Let me be clear. Too many artists already raise artificial barriers to creation: they can't write, or think, or paint, they claim, unless they're seated at a pristine desk, with southern light, perfect silence, and a dozen sharpened pencils all pointed west. These are not aids to creation, or marks of real discipline: they are a group of excuses not to create if the conditions are not met. I am not saying, "Don't bother to create unless your whole life is in perfect order." I am saying, "Creation will require your whole life."

For years, I had seen my early commitment to prayer and writing as separate concerns. Now I wondered if my spiritual disciplines and my creative disciplines had been more deeply bound than I knew. The actions of discipline are simple, but the barriers to discipline are spiritual, rooted in anxiety, despair, and fear. And approaching them as if they're simple matters of practicality will only result in the failure that most artists already know so well.

The Curé, as a priest, is slightly different from Thérèse, in that he becomes the suffering Christ. The image of the face in Diary of a Country Priest remains somewhat mysterious, linked to Christ, yet always identified as the Curé's own. At the beginning of the diary he writes about the inner voice of his conscience: “It seemed to me the surface of another consciousness, previously unknown to me, a cloudy mirror in which I feared that a face might suddenly appear. Whose face? Mine, perhaps. A forgotten, rediscovered face.” The conscience, understood traditionally to be the divine voice in the depths of the soul, thus becomes a “consciousness”, or the presence of another person, and the Curé identifies his own face with it, an awareness at a subliminal level his oneness with Christ. At one point he acknowledges, almost humorously, the pathetic look of his face, in a comment to the visiting canon: “'I, Why look at my face,' I said. 'Surely if our lord created it for anything, He made it to be slapped...'”

Max Picard warns in his book The World of Silence, (a philosophic-poetic reflection on the meaning of Silence), that modern man is becoming a "word-machine", a "noise-machine." He says that true speaking emerges only from inner silence, which unites us to the fundamental silence of Being.

Silence is not the locking up of speech, but the necessary precondition for true speech.

Here are some random thoughts from the book that should be in every media missionaries tool-kit:

"The origin of language is impenetrable, like that of every creature, because it came from the perfect love of the Creator. Only if man were to live constantly in perfect love, could he learn the origin of language and of all creatures."

"Language sometimes creates poetry of its own accord and, as it were, all for itself."

Let me begin with a question. Has mass media, digital cultural, poplife, become the major educator of the young? Has it become their primary identity-giver?

And I don't mean just the content that puses across fiber optic lines or races down from geosynched satellites.

Media also teaches with its presence. The "way" in which the content is presented can redirect and transform something that is morally good or at least benign into something that is false and cancerous. More about this McLuham-esque process in later articles.

So what are good people to do when bad media happens to them?

Lets take a step back to address part of the answer.