ST. Gertrude’s Abbey – an at Home Monastic Practice

Tag: social-media

  • Sr. FBI

    by Sr. Organza Pettingfield, OLBQ

    I am not known to be a nosy nun. I may have a pocketbook-sized telescope, a pair of listening devices that fit into a hollowed-out Bible and I once correctly guessed Pam Bondi’s Ulta Beauty account login. (It was BLooDoftheLamb69). But I would never say I was nosy. I was recently in Washington D.C. this weekend for a conference at Georgetown University for former alumni of the school. No. I didn’t actually attend Georgetown, my mom Chiffon Pettingfield couldn’t afford it but she did pay for me to attend a correspondence course in calligraphy. Now I can “get” a degree from anywhere. As a nun, it wasn’t much trouble getting into the conference. A little guilt, my dress habit and a yardstick and the Jesuits roll out the red carpet.

    I have to confess, I didn’t go all the way to D.C. for a conference with a free buffet. I was most interested in a show at the Charles Freer Gallery on rare Japanese rocking chairs. The Freer Gallery is a little hidden jewel box. No tourists. No children. All the Asian art you can handle. I do love a quick trip to D.C. But after paying for the roundtrip airfare, I was a little strapped for cash and was forced to seek alternate accommodations while in Washington. I ended up staying with a delightful gay couple that I’ve never met at their elegant Dupont Circle townhome. They didn’t even know I was there. Quite literally as I couldn’t afford an AirBnB either. So I frogged it. This brings me to the point of my story. I followed Karoline Leavitt home from the White House on Friday afternoon. I borrowed a bike I found leaning against a tree and she never noticed me. What could be more inconspicuous than a six-foot tall nun, on a bright pink, floral children’s bicycle with a banana seat.

    Karoline lives in a beautiful part of Alexandria, Virginia. She pulled into her circular drive and still didn’t see me as I waited in the shadow of an old sycamore across the street and managed to conceal myself using a tactical army-issue ghillie suit I just happened to have on hand. I grabbed my telescope and peered across the way hoping she made an appearance. I didn’t have to wait long. Karoline came out rolling a giant plastic bin. That was certainly something to see. Who would have thought that princess took out her own trash. I suppose when you shovel bullshit for a living, trash on wheels is easy.

    After the sun went down, and I knew Karoline had gone to bed- as I stopped hearing her bay at the moon, I ventured across the street. I had to remain unassuming and the cover of night was perfect. I decided to go through Karoline’s trash and write down everything I found. A light suddenly went on in her house, so rather than abort the mission since even a whiff of abortion on the air can send Justice Thomas into apoplexy, I wheeled the trash bin all the way back to the house I was staying in. I know what you’re thinking, “Sr. Organza, isn’t Alexandria completely across the Potomac from DuPont Circle?” Yes, my child. It is. But I was discreet. I still had my dress habit on under my ghillie suit and would you think anything of a nun dressed half in her habit and half in a ghillie suit wheeling a five foot tall trash can across a bridge at 2am with a children’s bicycle tied to her waist?

    When I finally made it back, I just heave-hoed and dumped the contents of the bin onto the front lawn and started to inventory everything. Here’s the list, make of it what you will:

    • Two carry-out containers from Taco Burrito Palace
    • Several broken “personal massagers” with the words “The Rabbit” barely visible
    • Three negative pregnancy tests
    • The rind of a watermelon with a small hole cut out on one side
    • Half of a lemon, unused
    • a tattered copy of a 2023 Vogue September Issue
    • a VCR with the tape of “Fievel Goes West” still in the player
    • a half-eaten raw turkey, with the neck still attached
    • a box from Amazon labeled “Bedazzled Jesus Sign- 24 pack” -empty
    • several crumpled and torn sheets of personalized stationery, scented with Nina Ricci perfume and addressed to several unknown men. (I managed to make out some of the names – D, Don, Man Missile, and curiously enough Stephen. The letter addressed to the Man Missile opened with “My silo sits empty.”)
    • a 500-page scrapbook filled with Cathy cartoons from 1998 until now.
    • An empty box of Plan-B
    • A bag of pennies
    • A receipt from Starbucks for 4 macchiatos and 1 Americano
    • A receipt from McDonalds totaling $287.56 for an assortment of items but mostly baskets of French fries and some discarded food wrappers
    • An autographed copy of Jeanine Pirro’s book with the personalized inscription –“Hang in there Kare Bear…He’s 79 – Jeanie”
    • A wallet size picture of Barack Obama photoshopped onto Michael B. Jordan’s body.
    • A Bible, and finally
    • An entire bag of used condoms.

    I’m not sure what any of it really means. I had to quickly leave there and get back to St. Gertrude’s so I could pass this on. I’m astonished at how quick I can be on a banana seat bicycle. I made it all the way to Scranton when I realized –“Dummy! You left all of your underwear and lingerie in the downstairs powder room of the home I had been staying in!” Too late now. Serves me right for never wearing it anyway.

  • Finding Comfort in a Collapsing Country

    by Sr. Organza

    Americans are collectively idiotic. We have elected a man and a Congress bent on ending the United States and replacing it with something more like a collection of warlord-run states. We’ve been given ample opportunity to stop all of this and for whatever reason- we have decided not to. Perhaps it was Trump’s classic good looks, his virility, his vitality, his youth or his dashing sense of style that got him elected then re-elected. For many of us, these times seem “unprecedented” but they are not.

    Picture it. Rome, 410 A.D. A group of disheveled, rather ragamuffin, men and women from the north invaded the Roman provinces and sacked the eternal city itself. But, alas, they were too stupid and decided to destroy the city, take their bounty of gold and marble statues of naked people and left, leaving the Romans to uncertainty and poverty. You might compare this with a similar group of fur-clad imbeciles who sacked the Capitol on January 6th making off with such treasures as Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, a half-eaten orange from the Capitol cafeteria and the last shreds of dignity left in DC. The difference being that the ravaging Goths of the 5th century were led by an red-haired dynamo while the caravan of gullible tarts were led by an orange-faced, morbidly obese, man-baby who had just shit himself and needed a changing. Just like today, the writing was seemingly on the wall. Roman civilization was ending. But the Romans didn’t do a fucking thing. They spent time pointing fingers and blaming every cause available- much like the Democrats have been doing since 2016. So why were any Democrats remotely surprised that the Goths returned in 2024?

    For the next two decades, the Romans watched in horror as their empire fell around them. Imagine being an olive oil merchant living in or near Rome at that time. Actually, you probably can. All you want to do is make olive oil and sell it at a profit to a merchant from Genoa. Think of a band of wandering brigands the same as laughably high tariffs. The same fear, uncertainty and exploding cost of groceries you are witnessing today was exactly the same 1600 years ago. We may not have a bunch of hulking, fur-clad, sword-wielding men roaming around. But we do have a fat-ass, South African billionaire with all of our personal data. Finally, after years of terrible leadership, disease, and famine, Rome itself fell in 476. The last Roman emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed- partly because of his ridiculous name but mostly because he was an inept pussy. He was swiftly replaced by a Germanic warlord named Odacer.

    But that wasn’t precisely the end of Roman civilization. The Roman empire was still populated by mostly Roman people who lived Roman lives and were used to Roman roads, plumbing, orgies, and safety. Undoing all of that immediately was not a smart thing to do and Odacer knew it. So, he tried as best he could to keep things just as they were. King Odacer learned very quickly that economic stability and a strong, stable imperial trade network were worth more than perhaps a roasted turkey leg and a wench to call his own.

    Unto Us a Son is Given

    During this time of relative post-Roman stability, a man was born to a wealthy and noble Roman family – Boethius. He was kind of the “last Roman” in the way that most of us would understand an ancient Roman to be. In other words, he was smart, wore a toga, and was in a bathhouse every day. He spoke Latin, Greek and whatever bumbfuck language Odacer spoke and he ended up serving in this new Ostrogothic kingdom as a senator at the ripe old age of 25. Only 8-years later, Odacer was deposed by another German named Theodoric and being impressed by Boethius’s intelligence and his ability to keep himself clean for 24-hours with soap, appointed him consul of Rome.

    Despite the perceived intelligence and class of the gothic overlords of the remnants of Rome, they were still relatively uneducated, illiterate nincompoops and really needed men like Boethius to help them out. Theodoric himself was illiterate. It was these men who kept the government and the trade network running. But, uneducated gothic trash is still what it is and it did not take long before these guys fell victim to greed and corruption. Boethius, who I imagine was much like a single daycare worker in a feces-covered, urine-soaked daycare facility, was beside himself and decided he would speak up. Tsk. Stupid man. King Theodoric threw him in prison for treason in 523. This too should seem familiar. Imagine another fat idiot on a throne of his own making, pouting because someone smart said he was dumb and ruining everything. Boethius cared about his remaining Romans more than some petty king’s pocketbook and ego.

    While in prison and while Theodoric decided just what to do with the guy, Boethius wrote the self-soothingest of self-soothing tomes ever written – The Consolation of Philosophy. In it, Boethius is visited by the personification of philosophy- who was a woman in the fantasies of the young, imprisoned, and lonely former consul of Rome. So it was a wily woman who represented the last bits of logic and reason left in the world. And they talked. Well, Philosophy talked- or yelled as it were- while Boethius listened and agreed with everything she said. I suppose if a magical personification of all you held most dear just showed up in your house, that’s probably what you would do too.

    And what is it that they discussed? First, they started talking about fame, wealth and power and how these are all fickle things and none can compare with the only good thing in one’s life – one’s well cultivated mind. In essence, Boethius is accepting the state of affairs around him and recognizing that stability and surety are not extrinsic but rather intrinsic to oneself. The book goes on a bit about divine providence and the idea of predestination. Christians of the time REALLY liked this book. But so did a lot of other people who were definitely not Christian. It was a smash hit read for well over 1500 years. Alas, Boethius would never get to see the success of his book or go on that book tour to Alexandria as he was executed shortly after he finished the work a year later in 524. (Yet somehow George RR Martin keeps the world in thrall for decades waiting on another shitty book of dragon porn.) But it was Boethius who many scholars credit with the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. A little poet by the name of Dante in Florence, Italy rediscovered the work. He described Boethius as “the blessed soul who exposes the deceptive world to anyone who gives ear to him.” I’m sure that sounds way cooler in Italian.

    Misty Watercolor Memories

    So how does this jaunt down memory lane help any of us today as a modern Odacer and Theodoric pillage our nation? First, it is worth noting that tyrants do not typically last all that long. Whether the constant stress of being one or other would-be tyrants lurking about trying to kill you, these men did not make a significant historic mark and were usually dead fairly quickly. And that is a prevailing theme of Boethius – The Wheel of Fortune. I’m not talking about the crappy game show of the same name. I mean the ancient concept of fortune being a very cranky lady turning a giant wheel and where it lands for you is what you get. She doesn’t really care what you’ve done or whether you’ve been a good little boy or girl. She just turns the wheel. Maybe today you land on getting your head stuck in a staircase, but perhaps tomorrow you get to finally see that obituary you’ve been waiting to see on the front page for the last decade. Boethius took great solace in that this was just how life was. The turning of the wheel, although seemingly by chance, was divinely ordained. People in the Middle Ages loved the idea of the Wheel of Fortune. It was their version of Goop.

    The other lesson of Boethius is what happens when there are too many corrupt idiots running the circus and no one speaks out against it. Luckily, we do have some people speaking out today. Unluckily, most of them are comedians and not the opposing political party. But there is a second prong – action. People can yell, and scream, and post heady bullshit on Instagram all day long and it’s not going to do a damn bit of good if there aren’t also people trying to do something about the injustices. Boethius was unfortunately a one-man band. He had no problem speaking up and doing something, but no one else did.

    Alas, Cholesterol

    Because what is happening now is not permanent no matter how much they want you to think it is. There are still more of us Romans left than there are rich, oligarchy Ostrogoths. As long as we continue to persist and demand from our leaders those rights they cannot and should not ever take from us – we do not need to suffer the same fate as Rome. This will pass as all things eventually do. And history will not look kindly on those who sought America’s implosion and their collaborators.

    No matter how clever the Trump turd factory think it is being, there is always someone more clever waiting in the weeds or a wrench will end up in their cog that they could not have planned for. In the case of the Goths – it was Charlemagne. In the face of King George III, it was George Washington. In the face of Richard Nixon, it was Bob Woodward. And in the face of Donald Trump, there will be someone or something that not even the thinkiest thinktank could ever have predicted. That was perhaps the greatest lesson of Boethius – men in their feeble and petty ways have no control over anything but what goes on in between their two ears. Maybe we won’t get a Charlemagne to wield his mighty sword, but decades of McDonalds for three meals a day is probably just as effective.

  • Shut the F*ck up and Go Do Something!

    By The Abbot

    The mega power that is Meta has essentially controlled the public sphere for more than a decade. Facebook and then Instagram, initially mechanisms meant to connect people, has become the very force responsible for the rapid disintegration of our civilization. This is the fall of Rome but with uglier buildings and shittier roads. When I was young, the very idea of walking up to a stranger and screaming “You’re a fucking fat idiot!” at them would have either resulted in me getting a black eye or having the police called because someone thought I was having a psychotic episode. Yet I dare anyone to read the comments section on a mildly controversial post on Facebook or Instagram or even their own local newspaper’s comment section particularly this month as it’s Pride and millions of very insecure men and army of angry Marjorie Taylor Greene clones seem to have a lot to say. The comments on Pride can range from the typical personal attacks about the poster being a fag to bizarre tirades invoking scripture and Sodom. It is absolutely vicious.

    This is not to say that I am immune from social media or a shield for the terrified people of reason chased into their dark holes of liberal iniquity by the righteous white men with small penises brigade. My point is- the universe likes conflict. All forces in it have an opposite. Buddhists really own the philosophy on this. Being and non-being. Right action and wrong action. The arising of this also means the arising of that. And for every negative force, a positive one arises. So this is why platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and the like are so very dangerous – since their inception and domination, nothing has arisen to effectively counter them. And Rome continues to burn.

    Our minds remain occupied with things that provide no actual value. I am not saying if you follow an artist on Instagram that this is a futile pursuit. But liking someone’s post and visiting their gallery opening are two very different things. Somewhere since the 2000s, we have been taught by social media that our real community is fake and their virtual community is real. We lose focus of the people and experiences that really matter- our country, our community, our friends, our family, our self-enrichment, our education, our self-determination, our health, our creativity and our spirit. Instead, the great net of social media catches us and pulls us in and away from these, our most essential duties.

    We have grown lazy and content like pigs at a trough. We now depend on others for our own identity. Our culture has made it increasingly difficult to foment our own ideas and our own intentions without the approval of our polarized culture. Our minds are no longer our own. The phenomenon known as “cancel culture” is the result of a society gone haywire. An America with amnesia.

    Our political culture has ignored the fundamental and inalienable right to make up our own minds. My thoughts are my own and it is also my right to express them openly and without fear of punishment or recrimination. However, the world in which we live makes discussion impossible. We cannot speak frankly and honestly with each other without some level of fear of our own condemnation and ostracization. We have forgotten how to listen, to debate, to think, and to reason. This is due to a number of influences but the advent of the digital age, despite bringing with it great benefits and invaluable technology also brought with it increasingly complex, electronic distractions. We have forgotten how to simply be with one another. I mean REALLY BE. When was the last time any of you can remember having gone to dinner or out for cocktails or coffee and not had others in your group not present? They may be there in person, but in mind and spirit they are busy liking Henry Cavill’s new shirtless picture or a meme about chicken tacos. They are imbedded in their phones and have assimilated social media as their own clan leaving little room for real flesh and blood people. How do we find a way back? Is there a way to put the negative effects of technology and social media back in the box?

    The great power that the electronic world and this unending universe of media has taken from us is our self-determination. So, in order to reclaim just a tiny bit of your soul, focus on activities that fly under the radar of the digital age. Try baking or drawing, or painting or knitting, or birding or reading. In the words of Cher – “Shut the fuck up and go do something.” A quiet or meaningful activity is sometimes frowned upon in our extroverted world. We see a billion articles suggesting ways that introverts can be more extroverted, but how often do we see anything begging the frequently too loud land of extroverts to…shut the fuck up. Quiet and gentleness are often considered strange. So perhaps one start of reclaiming our soul begins by making the simple act of baking a loaf of bread or enjoying the company of friends on occasion without a camera absolutely okay. Normalize the mundane.

    We should now, more than ever, turn ourselves inward. We should find the simple pleasure of lighting candles, making a pot of tea, reading a good book, or taking delight in the scratchiness of a record. Our goal is to remain truly present. Not only to others but more importantly, to ourselves. If we could focus on one deliberate activity that involves no smart phone, that requires no streaming services, or that needs *gasp* no internet connection, what a start that would be. I promise, you can eat at a restaurant with your spouse, partner, cat or kid without having to let everyone else know about it. Focusing on others and your self-presence is an exceedingly wonderful gift you can give that will cost you nothing. You could live your life the way YOU believe it should be lived without worrying that some troll in Maine, or Alabama or North Dakota might disapprove of what you are doing. We could mind our own business together and perhaps, occasionally, enjoy one another’s company without a need for a single, solitary like.