There is a great mystery here. The Christian faith does not promise that we won’t suffer. It promises only that we will not suffer alone, and that come what may, the God who suffered will not abandon us, and that if we stay faithful, the day will come when He will wipe away every tear. We can know through faith that though chaos, disorder, and hatred may triumph in this broken world, it does not have to triumph through us, or within us.
[...] After the sermon, reflecting on his words, I thought about how our God is not a god of transaction: you do this thing, and are guaranteed that result. That’s not how it is with Him. He works through faith — and this faith of ours, He tests.
It could be that in His permissive will, He allows us to suffer for a time for some greater good. After all, the incomparable blessing of bearing the Messiah of Israel, the Savior of the world, Mary had to endure watching her beloved son mocked, tortured, and crucified. I don’t know if this is true, but I think Mary looks so sad in icons of herself with her little Son because she knows what is coming. As the Prophet Simeon said to her at her infant’s presentation in the temple: “Look, he is destined for the fall and for the rise of many in Israel, destined to be a sign that is opposed, and a sword will pierce your own soul too — so that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare” (Luke 2:34-35).
The point is that the will of God typically works itself out in part through suffering and sacrifice. Not even God’s only Son was spared. Nor was His mother. Mary knew from virtually the beginning that the blessing that began with the Incarnation, and her willingness to receive the Lord of Hosts into her womb, and that began to blossom there at the altar of the temple, would be mixed with tragedy. (November 19, 2023)
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Protestants and others may mistakenly think we are praying to Mary as a goddess. No, that’s not true. What we honor in her is her fidelity to God, and the way the Most High used her, and her willingness to surrender entirely to His will, as the conduit for His entry into the world of mortality, through which the salvation of all mankind was accomplished. She is the most important sign directing us to Him. She is the “cornland yielding a rich crop of mercies” because she said to God, through the Archangel Gabriel, “Be it done to me according to Thy word,” and received the divine seed. God, in His great love for mankind, will not force us to obey Him. He offers us miracle, but we must be prepared to receive it. This is why we look up to the Holy Virgin. She is our leader in showing us what we must do to receive Him, and to thereby glorify God. Her womb is the “table bearing a wealth of forgiveness,” the Savior of the world. (November 19, 2023)
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One more thing: we talked earlier this week about Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity, and how it strikes many people as purely instrumental. She had said that she was first drawn to Christianity because she saw that the things she had come to love about Western civilization were mostly down to its ancestral Christian faith. Plus, she could not bear the pain of nihilism that is inescapable from atheism. To these critics, this sounded like she became a Christian because it “works,” somehow.
As I wrote in her defense, nearly all of us who came to Jesus as adults did so through a messy way. Few if any of us had pure conversions, like St. Paul being struck on the road to Damascus. It is not surprising that Ayaan would approach the truth of Christ through looking at the civilizational fruits of Christian belief, and through her desolation at the stones of atheism, versus the bread of Christian faith. These are but signs pointing her onward, to a deep spiritual encounter with the living God. (November 19, 2023)
To convert to an enchanted way of seeing the world, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has done, is in some sense a highly rational thing to do — because there is life in it. The road to God begins with small steps. Ayaan correctly grasps that there has to be more to life than what atheism teaches, and also grasps that not all religions are the same. But if she stops at believing in Christianity because it’s good for you, she will miss its wellspring of life, and her faith will be stillborn. (November 17, 2023)
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Paul Kingsnorth wondered if there is some kind of Wotan [aka Odin] rising now in the West. It absolutely feels that way to me. Part of it is the glorification of identity, especially racial identity. These leftist idiots who wanted to get all the non-whites drunk from drinking their own blood, so to speak, only legitimized whites doing it. Part of it is the glorification of sexual instinct, and the stigmatization of inhibition. Part of it is the glorification of emotion as a reliable guide to truth. Part of it is the worship of sex and violence. And part of it is the way mobs can be formed and activated instantly with the Internet — and more, can be formed around the most idiotic and malicious ideas, such as that Osama bin Laden was justified in ordering the 9/11 attacks. (November 17, 2023)
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Let me end this section with this great quote from John Michael Greer, a wise pagan with whom I strongly disagree on particular religious matters, but with whom I stand against the reductive materialism of our modern world:
Of course the conventional wisdom of our time [claims] that the modern disenchanted state of consciousness is right and the enchanted state of consciousness is wrong. Central to the entire worldview of modern industrial culture is the belief that “we” (meaning here the minority of human beings during the last four centuries or so who have embraced the disenchanted state as truth, and believed devoutly in the ideology of scientific materialism) are the only human beings in all of history who have ever understood the world accurately, and everyone else down through the ages was just plain wrong. If that answer sounds arrogant to you, dear reader, let’s just say you’re not alone.Yet there are other problems with the easy modern assumption that true believers in the modern ideologies of disenchantment are right and everyone else who ever lived was too stupid to notice how wrong they were. One of those problems is the simple fact that the entire edifice of modern materialist science rests on assumptions about the nature of human knowledge that were disproved once and for all more than two hundred years ago. Another is the equally simple but far more brutal fact that the disenchanted world praised by today’s pundits in such triumphant terms has turned out to be unfit for human habitation. If we’re so much smarter than our ancestors, and thus presumably so much better at understanding and meeting human needs with our omniscient science and almighty technology, how come so many of us are blowing our brains out or drinking and drugging ourselves to death because of the sheer misery of life in the world that reason has made? (November 17, 2023)
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Snippets from Dreher's posts:
[Wokeism ...] is an essentially totalitarian ideology that justifies evil in the name of fighting whatever it identifies as oppression.
[Wokeism ...] has taught an entire generation of educated American youth to sympathise with the mass murderers of Jews.
A former priest said that people come to the Church saying they are seeking spiritual healing, but what they really want is a painkiller to temporarily avoid the consequences of their brokenness. For those who want the spiritual painkiller the Church cannot help them. But for those who want to be healed, the Church offers spiritual surgery that might hurt a lot at the beginning, but the healing will be real and true.
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