, wire together. So when you habituate
20:22
yourself towards something, you really create grooves
20:26
in your nervous system to make the repeated action easier.
20:30
And if you get addicted to the illusion and stimulation of pornography,
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you've messed up your brain in a way— in a manner that's going to take
20:40
a while for it to recover. So she's
20:44
very upset Vashti, the main character, at the very
20:47
thought of stepping outside of her cell, and she collapses
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on her bed. Listen to this. Immediately,
20:55
an enormous apparatus fell onto her out of the ceiling.
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A thermometer was automatically laid upon her heart.
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She lay powerless. Cool pads soothed
21:07
her forehead. She drank the medicine that the
21:11
doctor projected into her mouth, and the machinery retired into
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the ceiling. Pow. And that was
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it. So she is constantly being monitored,
21:22
she's constantly being observed, and they
21:26
are anticipating her needs. Now I want
21:30
to do a little bit of a further reflection, and,
21:33
um, because now you, you can get
21:36
AI boyfriends and girlfriends. And I remember
21:41
reading a story in Japan where this guy had I
21:44
guess kind of an AI girlfriend. It looked like an anime figure
21:49
and a lava lamp. Remember the lava lamps from the '70s? Or you
21:53
can look them up. They're retro. I think they're cool again now. And what
21:57
was interesting was that the company was discontinuing the line. It wasn't going
22:01
to support it with patches and upgrades. And so eventually his AI
22:05
girlfriend in the lava lamp who would turn on lights for him and send
22:09
him gifts for his birthday on Amazon, etc., because it was all computer-based,
22:14
she was going to die. His constant companion,
22:19
his artificial companion, his AI companion of several years, visible in
22:23
a lava lamp, who had a voice and would send him messages, etc., and Christmas
22:27
presents, wasn't going to be supported anymore. It was going to be like—
22:31
it was going to go to the graveyard like Windows 10. And he
22:36
was desolate, but he had no experience
22:40
of dealing with human beings. And so this is part of the trauma of woman
22:44
Vashti is to go to see her son Kuno, she has to travel and
22:49
be around people. And she had read some
22:53
of the older literature before the time of the Machine,
22:57
capital N. And she says all the
23:00
old literature with its praise of nature and
23:04
its fear of nature rang fake as
23:07
the prattle of a child. And as she
23:11
thinks about traveling, Foster writes,
23:15
her horror of direct experience had returned.
23:20
Oh, machine, she murmured, caressed her book,
23:24
the book of the machine, and was comforted.
23:29
And so her travel is horrified,
23:34
is horrifying for her, and at one point as she's
23:39
basically, she's on kind of an airplane. She stumbles, and the
23:43
stewardess reaches out a hand to steady
23:47
her. How dare you! she exclaimed. You forget
23:51
yourself! The woman was confused and apologized for not
23:55
having let her fall. People never touched
24:00
one another. The custom had become obsolete
24:04
owing to the machine. How we have
24:07
advanced, she said, thanks to the machine. Now,
24:11
she had 3 children. I— how to say
24:15
this politely— I don't know how you maintain social
24:18
distancing and still end
24:23
up with a conceived child. I don't know if— he
24:28
didn't talk about that in detail, and my imagination turns away
24:31
from the prospect. My point is this: that the
24:35
Machine, capital M, begins to dehumanize
24:40
people by cutting them off from their bodies and
24:43
from their fellows. And she is bereft
24:48
of resource to travel to see her son.
24:52
What happens if the Machine begins to
24:56
fail? That's what we'll talk about in the next segment. I'm Jesuit Father
25:00
Robert McTeague, your host here every day of The Catholic Current.
25:03
After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com, get our
25:07
resources list, download our audio as podcasts. Wherever you can find
25:11
audio, you can find us. Follow us on your favorite platform, write a 5-star review.
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We need to attract the attention of the listeners so these conversations get the
25:19
attention they deserve. Everything you need to take us to your family and friends,
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we give to you. Together, let's take it to the whole world. We can do
25:25
it with you. We cannot do without you. Let's do this good
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work together. Let's strive to be so much more than merely
25:33
relevant. Back in just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
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26:52
Here we are, part 7 of our ongoing series called Novel Prophecies.
26:56
We're making our through a short story by E.M. Forster called The Machine
27:01
Stops. Remember, this is written in 1909,
27:05
and I think it first foresees where we are and where we're
27:08
heading. So Vashti, the main character,
27:12
reluctantly travels around the world to see her son Kuno.
27:17
So finally they meet up. She's traumatized by the travel.
27:21
She arrives at her son's room, which exactly resembled her own.
27:25
She might well declare that the visit was superfluous.
27:28
The buttons, the knobs, the reading desk with the Book—
27:32
it's the Book of the Machine, capital M— the temperature, the atmosphere, the illumination,
27:37
all were exactly the same. And if Kuno himself,
27:42
flesh of her flesh, stood close beside her at last,
27:46
what profit was it in that? She was too well-bred
27:50
to shake him by the hand.
27:53
And she wants to know why it is that
27:57
she had to make this travel to see him. She says, here I am.
28:01
I've had the most terrible journey and greatly retarded the
28:04
development of my soul. It is not worth it, Kuno. It is not worth it.
28:07
My time is too precious. The sunlight almost touched
28:11
me. Think about what that means. So he's explaining
28:15
to her about why it is he
28:20
wants to go outside, why he
28:24
wants to leave the cell, why he doesn't want to live like everybody
28:28
else. He says, I want to find a way of my
28:32
own. A way of your own? she whispered.
28:36
But that would be wrong. Why?
28:39
her son asked. The question shocked her beyond measure.
28:43
And he accuses her, you're beginning to worship The Machine.
28:49
And, uh, yeah, so he's—
28:53
they don't know what to say to each other. They have become unintelligible
28:57
to one another. And she gets angry and says, I worship nothing.
29:01
I am most advanced. I don't think you're religious, for there's no
29:05
such thing as religion left. All the fear and superstition
29:08
that existed once have been destroyed by the
29:12
Machine. And then Foster explains about
29:15
how, uh, the cult of the machine
29:19
removes us from our body. Listen to this. Um,
29:23
he says, by these days it was a demerit to be
29:27
muscular. Each infant was examined at birth,
29:31
and all who promised undue strength were destroyed.
29:34
Humanitarians may protest, but would have been no true kindness
29:38
to let an athlete live. He never would have been happy in the state
29:43
of life to which the machine had him. He would have yearned for
29:46
trees to climb, rivers to bathe in, meadows and hills
29:49
against which he might measure his body.
29:53
Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not?
29:57
So this is just going to make us inhuman
30:03
because we are separated from the body.
30:08
And finally he says, no, I want to, I want to go out into the,
30:11
into the world. I want to see the sunlight. I want to see the stars.
30:14
I want to breathe real air.
30:18
And she scolds her son, don't,
30:22
don't talk of these terrible things. You make me miserable.
30:26
You're throwing civilization away.
30:29
And he says, one of the benefits of going outside is
30:33
that you don't hear the machine. He says to his mother,
30:37
the machine hums. Did you know that? Its hum penetrates
30:42
our blood and may even guide our thoughts. Who knows?
30:45
And she doesn't know what to do. She begins
30:49
to cry because she
30:54
knows that they have become unintelligible to
30:58
each other, and he admits, we are 2 different mothers,
31:03
and she says, look, the machine gives you everything. It gives you all the music
31:07
that you want when you want it. It gives you all the content
31:12
They call it lectures in the book, uh,
31:15
whenever you want it. What more could you want? And she
31:19
says to him, can you not see? Can that all you
31:23
lecturers, you influencers, uh, see that it
31:27
is we that are dying and that down here the only thing that
31:31
really lives is the machine? We created the machine
31:34
to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will
31:37
now. It has robbed us of the sense
31:41
of space and the sense of touch. It has blurred every human
31:45
relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act. It has
31:49
paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it
31:53
compels us to worship it. The machine develops,
31:58
the machine proceeds, but not to our
32:02
goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course
32:06
through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would
32:09
let us die. Is it too much
32:13
to say that that's where we're heading
32:18
to now? There are— I've
32:23
read reports of people with suicidal ideation when
32:27
ChatGPT goes down because that's, that's their
32:31
friend. That's the one who listens.
32:37
And they go back and forth,
32:40
and finally she leaves. She gladly, gladly goes
32:44
back to her cell, and he predicts
32:48
that eventually the machine would begin to break down,
32:52
and no one can imagine life without the machine.
32:56
And then at the bottom of the page, there's a paragraph that's
32:59
one sentence long. Foster writes, The troubles began
33:03
quietly, long before she
33:06
was conscious of them. Reminds me of something
33:10
Hemingway wrote, you know, uh, how did you go broke? And he said, very,
33:14
very slowly, and then all at once. So the machine breaks
33:19
down, and, uh, so people begin to
33:23
complain because there's the committee of the mending apparatus
33:28
And finally, the Committee of the Mending Apparatus admits that the
33:32
Mending Apparatus itself needs to be fixed, but don't
33:35
worry, because complaints about the Mending Apparatus can
33:40
be sent to the Central Committee, where they will be reviewed in turn.
33:44
So she sends off her complaint, and Foster writes,
33:48
Obscurely worried, she resumed her
33:52
life. And what that reminds me of, it's a novel we're not going to read
33:55
in this series, but I do recommend, called Alas, Babylon.
33:59
Set in Southwest Florida in the 1950s, and the Cold War
34:02
is really heating up. And it's about a community that survives
34:06
after a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And there's
34:10
Mrs. McGillicuddy, and she's doing her breakfast dishes
34:13
and looking out the kitchen window. And at the far rim of her,
34:17
of her horizon, she sees a mushroom cloud, and she says
34:21
to herself, oh, that can't be good. I suppose
34:25
I should pick up a few extra groceries tomorrow morning.
34:29
I wonder where I left my checkbook. And then she goes back
34:33
to washing the dishes because the normalcy bias
34:38
is so profound that even when
34:41
you see a mushroom cloud on the horizon, it doesn't register that the party's
34:45
over. So eventually, even the mending
34:49
apparatus isn't working properly. The committee for
34:53
the mending apparatus isn't working properly. The central committee isn't receiving complaints.
34:58
And she laments, there never was such an
35:02
unfortunate woman as myself. I can never be sure
35:06
of my music now. It gets worse and worse each time I summon it.
35:10
Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer.
35:14
The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that
35:18
latter day had become so subservient that they readily
35:22
adapted themselves to every caprice of the machine.
35:27
So they just keep resigning themselves to,
35:30
to their fate. And finally, here come the
35:34
conspiracy theorists or the conspiracy realists. Someone,
35:38
uh, uh, is meddling with the machine.
35:42
Someone is trying to make himself king, to reintroduce the personal element
35:47
Punish that man with homelessness! To the rescue! Avenge the
35:51
machine! Avenge the machine! War!
35:54
Kill the man who tampered with the machine!
35:58
But the Committee of the Mending Apparatus now came forward and allayed
36:03
the panic with well-chosen words. It confessed that the Mending
36:07
Apparatus was itself in need of repair.
36:12
And then finally the machine breaks down, and what is
36:16
written here is heartbreaking. Then she broke
36:20
down, for with the cessation of activity came
36:24
an unexpected terror: silence.
36:29
She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her.
36:33
It did kill many thousands of people outright.
36:37
Ever since her birth, she had been surrounded by the steady
36:41
hum of It was to the ear what artificial air
36:45
was to the lungs, and agonizing pains
36:48
shot across her head, and scarcely knowing what she did,
36:51
she stumbled forward and pressed the unfamiliar
36:55
button, the one that opened the door of her
36:59
cell. And then she sees other people outside.
37:04
People at any time repelled her, Forster wrote. And these were
37:09
nightmares from her worst dreams.
37:13
I won't talk about how the story ends because, you know,
37:15
spoiler, etc. But is he wrong?
37:20
Is it so far-fetched?
37:23
Aren't we umbilically attached to the
37:27
machine? And look, I am surrounded by miles of
37:31
cables. I've got Bluetooth everything out the wazoo.
37:35
I get deliveries from Amazon. I don't do DoorDash,
37:39
but I get deliveries from Amazon. I can't
37:43
do work and pay the bills unless I connect to the internet.
37:46
But I hope, I really hope,
37:50
that we also do something to maintain
37:54
a genuinely human connection.
37:59
You know, I have connections around the world, many continents,
38:03
and I'm grateful. For that. But this Saturday, pray for
38:07
me. It will be my birthday, the Feast of the Beheading of Saint John
38:11
the Baptist. A great day to come into the world, I should think.
38:15
And, um, I'll get well wishes from people from Europe
38:20
and Asia and so on, but some people will actually come
38:24
to see me and we'll celebrate in person
38:29
and we'll shake hands and hug and pat each other on the back.
38:32
And we'll have good food and drink, and we'll tell stories,
38:36
and we'll pray, and we'll laugh.
38:41
All those things that the machine can't
38:45
do for us despite its best
38:49
efforts. So, all right, we got a minute left in this segment. How am I
38:53
going to wrap this up? Touch grass, as the
38:57
Zoomers would say. Talk to people in
39:00
person. Hold real things in
39:05
your hand. Somehow find a way to listen to
39:09
live music. The Word was made
39:13
flesh and dwelt among us. Because of the Incarnation,
39:16
the human body and human senses have an identity, destiny, and dignity
39:21
that the machine can never offer,
39:25
but it can obscure that dignity.
39:28
It can make us forget our identity and
39:32
our destiny, and I don't want that to happen.
39:37
And friends, precisely because we, uh, we've gotten some
39:41
very good feedback on Novel Prophecies, we're going to continue next
39:44
week. We're going to have part 8 of our Novel Prophecies series,
39:48
trying to read them roughly in chronological Order. I'm going to discuss
39:52
with you the novel It Can't Happen Here,
39:55
written by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1935.
39:59
You want to stay with us for the rest of the hour? Coming up next,
40:02
Week in Readiness, reviewing the headlines of the week in light of the upcoming Sunday
40:05
scriptures so we all prayed up for Sunday Mass.
40:08
Be part of the conversation. Follow or following by following us on
40:12
Gab. That's gab.com The channel is The Catholic
40:16
Current, and you can influence the conversation. Contact us at stationofthecross.com/askfather.
40:23
Comments, questions, suggestions, recommendations— we want
40:27
to hear from you. stationofthecross.com/askfather. Take this
40:31
to your family and friends. Together we'll take it to the whole world. Back in
40:35
just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
41:01
Have a question or feedback about today's episode? Want to
41:05
suggest a guest or a future topic, go to thestationofthecross.com/askfather
41:12
and help influence the conversation.
41:20
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTighe of the Society of Jesus,
41:23
your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and
41:27
the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross studios,
41:30
your local radio station, the iCatholic radio mobile app. We proclaim
41:33
the fullness of truth with clarity and charity. Here it is
41:37
on a Friday, the last segment, Week in Readiness. You and me, uh,
41:40
we're taking a look at the headlines of the week in light of the upcoming
41:43
Sunday scripture, so be all prayed up for Sunday Mass. You should be aware
41:47
of the fact that I'm recording this on not Friday, so if
41:50
there's a big story that I didn't cover, it's because it, it didn't happen yet.
41:55
But let me tell you about some of the things that I'm following. You know,
41:59
we had talked about The Cult of the Machine
42:02
with this story by Anne Forster. So a very sad story the other
42:06
day in India. A teenage boy wants a new
42:10
iPhone. His parents say no, and he decides
42:15
he cannot go on living, so he runs to throw himself off a cliff.
42:18
The father tries to stop him. He gets dragged off with his son,
42:22
and then the wife and mother sees this and she throws herself
42:25
off the cliff as well. So yeah, it really can get that bad.
42:29
Uh, it really can't. We, we are fostering an addiction because
42:33
we're basically rewiring our brains to become, uh,
42:37
dopamine addicts, and, and that is of course a very bad thing. Uh,
42:41
supposedly the Straits of Hormuz are going to be open again because
42:44
the U.S. Navy has removed the Iranian mines in the
42:48
sea. I hope that's true. I thought that removing mines at
42:51
sea took longer than that. What do I know? My fear is
42:56
that the world is going to learn the hard way how much
43:00
of life on this planet depends on what flows
43:03
through the Strait of Hormuz. And if you think the phrase the machine stops
43:08
is terrifying, wait to see what happens if the Strait of Hormuz isn't
43:12
reliably open sometime soon. So, uh,
43:16
that is, uh, that is very much, uh, on my mind.
43:19
Uh, Catholic churches continue to be vandalized. The Eucharist
43:23
continues to be desecrated, and Catholic
43:28
institutions of higher education celebrate being certified as Laudato
43:32
Si' communities. So there is that.
43:35
Following a case in California,
43:39
there is a little town called Bell, California, and for
43:43
over— gosh, over 100 years,
43:46
there is a carved cross in
43:50
the town square, and he wants it removed because
43:54
reasons. And our friends
43:58
of the Thomas More Society are fighting back against that.
44:01
So good for you. To be a
44:05
welcoming community doesn't mean that
44:09
we can allow Christianity to be erased. I'm sure you've
44:13
been following the very tragic and ugly, ugly story Lindsay
44:17
Clancy, who murdered her 3 children.
44:21
It's a complicated story. There's some discussion of was
44:24
there postpartum depression. I'm not going to get into the weeds
44:28
of that because I haven't followed the story closely. What I find alarming are
44:33
the women who are uncritically celebrating
44:37
and lionizing Lindsay Clancy after she
44:41
had murdered her children. I I don't know what to
44:45
say to that except to say that it's not gonna stop anytime
44:49
soon. There is another story I just
44:53
looked at. I lost the link. I'll summarize it for you. A woman explained
44:57
that she aborted her child because she loved the
45:00
child so much, because, you know,
45:04
this world and all. I,
45:08
I don't know what to say to that. I just don't know
45:12
what to say to that. And oh, we were going to talk about some good
45:15
news. I had some good news here. Where is it?
45:18
There is a, uh,
45:22
a high school that requires as part of its initiation
45:27
ritual for incoming freshmen, you've got to kiss your mother goodbye before you go to
45:31
school. And, and moms really like that. So, okay, so something positive
45:34
that way. I remember growing up I mean, all my life, I can't
45:38
remember a time I didn't do it, but it was just taken for granted that
45:42
whenever I left the house, I'd give mom a kiss and tell her I was
45:45
going, and whenever I came back, I'd give mom a kiss and tell her I
45:49
was back. And I, I don't think I ever entered or left the house
45:52
without doing that, which is something that the machine
45:57
can't provide for. With that in mind,
46:00
let's take a look at the scriptures. If you're following the Novus Ordo calendar of
46:03
the Pauline Rite, we're looking at the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary
46:07
time, Lectionary 124. We've got Jeremiah 20.
46:12
The prophet Jeremiah is being duped because his— this being
46:15
a prophet thing didn't turn out as well as,
46:18
as he, uh, he would have liked. But let's go to
46:23
the Gospel, Matthew 16, because this is hard-hitting.
46:26
Uh, our Lord is predicting the miserable death he's
46:30
going to suffer, and Peter says, no, no, no, we don't— we
46:34
don't— no, we don't want this for you. And our Lord
46:38
rebukes Peter as Satan, as tempter.
46:42
Get behind me, you're an obstacle to me. You're not thinking as God does,
46:45
but as human beings do. So how does God think,
46:50
and how does God think about human life?
46:54
And our Lord says, whoever wishes to come after me must
46:58
deny himself, take up his cross, and follow
47:01
me. Notice what he did not say.
47:05
Whoever wishes to come after me must
47:09
speak his truth.
47:12
Didn't say that. He said, take up your
47:16
cross and follow me. Whoever wishes to save his
47:20
life will lose it. Whoever loses his life for
47:24
my sake will find it. It really is a choice.
47:27
Ultimately to stand before God and say either,
47:32
my will be done, or thy will
47:36
be done. And in either case, God will
47:40
say yes. Think about what that means.
47:44
We can't save ourselves. God can save us, and he chooses to save
47:49
us with us rather than without us. And if we
47:52
finally do say My will be
47:56
done. I don't want what you have to offer.
48:02
God will allow us to live with the eternal consequences of
48:06
that. It is a frightful thing having that much freedom,
48:10
that much power over our lives and our eternity.
48:15
But if we conform our lives to Christ,
48:19
which means living the life of sacrificial love,
48:23
Worshipping God rightly and loving neighbor for
48:28
the love of God, that is the path to truth,
48:31
beauty, goodness, freedom, and everlasting joy.
48:36
And it is the only way to
48:40
truth, beauty, goodness, freedom, and everlasting joy. There is
48:45
no other. So the dress rehearsal for the
48:49
happiness of heaven is to offer God our very best
48:53
in worship, our very best, and also
48:58
to love neighbor for the love of God. Saint Ignatius Loyola
49:02
said the hallmark of spiritual maturity is when we no longer
49:06
love a creature in its own right but only in relation to its Creator
49:10
and Lord. So true love says, because of who God is
49:14
and because of who you are to God, I choose
49:19
to love and serve you, and I would rather never see
49:23
you again than hurt you, dishonor you,
49:27
or worst of all, sin with you.
49:31
That is real love. That is love
49:35
marked and sustained and
49:40
validated and valorized by the cross of Christ.
49:44
We either live and die accordingly or we don't, and eternal
49:49
consequences will follow.
49:52
Please, friend, while there's still time, go to confession,
49:56
conform yourself to Christ, and help others to do the
50:00
same. May God's holy name be praised now and forever. I'm Jesuit
50:04
Father Robert McTeague, your host every day of The Catholic Current. Join us on Monday,
50:07
Monday for another episode of The Catholic Current. Great guest, great topic,
50:11
great conversation. That's how we roll here every day,
50:14
The Catholic Current and The Station of the Cross, where we strive mightily to
50:18
be so much more than merely relevant.
50:21
After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com, get our resources
50:25
list, download our audio as podcasts. Wherever you can find audio,
50:29
you can find us. Take us to your family and friends. Together we'll take it
50:32
to the whole world. Through the intercession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, may God
50:35
Lord surround you with a legion of guardian angels with flaming swords to
50:39
light your path, protect from all harm and every evil, to reach the happiness of
50:42
heaven. May Almighty God bless you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
50:45
Go in peace, and please do pray for me, for I am a sinner.