The Christmas Star
This fall a new spring arrives, the equinoxes turn.
“That the breath of the Holy Spirit engender a new missionary “spring” in the Church.”
Papa Francis’ prayer intention, October 2019
Year: 2019
The Rain Will Fall
It was a month ago a child came to speak the truth to the adults in America. On the Twentieth Day of September the major news outlets of old, ABC, CBS, and NBC all told of the marches that happened throughout the world. Didn’t these marches seem to appear out of nowhere? Yet they included millions and millions of people and had a most impassioned and articulate spokesmen, well, spokeswoman, well, a child actually. It was downright spiritual. One month later I do believe it is safe to say business as usual goes on in America, as usual.
Wrong.
Evil always makes the same mistake, it underestimates the power and simplicity of good.
Let’s see, I took a rough timing of all three stations on 9/20/2019 when the first Friday protest hit worldwide as Greta came to New York and on 9/23/2019 when the United Nations held its climate meeting. A meeting we should note on the heels of the most dire climate change report to the UN yet, warning that “many tipping points may have already been passed.”
On the 20th then 23rd
CBS: 4 mins / 1 min 30 secs
NBC: 2 mins 7 secs / 24 secs
ABC: 2 mins / 1 min 26 secs
Thank you for taking your 12 minutes for us from your busy schedule. We have waited a month for good documentaries, powerful presentation of scientific facts, the use of cameras and money to share the view of the damage, even a single serious debate about adaptation carried on at an adult level from the so-called air-waves. Silence.
It has been One Month, that is long enough. This is the season of Halloween in America, as it passes into All Souls Day, I am going to send the medicine to those who have been preparing along with me in these spiritual triage tents. I have not been peddling a false hope. Each of you will need to decide for yourself if it might be a true one or not. I’m asking each who have done the work along with me these last few years, and anyone else so moved, to join me in saying a simple prayer each day until the end of the month.
In this aspiration I use the word “Lord,” which is meant to stand for the sacred-most love and wisdom – and truth – ALL people of goodwill recognize in the beauty of the created world. Some of what is to come will be quite Catholic because watching a “magical battle” unfold is part of the education I’m offering. It is not meant to proselytize. My brothers and friends if for you it is Lord Buddha, or the Clear Light with a Smile, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Eastern and Western Orthodoxies, our beloved friends among the Native Americans honoring Grandfather Spirit. . . I could go on: Everyone celebrating the beauty and love that is ours to share in the wonder of life on earth lift up your hands with me, please, for the sake of the children.
AP reported “a major shift in alliances” on October 13th. The NYT reported the “pullout has already unleashed chaos and bloodletting.” This should rings bells for everyone on earth since it is not a small strategic development at all. For Catholics in particular, since every major Marian apparition approved by the Church ended on October 13th, the date too should ring bells. (For example Fatima where three children spoke and the Sun danced.) The fact that this whole fiasco was created by what has been called internationally a betrayal and stab-in-the-back of a brother in arms by the United States is a smear on our name of historic proportions. This should ring bells for every patriot! Is that the hoof-beats of the Apocalypse we hear?
There simply is no more clear cut illustration of the difference between the Catholic and Protestant point of view than the teaching of what the Book of Revelation given to us from St. John is in fact teaching. The schismatics in the last century or so hit upon the magical interpretation that became so popular with the publication of The Late Great Planet Earth and re-surged with another publishing phenomenon, the Protestant Christian Left Behind series of books and spin-offs. Among the children, of course, nothing in the publishing world could touch Harry Potter. We will be getting into that by and by and the news on that front, at least from the Catholic perspective is quite good indeed. It was a training of sorts for what your generation is going to need, if I am not mistaken. Their terryfying version of the Apocalypse has been canceled and I want to show you how, exactly. I think your going to like it.
There is an art to reading the larger spiritual forces behind the headlines of history, is there not? Mankind’s intelligence is simply incapable of spanning all the causes and effects ideas, words, and choices make in the end. It is not hard to see how seeds planted in the past developed into the modern world, but that does not allow us to know with any certainty what tomorrow will bring in detail. Classic Biblical belief is that some are given prophetic words and in them details of future events can be found that are astonishingly to the point. They are recognized in hind sight yet the role of the prophet is to advert the worse of the bad choice his generation is making. St. John’s Revelation is and remains the prophetic Word of the Church and she has every right to correct those who would use it to mislead the masses into madness. Even if WWIII has had its tinderbox struck do not fear, consciously or unconsciously by absorbing it from the surrounding Protestant culture, that the “blueprint” laid out in things like the Left Behind series and supported by 700 Club Christianity are going to map to reality. They have mixed up the planes. It makes a mockery of faith and it’s fight for the truth and it afflicts people with a fear, no a terror, they should not need to bear. Fighting Hersey is the business of the Church, Christians policing themselves as it were, and has always been. The public has been invited to watch the “magical battle” since at least St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote the classic text in the year 180 Against Heresies (which remains a fascinating read btw if you skip through some of the details of the older Gnostic dogmas).
Finally, I would like to call out that the lesson we will learn as the unsustainable collapses is just how valuable our children, and the future they represent, really are. How? By no longer pretending among ourselves as adults that we are ever going to find any better way of living together than to seek the good first, not money as Greta said just as clear as a, well, as a bell.
The story of betray in Christianity is found in both the tales of Judas and St. Peter. All men and woman of goodwill the world over join us in humbly admitting the honest truth about mankind, that at times we fail to live up to our innermost commitments to love and peace when we are under duress. We all betray but the question is what do you do with the guilt, since the past cannot be undone? Ever since the death camps and nuclear fires of the world wars the whole world has been asking itself the same question. The Gospel teaches that Judas is unable to believe God would ever forgive his guilt and he goes off and kills himself in a confused attempt at reparation through human sacrifice. It is the error that goes all the way back to Father Abraham when an angel stilled the dagger by which he thought killing his child was serving God. Starting to see where all this might be relevant to our times when children are under attack on every front? The alternative to Judas and taking the suicidal way out is to weep deep tears of repentance, to morn in sackcloth, to live fearlessly as a penitent so as never to grow too proud again. Most everyone knows how these stories end, the resurrected Lord forgives St. Peter, establishes him as the first Pope and Western history was off to the races.
The role of the Church is to visibly show the truth of the Divine Mysteries for the public, in public wherever it is allowed. It has not always been allowed nor is it today. Those without anything but a Protestant set of history textbooks might want to watch HBO’s Gunpowder Plot. It will be my contention that the Church is again showing the world an important and painful lesson about Her Mysteries, this time one concerning children.
People of goodwill everywhere, please try to understand the exquisite pain the pedophile scandal caused good, simple, believing Catholics throughout the world. Wouldn’t this be the most corrupting form of betray in any of your faiths? We need to pray for those hurt, in all our faiths. For Catholics the spiritual imagination that accompanies our ceremonial worship absorbed a powerful darkness, one made particularly poignant because we hold the words of Christ are, mysteriously, literally true when at the last supper he was to share on earth with His closest friends he said “this is my body” and “this is my blood.” Soon after, the robed one was handed over to those with spears. For believing Catholics when a fallen priest used the Host of Holy Communion as part of the ritualistically colored abuse they were setting the Abomination of Desolation on the altar of the Living God. We have drank the wine of that suffering since. A more Satanic rite could not be imagined. Mary Magdalene was not allowed to touch the wounds of Christ until he had completed his Resurrection, but she who had suffered the seven demons was the first to see it had happened. Though the enemy of the Church sought to strike His Sacred Heart with the lance a second time and finally finish off the Church in human history, that did not happen. The teaching is that He was “once able to suffer and then unable to suffer” and is now, in-spite of what looks to be an humiliating helplessness to ward off evil, in fact all-powerfully among us in ways we can hardly even imagine. What can be and was hurt is the Church, His Bride, and this is just what heretics have been seeking to do since the beginning. Some of them have hurt the Church more than others but all seek, as it were, to violate the Virgin we read about in St. John’s Book of Revelation.
The lies that do the most damage, as far as we are concerned as Catholics trying to protect the true interpretation of our symbols and stories, is to confuse the Orthodox teaching of the Living God with the cults of the Dying God. As I have stated multiple times, it turns out Christianity is a very dangerous set of teachings to misunderstand. Catholicism does not proselytize, you will not find us knocking on your door like Mormons or Seventh Day Adventists. We are known world wide for holding up the crucifix – a cross with a body on it – and holding up a wafer of bread above a chalice of wine and declaring them the body and blood of God made man. We invite the world to gaze upon the beauty of the ceremonial union of heaven and earth (see last chapters of St. John’s Revelation) as here and now we offer for all people of goodwill “the work of human hands” which becomes our spiritual food and drink. “Happy are those called to the supper of the lamb.” We are trying to win you over with our love, there is no other safe path to God but to love him for his own sake. That is the Catholic Way. Anything else and you are using Him. Maybe you are using Him out of fear or terror or pain but still you are using Him and persons do not like to be used.
By allowing this one miracle of the body and blood, I will argue, the Orthodoxy avoided all the many, many temptations to veer to the right or to the left under the attack of its enemies for two millennia. I am sure it can be counted on to carry on the good fight through the end of this third Christian millennia and beyond as well. By holding to Divine Magick, it never falls prey to magical thinking and the “gates of hell” do not prevail against her. Defender of Reason, defender of the rights of Man to paint and make art, it insists we are here on this astonishing planet to be JOYFUL, to feast with one another. Anger, rebellion and the spirit of iconoclasm has a role to play in Man’s ongoing fight against evil, but so does the Spirit of the Fathers who hold up their hand before the young ones are about to go over an Abyss and say, Lo! No! This far you are allowed, no farther.
The Rain Will Fall, perhaps we can turn it into the dewfall of the heavens fertilizing our Wonderful World, yes? The work of human hands can hurt us indeed, they do. Does this blacken the sky, curse the stars, extinguish the delightful laughter of the boys and girls among us, generation after generation? No! No! No! And a thousand times No!
The following symbol is Franciscan, though I am part of no existing Franciscan Order. I am using it for contemplatives’ suffering offered nakedly in brotherhood with the suffering endured by our brothers and friends of every nation and tribe, whatever robe you wear. The peace of Brother Francis, the little poor man who bore the marks of sanctity, may it come to your homes, that they may know the ecstasy that only the Lord can give. I put it at the top of the prayer to remind all of us affiliated with one religion or another that it is asking for prayers, not converts; we are all in this together and together will respond. I put a copy of the prayer by itself under Poetics.
Lord, Save the Children
the litany
Lord, Help Us Save the Children
From those who stole their attention span and sold it for 30 pieces of silver.
Lord, Help Us Save the Children
From those who stole their literate inheritance and replaced it with flashy screens, for 30 pieces of silver.
Lord, Help Us Save the Children
From those who designed their pastimes to be filled with shooting and gore, for 30 pieces of silver.
Lord, Help Us Save the Children
From those who build the nuclear weapons that haunt our nightmares, for 30 pieces of silver.
Lord, Help Us Save the Children
From those who saw the planet from space but refusing to heed the call to limit growth, sold it for 30 pieces of silver.
Lord, Help Us Save the Children
From those who are burning the Amazon and those who created the system that requires them to do so, for 30 pieces of silver.
(please add your earth meditations)
Lord, Help Us Save the Children
From those who placed gonzo pornography in the pocket of everyone, 24 x 7, for 30 pieces of silver.
Lord, Help Us Save the Children
From those who fill the airwaves with smut and lies seducing with noise and glamour the very hearts of the young, for 30 pieces of silver.
Lord, Help Us Save the Children
From those who fill their minds with truly strange drugs while school shootings and suicides under their ministries keep rising. And save them specifically from the snake in Big Pharma coldly addicting any and all comers, guilty and innocent alike, for 30 pieces of silver.
Lord, Help Us Save the Children
From Pharisees, “You have taken away the key of knowledge. You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter.” (Luke 11.52) Our young desperately need true spiritual food and you dared to play God for a trump, for a crown of power and throne of praise you will never, in fact, receive.
The Battle Belongs to the Lord.
Amen
(for Catholics and anyone else who wants to join us add:)
St. Francis of Assisi, Pray for Us
St. Clare of Assisi, Pray for Us
St. Anthony of Padua, Pray for Us
The Voice of the Dark Child
What I have been calling the Dark Child is the abused child that is silent no more. It always comes bearing a prophetic message, a word of judgement. Today, as Fall begins, Greta Thunberg brought that message to the world. So too has the Pope.
Now What ?
It is such a sacred world, how dare you not reverence it? Mindful Ecology: A Way Forward is a serious response to the seriousness of the crisis. It outlines a next good step for you to take, if you will. Are you depressed? Angry? If you are being called, do the homework, discipline yourself to the spiritual calling that it really is, these tears you shed for the earth. Tomorrow is not set in stone. Pray, meditate, contemplate; do so around ecological issues, earth’s beauty, or the cosmic wonder for 15 – 20 minutes every day. Let it shape you. No one can tell you what you need to do in response to the call you are receiving. Train and you will come to know what you need to know for yourself. Trust the heart, violence is not the way, there is another path.
Thank you, child, for speaking the true word for our time. There in the halls of power the question was raised that is fundamentally at the heart of our protest against the fossil fueled industrialized military complex. She asked the existing generation of leaders,
Who do you serve, God or Mammon?
Now What ?
The Emperor has no clothes! Oh my, where do we go from here? Mr. and Mrs. Exxon, the children want the planet back. What are you going to do? Nuclear war? More death camps? Don’t you dare do it in the name of Christ. The Pope spoke clearly, “build bridges, not walls.” It may all sound so right, this economic nationalism which, after all, correctly names the evils of globalization but, but. . . history includes many injustices against the poor. The rich cannot now say we start over at square one, now that the resources are trashed. Besides, the rich core is rotten and the South American Spirit is on the rise, bloody yes after so many years of CIA trained administrations but also filled with hope. Hope is something in rare supply just now in the overdeveloped world. Name the black and all the colors return everywhere else.
Every fossil fuel dependency our global civilization requires for its survival needs to be reversed, re-engineered or stopped as quickly as possible. Ask scientists who understand the reality of the lag involved in climate change when ALL carbon based fuel use should stop and they will say something like, ‘next March.’ Those who are starting to march understand.
Now what ?
The gulf between public words and the private experience of reality has rarely in history been this great. The disconnect between those of us who see the way Homo Colossus spreads death and destruction in its wake and those who do not is increasing. This is not a game, it reaches to the roots of each individual’s perception of the world they encounter day in and day out. These ecological facts carry the radical roots of revolutionary change for all of us, ready or not, like it or not.
If we lose Mercy, we lose it all. Yes, there needs to be a turning towards justice in truth. Yes, radically the operation will cut to the roots and the triage tents might seem small right up to the point the tide turns in our favor, but the tide will turn because the unsustainable will not be sustained. Do not miss your precious opportunity to take your place on the battlefield! Hit the triage tents and bind up your wounds and the wounds of your friends and then march out strong and confident back to the front lines. Just speak the truth, day after day, first to yourself and then to others. We have lost our reverence for the sacred that is everywhere on display throughout the natural world. We will learn to recover it and teach it to others. Never again will we allow a human abstraction, e.g. money, to blind us to the reality of the molecular world that is at hand and before our eyes everyday. The depression and anger you feel is a spiritual calling. Nurtured properly it will teach you your own way back to the path of reverence and you will enter the sacred world. You will see that this sublime order that is Earth and our presence on it is, in fact, sacred. Earth and all its glory is our inheritance, a gift to each of us being extended in all its bounty freely and profusely, right here and right now. The way we treat this sacredness that is right at hand is, today, utterly shameful. I do believe, as do many, many millions of others, that this will not always be the case.
Have you heard the voice of thunder?
Earth Day’s Dark Night
I would like to share a few thoughts this earth day. It has been awhile since I added a new essay to this site but, happily, the number of subscribers continues to rise. Though this is just one voice among many I do believe it is unique in its focus on the physical, emotional and spiritual impact our ecological transgressions have on people of goodwill who dare to study these things. I hope my readers remain centered in peace. The fact that the ecological news just keeps getting worse and the policies of the powerful corporations and governments do not change in any proportionate degree are wholly expected. Mindful of our ecological reality we expect nothing less.
Once again the public discourse fails to have the courage required for an adult conversation concerning the true state of the earth’s ecosystems, the primary causes of their accelerating destruction and the essential changes to our cultures and lifestyles required to respond effectively. Now the magic numbers being bandied about are “we only have a decade left to change our ways,” as if the time lag built into climate change had not already pushed us over the cliff and we do not already see tipping points in our rear-view mirror. The BBC’s recent and praiseworthy effort, Climate Change: The Facts (on YouTube here, today anyway) is a good example. It is just not possible to have a public conversation that does not include the happy chapter at the end — you know, the one that promises everything will be alright with a few technological adjustments here and there, though they may cost a bit, our perpetual shopping need never end. I think the happy chapter is a lie. I applaud the wisdom and courage of Greta Thunberg and the Youth Strike 4 Climate activities, this is just the type of dark child awakening I have been saying we should expect. She stated quite clearly when she refused to keep going to school, paraphrasing, what’s the point when business-as-usual has no future? Why go to school to learn more facts when the most important facts, the ecological ones, are being so routinely ignored? The happy chapter is wearing thin.
This is a time for repentance. Those who push the delusion of a new green economy uncoupled to a whole new set of human and social values are selling a chimera designed to avoid that necessary sorrowful confession of our failings. The happy chapter at the end of so many books analyzing the facts of ecological and social collapse is becoming ever more difficult to believe in. The magical incantation we have been repeating since the 1970’s, ‘we only have a decade more to change our ways’ rings hollow. As the ice melts and the fires burn, the methane bubbles and the holy wars get hotter the beginning of a properly proportional response breaks out here and there. I see Mindful Ecology as one such response, not that what I have to say is all that critical but that these thoughts occur to someone like myself is a true sign of the times. What father of goodwill, educated in the ecological facts, does not struggle daily with the pain of our pervasive biological, cultural and spiritual poisons? Isn’t this what is driving the disruptive demonstrations of Extinction Rebellion as well?
So much for European news. Here in the land of the free, free to burn fossil fuels from the moment we rise to the moment we fall asleep and nothing else, here the ecological news is so bleak as to defy description. We certainly do not have anything like the sane and scientific presentation of the BBC or demonstrations such as what is happening in England and Sweden. No, here the news of the day, literally today, news designed to bring despair to one and all who care about the issues constellated on earth day is. . . wait for it. . . exceptions to Iran’s oil sanctions will end in a few weeks. Sadly, thoughtful people everywhere cannot but wonder if this petrochemical administration is not simply marching us closer to the threshold of World War III.
Here is why I am writing to you today. Do not let the carefully planned fear mongering lead you to terror. Do not let it squeeze the spirit out of your soul and your soul out of your body but keep your seat, keep your perspective. All the evil that men and woman do will never overcome the power and wisdom blooming everywhere throughout our garden planet. We walk on sacred ground born from the mysteries of deep time and deep space. Though the depths of these deep wells may look like a dark night to us, they are in fact wells of light. The order we see on display everywhere still sings of an intelligence only a fool would name meaningless chaos.
More than ever we need to hone our triage skills. The dark child grows stronger in saying “NO” to all those forces — human and cosmic — that would sacrifice its life on the altar of convenience and quarterly profits. It is time we raise our voice until it is heard, yet all the while remaining on our guard against the jack boot thugs willing to dress in green to steal our vision and pervert our hope. Kindness born from compassion is still, and will remain, the way forward. We need a call to repentance, a turning around born of sorrow and simple sackcloth and ashes, to ring out all across the earth, not a call to war. Small is still beautiful.