Welcome to my blog!
My name is JonMarc Grodi. I am in my early twenties, recently married, very Catholic, have a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, am a web-designer by trade, have dipped my toes in campus ministry, and am interested in getting into speaking and writing about Catholicism and culture.
I love Jesus Christ. Since my initial adult conversion, I have been on the long hard road of detaching from sin and turning to God. This road is at the center of my life. Although I am a timid traveler and the progress is slow, everything I do, everywhere I go, every relationship I make (or break) is such in light of eternity.
The question I am most concerned with is in how I am to live. First, how am I to live my life true to my God and in light of eternity? But more practically, how am I to do this in the culture and time I have been given? Furthermore, since I am called to love and care for my neighbor, how am I to help heal my culture?
In a healthy society, literature, poetry, morality, history, science, technology, politics, and all the other cultural pursuits raise mens eyes to god and move him out of himself. They raise and respect man’s dignity. Ours is a culture that is quickly turning in on itself, quickly reducing man to the lowest common denominator rather than raising him to the heights.
It can be discouraging, to be sure. But it is also exciting. In the face of sin, corruption, discouragement, and widespread confusion and cynicism, there spring up all the more opportunities for grace.
My heroes are the writers who took up arms at the beginning of the present darkness – Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, Bellock, Percy, O’Connor, and the like. They saw modernism and all its philosophies and psychologies and sociologies on the way, and beautifully, patiently, and courageously asserted the simple truths that our “sophisticated society” is quickly and actively forgetting.
As truth is deconstructed into subjectivity, morality explained away as feelings, good and evil psychoanalyzed into confusion, personhood ever narrowed by the more powerful to dis-include the less powerful, and an uncaused cause we call “God” replaced by an uncaused “bang” that needs no explanation, to quote George Orwell: “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men”.
While I cannot count myself among intelligent men, I am their pupil. I read, I listen, I test, I pray, and I do some more listening.
I am a lover of truth and I seek it in the trenches: a normal professional, husband, and someday soon a father.
In this blog I share my experiences of seeking God always and living the faith in, but not of, the world. I am concerned with my culture – especially at the prospect of raising children in therein. But I am hopeful, for in a culture of death, life shines most brightly. As lies become wholesale, Truth becomes premium. As rebellion becomes the norm, a return to forgotten truths becomes the only real way to rock the boat. As noise fills every moment of the day, silence becomes the loudest and most attractive sound.
Thanks for reading. Ad majorem Dei Gloriam.
Your Brother in Light,
JonMarc Grodi