A Prayer at Eucharist

I need You; I want You. I love You; I adore You. I thank You; I trust You. I repent to You; I abide in You. I l receive You; I exult in You. I remember You; I look forward to You. I rest in You; I move and act in You. I delight in You; I hope in You.

Beware the "Angel of Light"

In his classic, prophetic "A Short Tale of the Anti-Christ"of 1900, the great Russian Soloviev imagines the emergence of a remarkable world leader, a unifer of all races and religions, a man of peace, a vegetarian,an eco-activist, an icon of all that is liberal and enlightened. One problem: he has no use for Christ as Savior. He is an "angel of light." He becomes an agent of peace and harmony around the globe. Eventually, the consensus of support and approval for him is resisted only by a very small contingent of eccentric, marginal "true believers" who face off in an apocalyptic confrontation. The tale recalls the traditional warning of the saints: beware the "angel of light." To the altruistic, idealistic, more virtuous among us Satan appears, not in his moral decadence, but as an angel of light, as an image of the ideal and the perfect. He appeals at once to what is enlightened and aspirational even as he sureptitiously awakens pride and eventually a refusal to receive the Crucified as Savior.. This tale throws light on our current politics. Donald Trump NEVER presented as an angel of light: he was breathtakingly transparent in his decadence, shameless and uninhibited in his self-centeredness, disrespect for women, ethnophobia, absolute regard for truth, crudeness and verbal violence to whoever offended him. In this he was refreshing: disarmingly candid, utterly free of hypocricy or pretentiousness. He was unequivocally, as a person, an angel of darkness. I could NEVER vote for him because I considered him a horrific role model for my grandchildren. Paradoxically, however, he exercised an inverted influence on them: so vile was he that our young recoiled from him in disgust and became vulnerable to deeper, darker moral toxins, but ones supernaturally camouflaged by appearance of the Good: angels of light. The liberal over-culture is currently euphoric and intoxicated with the agenda of Joe Biden. He is so appealing by contrast to Trump: warm, working-class, Catholic in a histrionic manner, anti-racist, pro-reproductive-rights-of-women, ecologically concerned, caring for the marginalized and immigrants and poor. He is, clearly, an angel of light. At a closer look: he advocates the genocide of the unborn, and coerces Catholics and others to support it with taxes. He advocates contraception and forces everyone to support it through the Obamacare mandate. He has utter contempt for the consciences of Catholics and others and for their religious liberty regarding the meaning of marriage and family. He supports the deconstruction of gender and the mutiliation of the young who suffer from gender dyphoria. He is spending money recklessly and inflicting a huge debt upon our young who will pay for it. He disparages those with different political views as racists, homophobes, yada yada yada. He does all this with a warmth, a pat on the back, a joke and a smile. The hypocricy is unbearable! He seems even to have deluded himself in a kind of moral senility. Biden is not along: our elite culture is replete with such influencers. Consider Michele Obama: wholesome, beautiful, articulate, intelligent, confident,idealistic. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, especially as played by Felicity Jones: charming, delightful, feminine and yet aggressive, idealistic. Consider almost all our movie celebrities: georgeous, confident, sexy! Our culture is populated mostly by angels of light, seductive and appealing but interiorly dedicated to the works of darkness.

My Favorite Clause: The Flexibility Clause! (or: What I Learned at UPS)

Amidst the chains of a Bureaucratic Universe...the suffocating, emasculating, smothering, infuriating, dispiriting chains...how do we keep sane, free, virile, light, sovereign, noble? The anwser is: The Flexibility Clause! I learned this marvelous principle in my 25 career in United Parcel Service. The principle is straightforward: all the regulations, protocols, rules, dictates...all of them...(but not the moral law itself of course!)...can be displaced by a simple prudential decision. Another word for "prudential decision": common sense! Yes...all the rules can be simply disregarded as needed: flexibility, prudence, common sense reign! UPS management had two codes: the official and the actual. Officially, the "tightest ship in the shipping business" complied with all laws, regulations, correct work protocols, and the dictates of "science"... in this case sacred Industrial Engineering. But actually, management was a macho, quasi-martial culture in which we were fighting an unending war with weather, traffic, accidents, the union (teamsters), recalcatrant workers, and human error...a war to get each package from point A to point B in the precise time designated. What was really valued was decisiveness, toughness, courage, determination, confidence, flexibility, and street smarts. The real code was not "obey the rules" but "get the job done, whatever it takes, and don't do anything stupid and don't get caught breaking the rules." And so, this unofficial culture gave us a freedom, an empowerment, a masculine confidence to make decisions and do what was necessary to fulfill our mission. As a package car driver I was out one Christmas season with my helper and my supervisor on an icy, snowy, dark night. We realized we had missed a stop halfway back the hill we had just come down. The supervisor was driving: he kicked into reverse, sped in reverse up the icy hill with all that blind spot behind him. The act was reckless and dangerous. I would not have done that. But I was thrilled by the daring. To an intemperate extreme he embodied the determination to deliver that package on time. When I supervised tractor trailer drivers my biggest challenge was a anxious, conscientious, actually quite decent guy who compulsively obeyed, literally, every work protocol. He always drove the designated speed limit, not a mile over, even if all traffic was speeding; he covered every item in his vehicle pretrips, if a highway sign said "construction: 30 miles an hour" he would do the 30 even in the middle of the night when no work was being done. As a result, he was always one to two hours "overplanned", that is, above the time determined for his work. He was the epitome of the official policy but the nemesis of the actual culture. I liked and respected him. He had integrity, consistency and logic on his side and I could not lean on him. And so: I exceed the speed limit on a habitual basis; I park in illegal spaces here in Jersey City all the time; as I keep poor financial records I feel free to make up my numbers for tax purposes; I have never sung "Happy Birthday" while washing my hands no matter what Dr. Fauci says. Which brings me, of course, to the last year of pandemic, paranoia and paralysis. For me, the hysteria and phobia around the virus has been far worse than the sickness itself. Of course I accept prudential, reasoned measures like masks in public, social distancing, ban on super-spreaders. But the safety-obsession, the protectiveness, the paralysis is beyond common sense. Most of the front-line workers "showed up" nobly and did their jobs, even facing danger, without complaint or pretension. Two groups, however, disgraced themselves: our Catholic bishops and the teacher's unions. The Catholic bishops closed our Churches, suspended the sacraments, condemned the sick and elderly to face death without the Annointing and be buried without family. They showed not the faintest faith in their own sacraments. They complied in a cowardly manner. Our Church has never, in my lifetime, stooped so low. The teacher's unions have caved to an irrational anxiety and disregarded the needs of the young. Seeing this, who would want to be a bishop or a teacher? As teh tenacles of the systematic, totalitarian, governmental-capitalistic-health-care-network grow and expand and strangle our freedom, we need a revival of the Flexibility Clause, and the freedom, confidence, virility and transcendence it grants.

The Culture War is Over

It is cut-and-dried, straightforward: the Culture War is over! We lost. It took over half a century. We lost. Cultural liberalism is firmly in control of virtually the entire superstructure of our society: ALL the powerful, influencial institutions and agencies are in its grip. It is pervasive and profound, systemic and systematic. All of the traditional arenas of freedom, of rest from the political...art, entertainment, academia, religion, athletics...are now incorporated into a totalistic, totalitarian system. It is "soft" but all the more systemic and perverse. The final straw has been the incorporation of global capitalism, including professional sports, into the dynasty. Am I overreacting to the current post-Trump, Biden-euphoria of the Left as they spike the football and do their victory laps? Possibly. The pendulum will swing back. And we do have the Judge Amy Barrett Court as well as lots of red states and conservative activity. But the conservative movement is fractured and incoherent. I was strangely saddened by Sunday's NY Times Piece by Ross Douthat. He argued what Catholics on the left and right have said for decades: a coherent pro-life, anti-abortion policy requires a strong, enduring safety net for mothers facing stressful pregnancies. The DNC is irrevocably wed to legal abortion; and the RNC is incapable of mounting a real crusade to support mothers-and-infants at risk. This realization discouraged me. Perhaps it is that I am old and tired. I am now entirely pessimistic about our society and indeed our world. Globally things are worse! Communism in China is surging with the energy from hell that exploded in Hitler and Stalin at their worst. Jihadist Islam, in both Shiite and Sunni forms, is entirely repressive of human freedom and is inhibited mostly by its own rivalry. It is inconceivable that Biden and his people are capable of the moral character to confront Communism in the way our parents did. Worst of all, The (Catholic) Church and the Churches are divided and incapable of a clear resistance to the Empires of Darkness. Pope Francis has installed a Quisling column that colludes with the totalitariams of Western Liberalism and Chinese Communism even as he assumes the pose of a crusader for the causes so dear to the cosmopolitan elites (death penalty, climate, immigration.) Does this mean that we surrender? Absolutely Not! That is unthinkable! No! Like Churchill, "...we will go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and grwoing strength, in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the filelds and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender." We shall never surrender! Our faith and values are more precious than life itself. But the war has shifted to a new phase. It is time to go into hiding; to go small; to go underground; to switch to guerrila warfare; to swim among the underclass, quiet and anonymous, where we have support. It is time to cherish and safeguard our legacy and resources. It is time to detach. It is time to draw closer to our God and to each other in truth, in holiness, in courage. It is time to wait, to wait for this leaden, lifeless regime to fall under its own weight, as did Nazism, Soviet Communism, Rome and all the arrogant empires. It is time to attend to our own souls; to our families; to our Churches; and to those closest to us. Above all, it is time to protect our young from the lies that pervade; to hand on our legacy; and to Hope in the midst of a chiaracuro of light amidst the prevalent darkness.

The Dark Empire Coalesces

2020, a historically momentous year: global pandemic, Black Lives Matter, the demise of Trump and ascension of the Democrats in the executive and legislative branches, a Republican party traumatized and unhinged by the Trump phenominon, imperialist aggression from Communism out of China, and a Catholic hierarchy polarized, incoherent, emasculated and subservient to the expansive totalitarianism of Communism in China and Cultural Liberalism in the West. The most ominous development may prove to be the radicalization of global capitialism: its embrace of Cultural Liberalism. Capitalism has always been deeply ambiguous morally to my mind. Positively, it means free markets, initiative, rule of law, industriousness, and all the associated freedoms. On the negative side, it inflames greed, materialism, consumerism, addictions to work and buying, meritocracy, and marginalization of the weak and incompetent. In its later stages it dissolves communities of locality, family, and Church. Back to the positive: Reagan Conservatism represented a fairly harmonious marriage of business and late-Calvinist Christianity in "the American Way." Personally I worked as a supervisor for UPS in those years and found my career in an iconic capitalistic enterpise to be mostly (but not entirely) congenial to my family and religious values. As a Catholic, however, this synthesis seemed to me to be interiorly conflicted. In 2020 the deeper reality of large scale capitalism is presenting itself: materialistic, individualitic and deeply coherent with the hedonism and secularism of Cultural Liberalism. And so we are witnessing the alignment of the dominant powers and principalities of the West: all the cultural elites (academia, media, entertainment, sports, etc.), big government and now big business. We might add big unions especially in the face of the shameless selfishness of the teacher's unions in the pandmic. We are living under a soft totalitarianism, as Rod Dreher suggests. The pushback from the right is fragmented and impotent. A thoughtful, promising minority (Douthat, Levin, Reno etc.) of intellectuals advocate a Catholic-friendly combination of cultural conservatism and economic populism. But theirs is a weak third voice, drowned out by the Trumpian rage and a residual "low-tax" Republical establishment that will be energized by the coming Biden tax increases. Meanwhile the American episcopacy, betrayed from within by the Cupich-Tobin forces, is incapable of speaking with a clear, firm voice. I find myself newly bereft of my customary optimism. But I am not without Hope...and hopes. The path ahead, it seems to me, is to go small, hidden, humble. To go into hiding like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda when the Empire took control. To go the way proposed by St. Benedict and Pope Benedict and Rod Dreher. To go the hidden way of Nazareth with St. Joseph. That will be my next blog.

The Passions of the Passionate Jesus

"Passion" is from the Latin "pati" which means "to suffer, endure, undergo." It took the meaning "to be affected or acted upon" and later an "emotion, desire, feeling considered an affliction." Eventually it was used of intense sexual and romantic desire but can refer to any overwhelming emotional movement such as rage, joy, or zeal. It differs from "affection" in that it is more powerful and intense, suggesting loss of control to the movement. And so today, being Good Friday, we contemplate the Passion of Christ. By this we mean, immediately, his suffering and pain: the scouraging, crown of thorns, nails, gasping for breath on the cross, the shame and contempt, his feeling of desolation and even abandonment. However, this passion must be understood as derivative and expressive of two primary passions. The first is indicated by Jesus' words: "I thirst!" His thirst was surely physical, dehydration; but more deeply his thirst was for souls, for us, to bring us into union with him and his Father. He is passionate for us; he craves us; he is nuts-crazy-insane-out-of-control. He is not sane and rational in our regard: he is out of his mind in love with us. That is why he surrendered himself to "The Passion." However even his love for us is not absolutely foundational; it is secondary, derivative of and expressive of The Primary Passion: His love for his Father; his urgency to glorify his father; his yearning for his Father; his reception from and giving to, eternally, his father. This is good news for us because it means that he doesn't need us; although he loves us. This leaves us free. We can accept or reject his love; either way he is fine, infinitely delighted in union with the Father in the Holy Spirit. We might consider an analogue: In a happy family, the best thing Dad can do for the kids is love Mom. The conjugal love between the two is already complete and satisfactory; not deprived or needy. The children flow out of, express and enrich the love, but are not necessary or needed. This leaves the kids free, in the right time, to leave Mom and Dad to live their own vocation as they are not, never were "needed." By contrast, a codependent or needy Mom or Dad might smother a child and block the move to freedom and maturity. And so: the Father and the Son are passionate, intense, extravagant, ardent in their desire for us. Even as they do not need us. That is why Jesus came and suffered and rose and ascended and sent the Spirit. As we open our hearts to receive this passionate love, we are ourselves inflamed with Passion: longing for God, and also thirst for souls, an urgency to love others and bring them into the abiding, eternal, delightful Love of the Trinity.

A Complicated Ideology

Politically and culturally my worldview is complex, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory. I am a mixture of: conservative Culture Warrior (at least 40%); residual old-school (pre-1965) political liberal (20% or less); First Things Neo-con (20%); and "smallist-anarchist" in the tradition of subsidiarity (strong 20%). Cultural Warrior: The defining global drama of my lifetime has been the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and the global, imperial Cultural Liberalism that resulted. And so my entire adult political life is formed by defense of innocent, powerless human life, of sexuality (spousality, paternity/maternity, family) as sacred, of tradition-authority-and the Holy. Secondly, I remain in part Political Liberal in the image of my union organizer father and the hayday of Catholic liberalism (1945-65) in its defense of the worker, the the civil rights of blacks and farmworkers and all the underpriviled. Thirdly, in my adulthood I became a Neo-Conservative in my support for the free market economy, democracy, rule of law and constitution, and civil rights as less than perfect but so far superior to the alternatives available. This entails an aversion to isolationaism and libertarianism and endorsement of a strenuous American global presence to countervail Communism now resurgent in China. Lastly, as a >Smallist-Subsidarist-Anarchist I harbor a suspicion of "gigantism" in government and industry both and a preference for the little, the immediate, the concrete. Influences in this regard include: Ivan Illich, Schumacher, Ellul, Berry and the Communio school of the Schindlers-Hanby and some of Dorothy Day and Rod Dreher. I am no utopian but I am keenly aware of the negativities (without denying the positivities) of inhuman biggness, meritocracy, bureaucracy, technocracy and the entire culture of scientistic control. I am vigilant in care of my own soul, as well as family, Church and intermediate communities, as mega-corporations and the expansive state grow cancerously and devour immediate communities of all sorts to leave the individual isolated, unrooted and vulnerable. This strange mix leaves me ambivalent about our national politics. It leaves me free to embrace what is good in the different policies. It leaves me skeptical about both parties and without a real political home. It is firmly rooted in my Catholic faith and enhances my sense restlessness in my journey to heaven. It allows me to participate energetically in our ambiguous culture even as I detach in love. It focuses my energy to my Church and family and immediate communities organically connected to them and liberates me from over-dependence on the mother-state as well as smothering global capitalism. My most profound and passionate aspiration is that my children and their children and others around me carry forward this vision of life.