Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Steve Herrmann's avatar

There is something quietly devastating, and quietly beautiful, in the way you have laid out the collision between technology’s mercenary mechanics and the stray mercy of Providence. Algorithms, for all their cold calculus, become, at rare, almost sacramental intervals, unwilling handmaids of grace. Even the architecture of our digital Babel is not beyond the reach of a God who writes His parables in the dust.

Matt Miller’s work, as you so movingly describe it, seems to enact that deeper mystery — a truth I often explore at Desert and Fire: that the Word has not abandoned the world, but has sown Himself secretly within it. This is the heart of incarnational mysticism: that the sacred is not confined to cloisters or cathedrals, but aches within even the most secular spaces, waiting for eyes trained by love to recognize Him. Even a blood-stained volleyball, born of desperation and loneliness, may stand — in its mute, ruined dignity — as a fragile icon of the God who hides Himself in plain sight.

There is, after all, no abandonment that Christ has not inhabited. No island so far-flung that He has not, in His descent into death, made a dwelling-place for the cry of "My God, why have You forsaken me?" Miller’s work — and your tribute to it — reminds us that it is not the "answers" of our age that prove most vital, but the aching questions, the wounds left open, the hunger that no algorithm can quite anesthetize, which calls out across the digital wilderness for Something — Someone — real.

It is precisely here that the mystery of the Incarnation shines most fiercely. God does not despise the mediums and messages of our fallen making; He slips into them. He rides even the accidental algorithms, the haunted movies, the desperate monologues of men dying too young. The Word becomes signal. The desert blooms with hidden fire.

In the end, the true signal is always suffering transfigured by love. And Miller, facing his own death even as he labored to complete his unfinished commentary, bore witness to this: that the final "Big Idea" worth our allegiance is not a concept at all, but a wounded God who chose not to erase our suffering, but to share it — to hide Himself in the longing He first stirred.

Thank you for carrying his signal a little farther down the road, for listening in a world that has forgotten how, and for reminding us — as I hope to remind readers at Desert and Fire — that even now, the Logos Made Flesh is nearer than breath, speaking through the broken syllables of the world, if only we have hearts still enough to hear.

Expand full comment
1 more comment...

No posts