Essays in Idleness

Is it alright to express outrage against excessive displays of outrage? I ask this more in curiosity than in anger. And I am curious about the full range of outrageousness: not only the “spittle-flecked nutties” I associate with conventional left-liberal thinking, but the more passive-aggressive forms developed in Canada, by which the target of the original outrage receives the girlish “silent treatment,” then is quietly unpersoned.

Outrage begets outrage, until we remember that Our Lord advised against resisting evil with evil. It was a saying that might be misunderstood, because some forms of resistance are good, and should not be bunched together with the bad ones. There is a place in society for a good hanging; or in war for a variety of thoughtful ordnance; or other focused, decisive acts of problem-fixing violence. Justice may demand it; though let me hope I will not be thought too liberal by adding that justice also demands certain procedural regularities, unavailable in e.g. a Kangaroo Court or Human Rights Tribunal.

There is, however, no place for ill-considered revenge; and the possibility of defeating hatred with love need not be dismissed out of hand.

“I am outraged by your outrage, sir,” is a line I have tried in several situations. Or, “ma’am,” as the case may be — spoken in the voice of unturbulent irony. It worked once, as anything might, calculated to make one’s assailant laugh. The trick is to undermine his self-importance, and this is easier to perform while it is over-exposed. Mere escalation will not have this effect, nor any other form of competition in which spectators are left to vote on which party is the greater lunatic.

For God, in His infinite foresight, has so arranged the human condition that reason has at least a chance. The Christian yoga of self-containment puts anger to its proper uses. Or, should gentle reader prefer: the principles of balance and leverage in judo. The winner in any pugilistic match, including those which are conducted with firearms, is most likely to be the contestant who is thinking more clearly. Anger may serve to inspire us to action, but makes a poor formulator of tactics. (We do want to win, don’t we?)

In the Empörungsgesellschaft of our times (see penultimate Idlepost), it is well to remember that outrage never works for long. It makes a dramatic opening for conflict, but can only be sustained with the sort of acting which, as we are beginning to see in Natted States Merica and elsewhere, soon wears on any audience. “Yes,” one might reflect to oneself, “it is quite outrageous that they are crazy and we are sane.”

But it is important that we manifest sanity.

I was not surprised, nor hurt, not to be invited to the Golden Globes this year. I’ve got used to it. I wasn’t invited in any previous years, and quite frankly, I do not own a fancy black dress. Nor a nice black tuxedo, any more, should I have decided to come as a heterosexual, instead of a hetaera. I used to have one: classic 1964 James Bond with narrow Thai silk lapels, handed down by my father. But in a mere half-century it had become somewhat ragged, so I passed it along to the Sally Anne. (Always thinking of the poor: they love ragged and broken things.) Well, these days I’m hardly invited anywhere; which is something I have in common with Harvey Weinstein.

Another thing is that I was accused of sexual harassment, once. This was by a young woman I fired, after she tried to seduce me. Fortunately some other girls whom I had not sexually harassed rode quickly to my defence. The little vixen dropped her rumour campaign; though not before it had seriously annoyed me. (Another guy I know was not so lucky; lost his big job and good prospects in life under the cloud of claims that were never brought to court, nor would be, as they were possible to disprove.)

“Amusement” would not describe my response as I watch the current phase of the “sexual revolution.” The paradox is that it made casual sexual advances commonplace: the very sort for which the guillotine is now being sharpened. I don’t blame second-wave feminism for this, but something larger that includes Playboy and, I’m sorry to say, James Bond; and has an ancestry that goes back to first-wave feminism, and the boulevardiers of the Gay Nineties. (Those would be the decadent eighteen-Nineties). A certain, civilized “atmosphere” between the sexes became seriously polluted around then. By now it is a grave environmental problem.

My motivation for today’s little Idlepost is however something I read in “Page Six” of the New York Post. I don’t usually go there, except when something is flagged on the Drudge Report. And I saw such a thing this morning. Having not read much about the Golden Globe party I missed, I was nevertheless fascinated to learn about others who were not invited. These included women with the surnames Arquette, Argento, McGowan, and Sorvino. They were among the first to turn on the sleazy Mr Weinstein, and laid charges including rape that may actually go to court. But as the tabloid explains, “Victims are not glamorous.” The Golden Globes are, after all, a winners’ circle.

“Bandwagons are for climbing on, not starting.” This Lord Chesterfield advice was given to me young, and quite facetiously, by the father who handed me down his tuxedo. I say facetious, because he was incorruptible himself; and too, the sort of man who would start the horses. He was also inventive, and as an industrial designer, designed several products that made other people many millions of dollars, but left him a few hundred out-of-pocket. He truly lacked the skill for cashing in. So that, as he also facetiously noted, inventors, original designers, and pioneers of any sort, tend to die poor. If you want to die rich, do not waste time inventing things for the good of mankind. Focus instead on marketing.

This principle applies to every field with which I am even passingly familiar, including all the arts. Granted, there are exceptions: “Inventors like Edison or Picasso, who were also ruthless entrepreneurs.”

Laying bold criminal charges is likewise a mug’s game. Even if you win, you lose. Others will grab the advantages. These do not come from sticking your neck out, but from piling on, once the defendant is safely down. Third-wave feminism has mastered this principle, of ruthless entrepreneurialism. The glamour comes from cashing in; and strutting your stuff with virtue signalling.

The longer I live, the more I identify with losers. Even Hollywood losers.

I have just learnt a new word, from a Swabian friend. She is a liberal, in the old sense — which is to say, stable, sane, empirical, Continental. Perhaps not a genius, but very smart. Impossible to provoke (I’ve tested this). A liberal from Europe does not allow herself to be confused with a socialist, a feminist, or other insane person. Regine (let us call her) is a reader of Die Zeit, which remains at least a half-sane paper. (How I wish we had something like it in English.) As a good liberal, she tirelessly instructs me, for my own good. She suggests that I become more moderate. (I hesitate to suggest that a German should become more reactionary.)

Well, Empörungsgesellschaft may not be a new word to Germans, but it was to me. Like many of their other concepts, it cannot be translated adequately. This is especially true of their innumerable compounds. The whole is invariably greater than the parts. Empörung could be many kinds of disgust, or indignation; or resistance, or revolt. Gesellschaft could be many kinds of society, company, class. It might even suggest a form of dress. All these meanings are intended. We might wish to translate this term simply, as “outrage society,” and that would get us, superficially, near. But the pregnant ambiguities on either side of the fused appellations conduct a lot of electricity through the matrix, in the absence of a circuit-breaking hyphen.

We must thus incorporate Empörungsgesellschaft into English, whole, as we have done with Weltanschauung, Zeitgeist, Übermensch, Kulturkampf, Gemütlichkeit, Weltschmerz, Schadenfreude. To say nothing of, Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

From what I can make out, the new E-word assumes the floundering of the Fourth Estate (or “legacy” journalism) before the invasive “fifth force” of social media. Crazy bloggers, twitterers, facebooklings, and so forth, are able to impinge upon the public consciousness in new and historically unprecedented ways. “Facts” are concocted to order, and subsequent “fact-checks” are concocted, too; opponents thus label each other constantly as liars. Discussion of every topic is politicized, in the lynch-mob spirit of shrieking moral outrage. The old-fashioned newsman’s criterion of “relevance” is replaced by cross-links to imaginary events and conspiracy theories. Attention is suddenly focused on the most unlikely details. The Internet itself is configured to encourage bizarre confirmation subcultures; users can funnel a round-the-clock supply of whatever “information” might please them. This provides them with a Wundpflaster against their aching kognitive Dissonanz. All public policy must be determined not only in live time, but in the full knowledge that at any moment, anyone can become the object of a Scheiße-Sturms (“shit-storm”).

Well, there is more to it than that; I have merely picked out the bullet points. But I think those Germans are onto something.

Empörungsgesellschaft. … You read it here first.

According to a certain Syrian gentleman — from the Patriarchate of Antioch, one of the Pentarchy of “first churches” going back to the Apostles, specifically Peter and Paul — Christ was baptized in the waters of the Jordan. And not on His own account, strictly speaking, but for mysterious reasons, having to do with the Sacrament of Baptism itself. He was, as it were, “baptizing Baptism,” and making holy the waters. This was a manifestation of the Trinity — done in the name of the Holy Trinity, and by the Trinity, for the purposes of the Trinity. God the Father acknowledges, “this is my Son”; the Spirit descends in the form of a dove.

“There they are, all Three. How can anyone miss it?”

He was alluding to another gentleman, a certain smartass from California, who’d said he had read the Bible right through, but hadn’t found the Trinity mentioned in it.

But of course one can miss anything, if one is sufficiently obtuse. It is what makes our modern, happyface, deist unitarianism possible; along with atheism and a few other things. And as my Syrian informant said — decades ago — this was so in Damascus, too. Syrian Christians were already “promoting themselves to the glory” of a post-religious, middle-class life, with osterizers and toasters. So, for that matter, were their Islamic friends, “going rogue” from the Muslim point-of-view; losing all interest in observance, and by extension, in belief. (Verily, this opened the field to the fanatics.)

Denho, the Syriac term, can be translated “Epiphany,” or “Theophany.” It is the same Feast as we celebrate “todayish” in the West, though if I’m not mistaken it omits specific reference to the Magi. Yet it stresses a first appearance to the Gentiles. It carries the etymological implication of a light-burst, a moment of revelation. But so does the Epiphany in our Western feast. The Syrian rite combines gospel events on several planes, as ours does; while focusing upon action through John the Baptist. The miracle of Cana, and of holy marriage; of Magnificat, and the baptism of children: all this is carried into the Manifestation — alike through Greek Testament and Peshitta. East and West, the Epiphany recalls that moment when the sublime, very ancient and long enduring Hebrew faith “explodes” into the World Religion, for the salvation of all men.

From the little I was able to understand in my own readings on “comparative religion” — back in the day — I was struck most forcibly not by the theological differences of the Eastern churches, but by their familiarity, across the board. Separated, as we have often been through many generations, the pattern of Liturgy remains the same. It seems to lie discernibly beneath each refinement. It is like reading alternative translations of the same original poem. That Poem being Christ.

Something mysterious has been working against syncretism in all the wandering strands of our Faith. Everywhere the idea of Epiphany remains. The accretions through the centuries seem to follow from the source, more than from external influences. There is that “Jewish” quality — for although we are not united by tribe, we are bound by calling.

In my days of wandering — even before I became a Christian myself, when I was motivated instead by anthropological curiosity — I was fascinated by Assyrians, Copts, Ethiopians, Malabars; … all the “exotics” I encountered.

The Portuguese, on first landing in India, were surprised to find among Hindu-looking temples, some dominated by large granite and quite unmistakable Crucifixes. It was a shock of recognition, between two Christian peoples, separated since the first Christian century. But in the old Syriac word, “Nasrani,” they could hear what these people still were, and of their long descent from Saint Thomas the Apostle.

I read (still own) a history of the Christians in China, long, long before first contact with the European missionaries of the Renaissance; was impressed, in Japan, by the fact of underground Catholic survival through centuries under the threat of hideous torture. Or of the Korean Confucian converts to an unimaginably distant Nazarene — “self-taught” Catholics (from the Jesuits at Peking) whom the Jesuits arriving in the Hermit Kingdom had known nothing about. Then, as now, everywhere we go, including Antarctica in one Anglo-Argentine anecdote I could tell, there are Christians to greet Christians.

No other religion has travelled like this. But to the theophanic point, none has maintained its integrity over vast, “multicultural” isolations of space and time. And through the wormholes come the ministers of renewal. Christ does not forget those who have not forgotten Him — mother and child, through the generations.

It is easy enough to lapse, especially when every worldly advantage can come of apostasy, as has been the case through nearly fourteen centuries for Christians in the Muslim realms. The hard thing to understand is rather, why there are people who have not lapsed; who continue to die, sometimes, for their refusal to relinquish a promise that was made to their fathers, dozens of fathers ago.

The historians must explain how all of this was possible, through the “normal” or “natural” progression of events. Indeed, they have a lot of explaining to do.

“A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth even gets its pants on,” or something like that, as Mark Twain is supposed to have said, though if he did, it was hardly original. The attribution has circumnavigated the planet many times, without the correction ever catching up. But the falsehood can be proved. Jonathan Swift in the Examiner (1710): “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” That in itself gets us closer to Adam, but from Swift’s tone I would guess that he had found the proverb elsewhere. He (and Shakespeare, incidentally) liked to pick sayings off the street, like spilt farthings; save them and then, put them to good use. Often the genius is more editor than writer. (Alexander Pope almost specialized in this insight.)

And let me add, from my shallow reading of history, that the tortoise does not necessarily outrun the hare. Or when he does, no one is still watching.

I think I wrote once, at dribbling length, about the Flat Earth. The joke there was, that no one believed the Earth to be flat — at least, no one with a modicum of education — through all the centuries until 1828. That was when Washington Irving’s quite fictional biography of Christopher Columbus was published. It has a scene wherein Catholic bigots challenge Columbus’s assumption that the world is spherical, claiming scriptural authority to refute him. But the sphericity of the Earth was never in question, when he was planning his voyages. Instead, the issue was, the Earth’s diameter. (Columbus miscalculated by assuming that Arabic miles were the same as Italian; among other little oversights. He knew the sphere was large; just not how large.)

In fact, scripture presents our planet as round, and Isaiah describes it hanging in space. Irving’s playful (and genuinely bigoted) account is thus double nonsense. But shameless Darwinists bought into the story, to smear opponents of their “progressive” (and unproveable) evolutionary theory; and ever since, the progressive types have been using the “Flat Earth” as a mud-ball. Meanwhile, American fundamentalists, not to be outdone, provided much-needed credibility to the slur, by buying into the Flat Earth themselves, and standing up for it courageously. (God bless them: fundamentalists can be coached to believe all sorts of things are in the Bible, that ain’t.)

Sometimes, in moments of desolation, and sometimes in moments of elation, I think of our world in the manner of Isaiah — but with lies buzzing round it like flies around a dung ball. You can’t kill them all. They’ll still be there after global cooling.

The piece I wrote today for the Thing (here), touches on this matter: of public stupidity and its relation to sin; of public beliefs that are bass ackwards; and ever promoted by the malign, for purposes they will never fully understand.

The truth is that there are many lies, and that they assemble themselves in buzzing constellations, that disperse then regather after the wind blows through. Till the world ends, they will never be permanently blown away. New generations of the grossly ignorant arise to replace the fallen; yet within each soul, falsehoods can be corrected only one at a time.

Listening to Rome today, one might easily form the (wrong) impression that the Church has given up on lie-swatting. It is as if she admits the task is hopeless; that she must now make her compromise with the falsehoods of this world, through the magic of “accompaniment” and “discernment.” But as Christ is her Founder, she is not entitled to do so: not with every living soul at stake, and every single one to be fought for.

In a world full of lies, long and always full of lies, it is the function of the Church to remind what the Truth is. And to do so even if the masses are indifferent, or mock her as they once mocked Christ. It is to shine the disinfecting Sun on sin and error. For us, the task is complementary. It is to seek that Truth, and to apply it.

Today would be the Feast of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, according to my old missal; though it will be celebrated tomorrow according to my parish bulletin. I try to avoid staying up to date in missals, the most recent up here in the High Doganate having been printed fifty-six years ago, somewhere abroad. But there are too many Bugninisms already in this 1962 recension. I find a 1939 more reliable, though I keep a few much older, for security and clinging purposes.

I should also like to mention that it is my 800th birthday, measured in Full Moons. (I was born under a Full Moon, almost to the minute, and am thus a genuine lunatick, not a fake one like so many others.)

Was watching it in the western sky as it descended, earlier this morning. Superb clear sky, except some light brushstrokes presenting as grey eyebrow clouds, by way of surreal decoration. As I discovered upon stepping out, it is still rather chilly … for a January.

I am taking a few days off, from my excessive writing. But gentle reader will recall that I am a graphomaniac, too, hence this little slip. Pay no attention.

The year is ending with 313 unanswered letters in my email inbox, two dozen more of the snail variety, and thank-you notes unwritten to most of the very kind people who responded to my mendicant plea on Black Friday, more than five weeks ago (some in amounts greater than 50$). … I am ashamed. … But too, I am without secretarial assistance, or some whip-wielding personage to keep me rolling my boulder. I do attentively read all the incoming; and express my thanks to our common Maker for a remarkably thoughtful audience, in frequent short expostulations and Rosary prayers. Please bear with me, and when necessary, forgive.

On this, the fourteenth anniversary of my reception into the Holy Catholic Church.

*

Having given my prediction for the next two thousand years, yesterday, it would be petty for me to tell gentle reader everything that will happen in the next twelve months. One year is much like another, and the little dramas exploited by the industry of news and entertainment are actually quite boring. That which is genuinely interesting, partakes of Mystery and is not subject to seasonal change.

Take Trump for instance, whom I have mentioned too often in this last year, as he is a common topic for conversation, being overtaken by the weather only in this last week or so. Like the other rakers and shakers of history, he is, almost certainly, secretly a bore. Indeed, this may be one of history’s best-kept secrets: a vast conspiracy of the rich and famous to make us think they live enchanted lives, when in fact almost everything they do is tedious, and exciting only when violence intervenes.

He has done, to be sure, lots of little things, to restrain the administrative state (in which I include mild tax relief). The American economy would seem to be booming again, even the manufacturing sector, but what does that matter? In the absence of his vaunted wall, he seems able to restrict illegal immigration, merely by tweeting. (It is amazing what putzes even criminals are.) By taking the micromanagement pincers off his generals he has allowed big gains in the field against Daesh and Taliban, without committing major new resources. The best bit was, “next year in Jerusalem.” Other things of this nature, I happily applaud.

But there is no great structural transformation, and won’t be. He is trimming at the edges of what I have long called the “Nanny State” (the complex of government and big business), and have now improved to, “Twisted Nanny State.” The people themselves do not want to take moral or fiscal responsibility for their own lives, and have adapted too well to an environment of centrally-regulated spiritual, material, and aesthetic tawdriness; to “consumerism” in trade, politics, and leisure. Only God can change hearts. Sentimentality is completely ineffective.

Ditto, the right-wing semi-lunatics whose rise is in response to the décrépitude of the European Union. I wish them all well, but they are trimming at the edges.

Laws of inertia, in the universe we inhabit, will continue to function. Things stay the same until the tipping points are reached. Dramatic and comprehensive change requires applications of extraordinary energy, which cannot be controlled by mere human beings. But individual hearts can change, and we should focus on what is actually achievable, leaving the aggregate effect to God.

I’m going to disappear for a few days. But first, my best wishes for a Happy New Year and Christmas Octave, to each of you and to all of our beloved — the living and alike, the dead.

Among the joys of winter, up here in the land God gave Cain (“Cainada”), are our glorious “cold snaps.” That is when temperatures, which we had naïvely thought insupportable, suddenly plunge. The breeze comes into this, too. I don’t know if readers in Bali, or Gabon, can fully appreciate what I mean by a “windchill” of minus 40 degrees. (Fahrenheit or Celsius: take your pick.) We’ve had a taste of this in Greater Parkdale recently. Too, a lot of snow. I am told that we are, moreover, sharing this “polar vortex” with much of the United States, and north-western Europe. It hasn’t shut up the global warmalarmists, but it has made them discernibly less strident, which I’m willing to count as a Christmas present.

Nematodes, I am reliably informed, can survive forty-plus weeks frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures, then spring back to life, to resume their attack on your sheep. Who, unfortunately, cannot survive at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Nor can any other warm-blooded beast, as we are reminded in weather-channel videos that show wild animals desperately trying to break into our homes. (Don’t let them in. They’ll be polite, at first, but once they get comfortable, all bets are off.)

I am a little too proud, perhaps, of not being a nematode, yet envy such tricks as cryoprotective dehydration. The closest I can get is in my preference for whisky to water. That is not their only trick, as I understand, nor are the resilient bacteria one-trick wonders. The angelic engineers went to much trouble; alas, not all of them were on our side. But the nematodes do serve to remind that life may be harder to eradicate from this planet than alarmists suppose. Even we humans have tricks up our sleeves, though most involve “technology.” I am sceptical of our ability even to kill ourselves off, without God’s help.

Note that, for instance, despite the Devil’s best efforts, the world still contains Jews and Armenians. Could we take leave for a moment, and return to the planet in a couple thousand years, I think we would find they were still here; along with Catholics I am happy to say. I’m less sure about the rest. I think of the Zoroastrians — quite dominant in the Middle East for a millennium or two, then suddenly, quite gone. I give the anthropogenic global warming religion another decade at most.

Alternatively, the world will end at eight-thirty tomorrow morning (GMT).

By fire or in ice? … Whichever. … Those who have frozen to death are often found naked. This is because, below a certain temperature, the human metabolism confuses hot and cold. The exposed form the mad impression that they are on fire, so rip off all their clothing. But it wouldn’t have helped if they hadn’t.

According to the latest on “Zharkova cycles,” the sun has not one but two sub-surface magnetic wave components, both approximately eleven Earth years, but slightly fluctuating, and slightly offset. As they move together we get plenty of sunspots, and the Earth warms. As they move apart we get solar quiescence, and a cooling. Factor in longer-term wobbles in our orbit — for the next century or more we’ll be moving farther from the stove — and we may plausibly predict that our grandchildren will have something much like the cold of two centuries ago (which included 1816, “the year without a summer”). Too, that this adventure will begin memorably, around 2022, with a low tacked on a low.

But this is the work of odd, isolated hypothesizers (like Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and so forth), working in defiance of the “settled science.” Indeed, show me a single advance in real science that wasn’t disrespectful of the “settled” sort, and I will show you some fake news. This latter currently costs us taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, and relies on computer modelling that can’t even be sure if it will snow tomorrow.

Gentle reader may guess where the vested interests lie.

Behind Saint Thomas More, my primary political hero, lies today’s saint, Thomas à Becket, after whom he was named. The coincidences are numerous. Both were born in London’s Cheapside; both trained as lawyers; each rose with reputation for genius and probity, to become Chancellor of England and the King’s right hand; and fell, for Christian principle, defending the freedom and independence of the Church against impositions by the civil power. Both were, in the end, murdered by the royal henchmen. The kings in question — Henry II and Henry VIII — were neither of them mere custodians of their realms. Both were ambitious, both credited by nature with extraordinary gifts of intelligence, energy, and personality; with a terrifying charismatic charm, when they chose to display it. Neither could bear contradiction.

Power went to their heads. Henry VIII became, by degrees, one of the true monsters of history; Henry II was a more slippery case. He had his own Saint Thomas directly murdered, not judicially murdered after a show trial. Later, in affected remorse, he allowed himself to be publicly whipped for his crime; then cleverly bought into Thomas à Becket’s spreading martyr’s cult for his own political purposes.

The great achievement of Henry Tudor was to initiate the great schism of western Christendom, by his seizure of all Church estates. Henry Plantagenet’s had been to lay the foundations of English Common Law, and supporting institutions of modern governance. To those who worship state power, in the “Whig interpretation,” both kings were “on the side of history” — that schoolboy history of “progress” and “enlightenment”; the history that every conscientious Catholic is on the wrong side of.

Today’s Idlepost is actually a footnote to yesterday’s. It turns on a passage from the First Book of Samuel (or “First Kings” in your Douays): the eighth chapter, verse 10 through 18 or so. The Israelites want a king. Samuel tells them prophetically what kings are all about. They want a Covenant, not with their Lord, but with a law-giving king, as every other nation. They long to be “normal.”

Do not be confused by offices and stations: “the king” will stand for any national power.

In Christian or in ancient Hebrew terms, the Covenant is between God and His people. It is not, as earthly kings have long maintained, between God and any nation state. There is no “divine right,” of kings, or of electorates.

The officers of state are only officers of state, and themselves must answer to the highest power — not above but alongside their peoples. In Christian terms, they are answerable to Christ, through the Church he founded; to the Spirit that animates that Church; to God in the universal Kingship of Christ.

Let me be plainer. The Covenant is not a collectivist arrangement. It is actually the opposite of a collectivist arrangement, and was so from the beginning. The true Christian teaching stands in anticipation of, and opposition to, the ideals of that “Reformation,” which worked themselves out as a spiritual as well as contractual relation between the People and the State (exalted in “Americanism”). The Covenant is instead with persons, both vertically in their relations with God, and horizontally in their relations with each other: cor ad cor loquitur. To love God and to love thy neighbour: that is the whole teaching. Everything follows from that.

This is a politics in opposition to politics; a politics that produces martyrs, for the principle at its heart cannot be explained to the Princes of this World.

A Jewish friend — sincere and observant and at the time trending from “conservative” to “orthodox” — once described to me the condition of Jewry. His people were “chosen,” as everyone knows. But what they don’t know is how stressful that is.

“Were G-d to say, ‘You are now unchosen’, we would all walk.”

This was, I believe, an attempt at humour. (“Where would the Jews be without it?” he also said.) Later, I learnt it is an old joke. And grasped: that the humour is not blasphemous, but self-deprecating.

Nevertheless it is dicey, for the audience may not appreciate an article of faith. It is that God has the Majesty. Wisdom lies in obedience. And deeper it lies in the contemplation of God’s ways, which at the surface may seem to make no sense at all; to be arbitrary, tyrannical. As instead are the ways of men, when men resolve to play God, forgetting that they lack His omniscience.

As Herod who, in the “infancy narratives,” resolves to secure his kingship by the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. (See also, here.) For this is what worldly power does, when it feels threatened.

The event is not mentioned in Josephus, but was typical of the many Herodine atrocities that the “secular” historians did record. By the biblical scholars, the numbers are contested — not the thousands upon thousands of murdered babies in lurid Syriac, then mediaeval accounts. For as the scholars like to say, dryly, “Bethlehem was a small town.” There couldn’t have been more than a few dozen children under the age of two, in all of its environs. But, “Not that many killed,” makes a poor news headline.

Put it rather in the words of Jeremiah: “A voice in Ramah was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”

As to large numbers, I’m often given to reflect on the ten-millions of “holy innocents” that we have slaughtered, under the rule not of Herod but of liberal and progressive thinking — something vastly more evil than Herod in its effects and pretensions.

Why did God allow Herod’s slaughter to happen? This is a question often asked by the glib, who would like to transfer Herod’s guilt to the Almighty, by way of excusing themselves from belief. Among the questions that answer that question is, “Why did God allow you to have an abortion?”

But of course He did not. The plural “you” in this reformulation put her and himself in God’s place, and that is what followed. It is what invariably follows when the human is substituted for the divine will: an atrocity. The choice is life or death, and therefore Isaiah: “Choose life.”

The Feast of the Holy Innocents can be found in the Leonine Sacramentary of the fifth century, along with the first formal ordering of Gregorian chant within the Church Calendar (a proof that all were flourishing long before). To my mind, it was brilliantly placed on this fourth day of Christmas, to invoke the martyrs “after Stephen,” who came in fact before Stephen: “the martyrs before the martyrs,” as it were — the (innumerable) martyrs for Christ in the Old dispensation. I mean, those who died for Christ, and may continue to die for Christ, all unknowing. This Old dispensation is taken up in the New: for yes they, too, are surely our martyrs.

It is a sequence of Sacrifice that extends out of time, woven of the supernatural threads that bound the first woman and the first man.

Christ came to break this demonic cord, that pulls us down; to rescue us. He “chose” to rescue us. In that sense we, the wicked Gentiles, were “chosen” as the wicked Jews had been chosen. To “walk” is not to escape this “tyranny”; it is instead to choose drowning rather than be saved.

“No one at Calvary was consulting a book.”

(And no one at Bethlehem, either. There were no missals yet.)

This is one of the many little sayings that I’ve acquired from backward-looking, anti-intellectual, Latin-singing deplorables through the years. The sort of people who may have voted for Trump, even though they thought he was a disgusting liberal. Who plod away at their retrogade religion, even when discouraged by the boss in Rome. Who are not very smart; who don’t know any better. Who observe the antiquated Calendar of the Church, having, it seems, nothing better to do. Soft, when the world goes hard; hard, when the world goes soft. Whose minds indeed wander from the worldly things. Who think the Word precedes the world, and that the most important event in history — the only thing of immortal importance — happened twenty centuries ago. Who aren’t even clinging to their Bibles and their guns, except when challenged. Because the Word transcends them; a Word before all words. “Space cadets,” you might call us; yet disrespectful to the rocket scientists.

Saint John — the Apostle and Evangelist; author of Gospel, Epistles, Apocalypse; the “Theologos,” the first “Doctor of the Church”; witness to the Transfiguration; him who was placed by Christ’s right side at the Last Supper; and at Christ’s feet before the Cross; to whose care Jesus entrusted his own Mother; the disciple “whom Jesus loved”; the only one of the original Twelve to die of natural causes. (At Ephesus.)

Just to be clear: that John.

I play favourites, too; Saint John is the first place I go in the Bible. No matter how many times I read it, or hear it read, the opening of the Fourth Gospel electrifies me. It is as the universe in its totality bursting from the infinitesimal “cosmic egg.”

Except, we go deeper:

— In principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum. …

We are there, “in the beginning,” once again, and in the flip of a few pages we are there again, at our end:

— And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the First and the Last:

— I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore; and have the keys of Hell and of Death.

The 27th of December, 3rd day of Christmas, Feast of St John. … Mark that date.

The idea would be, just as the world is shaking off its holiday binges, and heading out for the Boxing Day sales, we of the Midnight Mass and perhaps the three Christ-Masses march back to the church, with our wee mites (if any) in our entourage. And this, for the celebration of the first Christian martyr: the hallowed Feast of Stephen. And, take half the money we would have blown on things we didn’t need and only slightly wanted, adding it instead to the Christmas collections for the poor; or for the priests so they may commission new and more glorious vestments, and continue to upgrade our worship in God-facing Latin from the ancient rite; and perhaps, fix the bleeding roof.

Verily, for today, the day after Christmas, I am trying to imagine what it would be like to be a good Catholic. I mean, of course, a serious one; not a monk or nun, but living in the world. And of course, my list is just starting. (There are commandments in addition to the giving of alms, and church attendance.)

Now, I’m not a very good example of a Catholic, myself. It is among my failings that I get churched-out, from a deep past of inobservance, whose habits will not die quietly. Often I must kick myself out of Sunday-morning torpor; and my confessor knows what a strain it is, to remind his dragging penitent that there is — to give but one example — a Mass every day. And that it is the very place to go, for strength to lift such burdens as have fallen to one’s lot.

Though I fail in the positives, I can supply some of the negatives readily. For I am allergic to the shopping malls, and feel no temptation towards the Amazon addiction which has replaced it in many of the worldlings, according to their media. Rather my partiality is to the knowing work of human hands: the artist’s hands, the surgeon’s hands, the priest’s hands. I love the low Latin Mass in its whispers; the raising of the chalice; the moment when everything else is stripped away. I hate crowds, alas, even those of my fellow Christians. I crave peace and quiet; the music of good order.

There are sins I have entirely given up. Not, however, because I am so holy, but because I got sick of committing them; and tired of the associated self-loathing.

But that is just me, and each other person is his own peculiar bundle of dim light, and of recalcitrant sinning. Each has failures of his own to work out, and while every one of us has earned a hanging, who has had some opportunity in life, there is still time. The “worst Catholic in the world” can still try for a little improvement before his number is called in.

Saint Stephen’s feast is a kind of test; as it always was — beginning for Saint Stephen. It is true: God “led him into temptation” — the very real temptation to disavow Our Lord, in the hope of cheating death. But death, in the end, will not anyway be cheated, and we each owe a life. And Saint Paul checked cloaks for the men who would stone this first of innumerable obstinates, who through the centuries have stood in his position; have stood their ground against the pleasures of this world. A “test,” yes, but the word “temptation” follows on its heels. The standard to which we are held is high, but Grace and Mercy shall be there to catch us.

Every day, remember you must die; that there is nothing in this world that you can take with you. Those are the terms, and it really does not matter if you don’t like them; if you think they are unfair. It was unfair that you were ever born. But you got used to it somehow, no? … God is Love, and Love is no mere fairness.

The Cross had nothing to do with “fair.” As neither did the birth in Bethlehem; there was no possible way we “deserved” it.

That is what I keep telling myself, and if I seem a tad forward in telling others, too, you will have to forgive me. For among my obnoxious habits is, thinking aloud.

And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.