An Advent Prayer

You wait in silence and darkness, hidden to wandering eyes, unheard by noise-filled ears. You wait, silent and alone, like the moon in the dark-night sky.  No sound, no movement, nothing seen, nothing known. You alone truly know what or who you are.   

I wait in darknesses and in lights, not hidden, eyes wandering, mind wandering, ears filled with noises. I wait, noisy and busy, like dried leaves blowing across a frozen yard.  Many sounds, movements, things seen, nothing truly known. The mystery of being has melted in the heat of much busyness.  So busy living, no time to live.    

I say, “Come, Lord God Almighty,” but if You were not here, how could I—how would I—possibly seek You? You were here before I turned towards You, and You will be here long after I, too, have scurried across the frozen ground, a dried leaf. What does it mean that “You are here?” You are no object, nothing seen, nothing known by your boundaries or limits, nothing heard nor felt. You are here in the darkness from which I turn away, in the silence I cannot hear. You are present, but I am absent—now here, there, perhaps nowhere at all. You are present in ways that nothing is or can be present. You are present in your apparent absence.  

How can I seek You when I am dispersed everywhere? My mind is fragmented in so many thoughts, feelings, sensations, that there is no room for your still nothingness. Are our parties and liturgical services truly an aid to seeking You, when they resemble Santa’s sack of stuffed toys? Not silence, but noise; not stillness, but motion-commotion; not darkness, but infatuations.   

And still, You wait. You come to the one who sits alone in silence, waiting, as You wait, and listening, as You listen. You speak in silence; our speech drowns out silence, leaving You unheard. You shine into darkened minds, which turn themselves away from your penetratingly bright, discerning gaze. You come, only if I will sit still, and allow You to draw me empty-handed, empty-minded into the Cloud of Unknowing.  

A Note To My Family...

A note to my family, supposing that my brother Andy is Donald Trump, and my sister Jeanie is Hillary Clinton.

My dear sister and brother:

I feel very bad for both of you, after such a humiliating and mud-slinging campaign. It has been brutal and ugly for all of us, really. I also feel bad for you because one will win the Presidency, and one will not. And I know that each one of you, my brother and sister, has flaws and weaknesses. And you have personal motives for wanting the highest office in the land, some perhaps not even clear to you in the depth of your heart.  You also each have your conscious wishes and plans for the country, for improving our common life here according to your lights. And you both have large swarms of people around you, including some very sharp advisors on both sides—and some who just like to be near the center of power, and could even betray you if they thought it served their own interests.

For the one of you who loses the election, I feel genuine pity.  But I will feel even more pity, if less immediate and intense, but sustained over your years in office, for the one of you who wins this bloody election.  What you gain, you may live to regret, as other powerful leaders have regretted their terms in office—often ending in shame, humiliation, violent or natural death.

Whichever one of you wins, our country remains deeply divided.  We have divided for years, but the intensity and severity of division keeps growing.  Whoever wins, more than half of the electorate will be highly critical of you (remember that perhaps 30% of eligible citizens will not bother voting—just a rough guess). Whoever wins, you will be hated by many.

The one of you who becomes President will face a highly turbulent international scene, with grave crises awaiting:  Islamic-fundamentalist terrorism; resurgent Iran; Russia and China pressing to expand their spheres of influence / power; wicked regimes as in N Korea; violent unrest blowing up in one country after another (such as in Venezuela recently).  So you will face extremely grave crises and challenges—most of which we cannot even now guess. You and your inner circle of advisors—and our whole country whom you will represent—will be utterly tested.  Surely you know and expect such tests.

But furthermore, whoever wins, you will face our country struggling with numerous serious problems: breakdown of families and community bonds; spiritual-intellectual-moral decay in many citizens; a poor educational system for many Americans; profound racial tensions; breakdown of order in inner cities; rampant drug abuse; influx of millions of “undocumented” migrants; increasing concentration of wealth in large cities, with third-world poverty in small towns and rural areas; sluggish economic growth and perhaps a recession; an enormous and growing national debt; and so on.  You will face an empire that is, in my opinion, dying from within. You may disagree, but surely you will have to deal with many symptoms of internal disease and disorder.

You may win the election, dear brother or sister, but I think that you will often feel enormous burdens on your shoulders, and be deprived of quiet rest.  You will have sleepless nights as you must struggle through many difficult decisions—all the while as you are mocked and even vilified by the mass media and entertainment industries. Few will be concerned for you as a person.  Even friends and associates will see you as a means to their own gain. You will wonder, “Who are my real friends?”  You will often be alone in the quiet or turmoil of your own heart.

So whichever one of you wins, my brother and sister, my heart goes out to you. I owe you and promise you my love and support, and well-intentioned advice should you ever ask me for it. No matter what happens to you, you are my brother and my sister.

"To God All Are Alive"

Each one of us faces the prospects of dying as our body suffers death.  And each of us knows bodily death to be the fate not only of every human being, but by observation and reflection, of every living being:  whatever lives in a body must die.  This is the one certainty in existence.

How our animal friends deal with death, I do not know, but many of us have observed dogs or horses grieving the loss of a companion, and elephants seem to practice some kind of ritual at the site where one of their members died. Our primitive human ancestors buried their dead, and archaic cave drawings suggest early beliefs about life beyond death.  

The ways of dealing with death and the possibility of existence beyond bodily death that show up in recorded human history are highly varied, all pointing to the desire of every human being to endure in some form beyond death, even if only in the memories of loved ones. Living on in the memories of others, “in history,” is the weakest form of immortality, but the only form known to imaginations bound to space-time, to secular souls. Another pale or weak form of existence beyond death was held by ancient Israelites, who speculated little on life beyond death, other than conceiving of death in “Sheol,” a kind of shadowy underworld, about which nothing could be known. A far more elaborate set of beliefs is embodied in what is called metempsychosis, or the “transmigration of the soul” from one form of existence to another. We may be familiar with this belief in the form of “reincarnation,” as taught, for example, within Hinduism. The soul of the being, its interior life, may return in some other bodily existence.

I know of two other speculative beliefs about “after life” which have had millions of adherents. One is the “resurrection of the body,” as believed in ancient Zoroastrianism and then in Pharisaic Judaism and early Christianity.  We hear this belief in the ancient creeds of the Church:  “I believe in the resurrection of the body.”  Given his experience of Christ as “Resurrected” beyond death, the Apostle Paul accepted resurrection, but not in a physical form, but as a “spiritual body” (I Corinthians 15). The Apostle strains to make a vital distinction. The second major speculation on a form of life beyond death was held by the ancient Greeks in the teaching of the “immortality of the soul.” What this meant, and which parts of the soul might endure beyond death, received attention even by the best Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. The general agreement in Greek teaching was that at least the divine intellect in human being endured beyond death.  

As recorded in our Gospels, Jesus offered no speculation on life beyond death: he did not teach the “resurrection of the body” or the “immortality of the soul,” and surely not “reincarnation.” Hence, he broke from Pharisaic Judaism and from Greek culture. But he did not share the secularist view that after death—nothing.  What we find in the Gospels is far more simple and profound:  “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living; to God all are alive.”That is Jesus’ definitive statement on life beyond death, and perhaps all that can be said. He does not restrict his claim to “all human beings,” but says, “to God all are alive.”  In a similar teaching in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Because I live, you also will live.” Period. Again, that is all, devoid of speculation on how, when, and so on. All he adds, in refuting his clever questioners, is what we read in Luke 20, read at Mass today:  that one cannot die again, so there is no need for marriage. Christ’s simple assertion is crystal clear: “To God all are alive.”In that phrase I place my hope in Life, life eternal. “The rest is silence.”

Thoughts On American-Global Totalitariamism

To fellow Americans who may read this:

I call to mind words of Thomas Jefferson written to his friend John Holmes in 1820, on the occasion of the Missouri Compromise and what he saw coming in American politics:

...But this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened
 and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the
Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only,
not a final sentence…

“The fire bell in the night,” the death-knell of our American political order is what one can hear if one is listening, and thinks about what we see unfolding in American political and social life. What we experienced in years past as a democratic republic has ceased being a republic and a democracy, but has increasingly become a totalitarian empire ruled by Progressive Gnostics seeking to “transform America” into part of a globalist society of fellow-traveling rulers, intellectuals, bureaucrats, bankers, multinational corporate head, educationists, and media-propagandists.Their domination over American political and social life is nearly complete. 

That our American political regime and way of life are in truth becoming totalitarian I submit, for the present, a few facts: 

1. It is increasingly evident that our country is dominated by a closed ruling elite, made up of members of both major political parties, who know that they have much more in common with each other than they do with the masses whom they dominate and seek to continue to control. This ruling class seeks total domination over the citizens, and endless perpetuation of their ever-increasing power. 

2. The ruling elite is dominated by forms of Gnosticism, especially of a Progressivist-Socialist variety, amalgamated from Comte’s Progressivism, Marxian Socialism, elements of classical Liberalism, with other planks pulled from various ideologies. They are close-minded in thought, certain that they possess “the truth,” and seek to impose this “truth” not only on the USA, but on the entire world. To an alarming degree, they have been successful. 

3. The killing of the unborn, increasingly with public funds and statesponsorship, is not incidental or just one promoted policy, but a revealing model of the "brave new world" they seek to create: a realm of total domination of powerful rulers over the ruled. The most helpless, defenseless members of our human community-infants in the womb-are subject to a reign of terror in the form of "abortion on demand." It is one step towards power to put to death any individuals or classes of citizens deemed "unwanted," or deplorable," or "unproductive." In addition to the unborn, most vulnerable victims include newly born infants (some of whom are left to die), unwanted children, various "irredeemables," elderly persons declared to be "socially useless," and the terminally ill who may be "euthanized." American death camps include abortion mills, hospitals, "care facilities," and even inner cities where often drug-crazed gangs terrorize citizens with real and threatened violence. Abortion mills and inner cities together show the accepted and promoted reign of terror in America. 

 4. The ruling elite has proven itself willing to use totalitarian techniques to keep their monopoly of political power. One primary means of control are the mass media which enter nearly every home and every citizen’s consciousness, especially through television and movies, but also through the internet, and which seek to dominate thinking, prevent independence of thought and judgment, and remake all citizens in the image of the ruling elite. 

5. Another primary means of ongoing control of the citizens is through Progressivist domination in mass “education” (propaganda) from pre-school through secondary education, into college and graduate schools. The lack of freedom of thought in American academia is astonishing, but well known to anyone who has spent years in this system and dared to “think outside of the box,” that is, outside the realm of Progressivist Gnostic ideology. The grip on teachers and students is ironclad and nearly complete. The cost for refusal to accept the dominant ideology is poor performance, failure, or unemployment in the area of one’s expertise. 

6. As we have seen in the recent Presidential election, a challenge to elite domination has been met with rejection of virtually the entire ruling class, media manipulation, screening out of diverse views, character assassination, and even covert, fomented violence at political rallies to make it appear that the interloper is “a dictator,” when in fact the monopoly of power belongs to the ruling clique. Citizens have been mugged, property has been stolen or damaged (as in “keying cars,” and defacing campaign signs), persons have been threatened. What shows up to discerning eyes is the severe loss of freedom of expression and action in American politics. 

In short, the United States of America is neither a republican form of government, nor a mass democracy. These terms are used and promoted as part of a democratic mythology intended to keep the masses uninformed and living in a dreamlike state of illusion, as the rulers continue their quest for domination over all aspects of American life. The American regime has increasingly become a form of Gnostic totalitarianism, similar in form to the Soviet Union, Communist China, National Socialist Germany, Communist Cuba, Socialist Europe, and such regimes. What is called “American democracy” is in reality a virulent cancer destroying our body politic. 

What are we to do?

First, we must open our eyes and try to see clearly what has been happening to us as a people in history. Living in illusions—such as the myth of being “democratic”—prevents clear sightedness and coming to grips with reality. 

Second, the use of violence to overthrow the regime, as our Founders rebelled against the British Crown, is neither possible nor beneficial. The monopoly of power in the hands of rulers in government is extreme. And too many innocent lives would be destroyed in any attempted coup d’état. 

Third, the Gnostic-Progressive ideology must be examined and dissected for the diseased non-thought that it is. And it must be rejected as spiritually and intellectually diseased. For example, when candidate Obama proclaimed, “We will transform the world,” American citizens foolishly accepted such nonsense, rather than rejecting the verbiage and its goal as destructive. It was accepted because we have been instilled with such nonsense for over a hundred years. The origin of such thought in the young Karl Marx was neither analyzed nor understood. As President Obama has shown himself to be living in a Gnostic dream world, with dire consequences for American domestic and foreign policies. The man is not stupid, but he is a blind fool on account of his ironclad Progressivist ideology. 

Fourth, we must not be deceived: Mrs. Clinton would continue the same would-be totalitarian domination of American life evident in our leaders for decades: from the reign of Progressives such as T Roosevelt and W Wilson, through recent rulers—Clinton, Bush, Obama. Those who can observe and think should now understand that both major political parties are, at the top levels, part of the same dominating clique bent on changing American society into part of the globalist utopia of their dreams. One result of this utopian dream is perpetual warfare, as our rulers seek to impose their diseased vision on an often recalcitrant world. Here we find not “one empire, one people, one leader” of National Socialism, but “one world under our total domination” by the globalist, Gnostic elites. What the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were on a national or imperial scale, we are now becoming on a global scale.

On Those Who Trust In Themselves

A tree praying

For all of our lives we have read on U.S. coins and currency, “In God we trust.” Historically this phrase was a slight modification of words from the poem we know in the “Star-Spangled Banner”:   “In God is our trust.” Whatever the specific origin, the phrase, “In God we trust,” embodies the immersion of our Founders and Forefathers in the biblical tradition of Judaeo-Christianity. For the usage of similar phrases is common throughout the Bible, the book most read by generations of Americans.  Especially in the book of Psalms—“the prayerbook of the church”—one finds repeated instruction to place one’s trust in the LORD (YHWH), in God (Elohim). At the root of distinctly Christian faith is the act of placing one’s faith, one’s trust “in Jesus Christ and in the God who sent him,” to use a typical phrase. The foundational, grounding experience of the Apostles and earliest Christians was the act of entrusting one’s self, one’s life, soul, loved ones, to the providential care of the all-good, all-merciful God.This experience of entrusting oneself to God-in-Christ was in turn a response to discovering in Jesus the presence, life, mercy, liberating power of the Creator-God. A man or woman first spiritually discerns that God is present in Jesus and acting for our salvation, our complete benefit; and the inspired response to this spiritual insight is self-surrendering, self-abandoning trust. This action is not done once, but often, in words or in a more direct glance of the heart. And we see it beautifully expressed by Jesus on the cross in St. Luke’s account of the Passion: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” In agony or in joy, in times of plenty or of great want, the faithful soul lovingly entrusts itself to the One in whom alone we find true life.

The parable of two men going up to the Temple to pray, given to us only in St. Luke’s Gospel, depicts two ways of life—one leading to fulfillment and peace with God, the other condemning oneself to the hell of a self-absorbed, self-centered life. Once again, Luke is a master story-teller, and in this short parable summarizes these two ways of life in a way that all of us can understand and remember. One person’s “prayer” is itself nothing but self-absorption, and is even spoken “with himself,” or, more literally, “to himself.” (What kind of human being prays “to himself”?) God does not enter into this prayer at all, because the one offering it is closed to God.  How can God enter into an ego-filled consciousness, into a person whose thoughts are ever about himself? This person can love neither God nor human being, but despises others as beneath contempt, as deplorable, perhaps not even as truly human at all.This big shot, trusting in himself, has both feet squarely on earth, and his mind has not risen up into the Kingdom, into the Presence of God. He is empty, alone, self-satisfied, spiritually dead. In himself he now lives; in himself he will die. He looks impressive from the outside, but inside is all “waste and void.”

The other man does not take pride in himself or in his life. Rather, conscious of his own shortcomings and failures, humbly faces the ground—an outward expression of inner surrender. And he cries out to the one who is Love itself: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (or literally, “to me, to the sinner”). To this person, there is one who is merciful—God—and only one known sinner—I myself. This man, this sinner, not only addresses his heart and prayer to God, but is already graced by God, for it is the LORD himself who is moving this man to be conscious of his failings, and to turn to the LORD in his need.This man prays to God, with God, in God. Although he may not know it, his very words are being moved by the Creator, to lift his heart and mind into a union with God possible only to the humble—that is, to the self-emptying. Casting himself onto God, he is in reality already in the Kingdom of Heaven.  

St. Luke knows this experience from the inside, because he lives, prays, writes his gospel not out of himself alone, but out of his faith-union with God. As he writes at the end of his Gospel: “Did not our hearts burn within us when he spoke to us along the way and opened to us the Scriptures?” He knows

well of what he speaks, for he is focused not on himself, but on the presence of God as Christ and Spirit in his own soul, his consciousness.

What I have offered is an example of reading a spiritual text, such as a passage of a Gospel, in light of the experiences out of which the author is writing. To do otherwise, and to offer another kind of interpretation, disrespects the text and its author, and allows one to read in anything he wishes. An example of such reading would be a doctrinal interpretation (to fit with dogma), or an allegorical interpretation, as the Church Fathers often used. Others get caught in minutiae of biblical games. Remember, Christ is far greater than ourselves.  

Questions and a Note

Two weeks ago at Mass, I asked each of us a question: Does your faith bring you into contact with God? Does your faith make a difference in your life, in how you experience the world around you, and within you? Do you have an ongoing sense of God’s Presence in you, or do you feel alone, apart from God? 

Now I ask you little question based on our readings last week. Let’s see who can guess the answer. Why did Naaman the Syrian want dirt? Naaman says to the prophet Elisha, “Please let me, your servant, have two mule-loads of earth, for I will no longer sacrifice to any other god except to the LORD.” What is the connection between dirt and worshipping the LORD? 

And now my note: An anniversary is an occasion to remember milestones in one’s life, and to recall the original event with gratitude. Today I remember 15 October 1988, the day I was ordained a Catholic priest. My sense of being a priest, and what it means to me, came vividly to mind this past week as I visited a former parishioner from Great Falls who is dying. The family honored me by asking me to pray for their mother, Rose, and we prayed the Last Rites. Priesthood is not a matter of status or possession, but a means to help others in time of spiritual need. In loving service one feels gratitude and joy in God.

A Mini-Homily

Last week at Mass I asked each of you a question:  Does your faith bring you into contact with God?  Does your faith make a difference in your life, in how you experience the world around you, and within you?  Do you have an ongoing sense of God’s Presence in you, or do you feel alone, apart from God?  

Now I ask you one little question.  Let’s see who can guess the answer.  Why did Naaman the Syrian want dirt?  Naaman says to the prophet Elisha, “Please let me, your servant, have two mule-loads of earth, for I will no longer sacrifice to any other god except to the LORD.”  What is the connection between dirt or earth and worshipping the LORD?

Let’s see who figures this out.