Purple Pilled

It has been a month and a half since I've had any nicotine in my system. Thanks be to God. Building on the momentum of paying more attention to my health now that I'm over 40, I decided in solidarity with my wife to follow the whole food-plant based diet recommended to her by her Napro doctor to help us get and stay pregnant. So no meat, no dairy (and no caffeine). Pretty extreme on the surface, but also pretty beneficial in a lot of ways.

We've been feeling pretty good on the diet for a few weeks now, and I've even lost some weight too. But I'm not immune to temptation. When I saw an ad for two dozen donuts for $13 on Friday the 13th, I got a hankering so strong that I drove to the nearest Krispy Kreme store (half an hour away!), bought two dozen donuts, and ate five in a sitting. Mea maxima culpa. 

There's nothing wrong with a Krispy Kreme donut here and there every once in a while. But as I was chatting with a buddy on the phone this evening, he made a comment that stuck with me: 

"The Devil takes a good thing and takes it to extremes."

He is right. I should mention that this buddy of mine is just a good hearted, sensible Catholic guy. He has been my kind of 'canary in a cage' the past year or so. He was feeling social media wasn't such a good thing for him last year, and jumped off. He got me thinking about that, and a few months later I had departed as well. He also was a measured sense of reason when it came to issues of talking about the vax, and because I trusted his intent and sense of reason which seemed to square with my own, I put a good bit of stock in what he had to say. And we both have been feeling pretty disillusioned with the #metradtoo tribal movement of Extra-Catholica Catholicism, though we both attend and love TLM. 

We've both noticed that a lot of Catholic big name trads are starting to really drift towards the fringes and/or gone off the rails. These are the Red Pilled Catholics (as opposed to Blue Pilled "normies") who have woken up to the matrix of Novus Ordo beige Catholicism, and have added healthy doses of anti-mask/anti-vax/anti-pope/anti-NWO extra-catholica toppings to their faith. Which is fine, except that the fence around the property tends to get built up pretty high as a consequence so that new-comers feel they need to don the extra apparel to make an appointment. I've been trying to figure it out, but maybe it's just what my friend said, 

"The Devil takes a good thing and takes it to extremes."

I think the drug of followings+social media+sometimes monetization equates with the temptation towards consistently having to raise the bar to get them clicks. We were talking about organizations like Catholic Answers and their apologists, who are on pretty solid ground catechetically, and I mentioned how they can be sensibly 'boring' (in a good way) in that they don't sensationalize the faith or its claims. The same goes for slow steady financial growth through passive investing in boring, low-cost index funds versus, say, riding the wave of bitcoin mining or margin-calls. "Boring" in these scenarios is not a pejorative; in fact, it's a laudable expression of the underrated virtues of prudence, temperance, and moderation. 

So what's with the title of this post? What is a purple pill? I'm not sure, as I just made it up for those who maybe, like me, are feeling a lil' mix of Normie and Eyes Wide Open. If we were presented by Morpheus with a choice of Faith OR Reason ("You can only choose one")....well, it's a non sequitor for a Catholic, is it not? What does it mean to be saved by faith AND works? Live by faith AND reason? Tradition AND scripture? Or even just the way the saints who lived in sanctity and the mind and heart of Christ (Red Pilled) but who were still walking among and serving the "normies" on this earth who have not yet finished the race and been crowned with Eternal Life.

I see some of these Red-Pilled folk and maybe it's just like staring at the sun for too long; prudence dictates we protect our eyes during a solar eclipse. Even the saints who experienced the ecstasy of the Divine did so often in glimpses, rather than engulfment 24/7.

But then I'm also living among a sea of Blue-Pilled people asleep at the wheel, even in the Church. I've seen too much, peered down on my knees into too many rabbit holes to know that I can't be an ostrich with his head in the sand. And yet I still need to live my daily life, provide a salary, raise my kids, love my wife, serve my community.

My counter to my friend's claim is that there is, in fact, one thing that we should be extreme in, and that is love. We are living through Mt 24:12, a time where what is written is being fulfilled, "because of the abundance of evil, the love of many will grow cold." And so we must be extreme in love to become saints. But extremes in religious posturing, red-pilled postings, hard-core judgments, doomsday prepping and predictions, I'll take a pass. We are to be wise as serpents AND innocent as doves. Maybe I'll try my hand at being a red-pilled Normie and see how far I get.