End Times

But as to the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need to have anything written to you.  For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape.  But you are not in darkness, brethren, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all sons of light and sons of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness.  So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.  For those who sleep sleep at night, and those who get drunk are drunk at night.  But, since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.  For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ,  who died for us so that whether we wake or sleep we might live with him.
1 Thessalonians 5 


Christians have always been fighting a battle against the world the flesh and the devil. This should not be a depressing bit of news , because it is central to the Gospel. Where the world teaches us to doubt, Christ teaches us to have faith, where the world teaches us to despair, Christ gives us hope, where the world teaches to love only self, Christ puts true charity into our hearts so we can love God and neighbour.

We put on the armour of Christ and take up the sword of the spirit and go out into battle. The enemy is both within and without, as Peter and Paul remind us: 

St Peter says "Therefore gird up your minds, be sober, set your hope fully upon the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.  As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

And St Paul says: "Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect."

As to the method of the fight, it is important as St Paul says above that we 'pray unceasingly' that we do not fall asleep.

But we fight a new and seemingly more dread battle against an enemy who seems implacable in this modern age. One reason for this is that we are living at the end of Christian civilization, at least in Europe. We can no longer rely on the culture around us to share the values we have as Christians. Even the word 'values' itself reveals the relativism which has penetrated to the heart of our thinking. What I value is relative to me and thus cannot be relied on as a universal moral good.

 And as the culture goes, so do we. We who were born after the great revolution of the 1960s are more infected than ever with sensuality, pride, sloth, arrogance and so on, because the world itself has wholeheartedly embraced these things. Individuals can only do so much when the whole community is going in a different direction. It is then that we can learn from the early Church, facing incredible persecution amidst a heathen culture. The new heathenism is worse, as someone once said, because the old heathens had never known Christ, whereas the new ones have knowingly rejected him.

Just as we must carefully guard what we eat in an age when highly processed high-carb food is ubiquitous, so we must also guard what we consume in a spiritual sense from the culture around us. Many of us are rediscovering the importance, especially against the background of the coronavirus, of what Michael Pollen calls "Real food, mainly plants, in sensible portions". So we should also be rediscovering from the treasury of our Christian culture those real staples that nourished us for hundreds of years.

There are so many fronts on which to fight the battle. The enemy is many-headed like the hydra. Padre Pio, said of the demons of the air: "There are so many that if they were capable of assuming a form as tiny as a grain of sand, they would block out the sun. Be attentive – for when the enemy is silent it means he is preparing another plan.’”

Tempest

"Watch ye, and pray that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh weak." Matt 26:41-43


"For it is written: As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God." Romans 14:11



Have we crowned the serpent rather than bent the knee to Christ the King? Indeed we have, and we are paying for it. The current events are so clearly a chastisement that to hear Catholics deny this is just astonishing. Has rationalism so penetrated the Faith, and blind technocratic optimism so taken the place of our awareness of sin and the need for our own personal reparation that we do not know how to read the signs of the times? Sin is not an individual thing which only affects individuals. It affects us as a body. We have forgotten this, or attempted to bury the knowledge of it. Part of the greatness of Fyodor Dostoevsky is his understanding of this. “In sinning,” Dostoevsky wrote in Demons, “each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilty for another’s sin. There is no isolated sin.”.

This corporate nature of sin is revealed in the paralysing effects it has on the goods of community. Without a doubt we are witnessing the echo of this paralysis in the closing down of our institutions and countries because of a silent and invisible enemy.

Catholic prophecy points quite decisively to certain events which must occur before the end times. Our Lady has come countless times to warn us of the chastisement that awaits if we persist in sin. Many many times over the last 200 years in many different places her message has been the same - repentance, reparation for our own and others' sins, and praying the rosary. At perhaps her most publicly significant apparition, Fatima, she showed a vision of hell to the three children and said that many souls go there because of sins of impurity. She said she wanted to establish in the world devotion to her Immaculate Heart, and for Russia to be consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart. She said that Russia would 'spread its errors throughout the world', and the consecration would be the antidote to the spread of this poison.

Well, the errors have spread, and our nations and societies become progressively more paralysed by sin. The tempest blows and the boat is tossed about and we cry out. We can do small things; consecrate ourselves and our families to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and nations are also doing this, realising that Christ must reign, or we shall build a kingdom of darkness and thus condemn ourselves and our societies to a spiritual death.

How To Transform Catholic Education

Recommended reading for Catholic educators, this book is very much in the vein of Stratford Caldecott's excellent books such as Beauty in the Word. The emphasis is on *how* to transform Catholic education, so the books have suggestions on how to implement the Catholic vision. I think Peachey is especially strong here when he talks about work, using people like Josef Pieper and E. F. Schumacher to argue for the Catholic school as oasis of leisure in the middle of a desert of utilitarian and positivist ideology!

The Serpent Returns

“In the war of ideas, it's the crudest & most simplified ideology that wins. During our own lifetimes we have seen great & highly civilized countries becoming infected by epidemics of ideological insanity, & whole populations being destroyed for the sake of some irrational slogan.” Christopher Dawson


1500 years ago St Patrick drove the serpent out of Ireland. The country was the warm beating heart of Christendom. Its people generous and devout and kind. Many might wonder if the serpent has returned now that Ireland has voted to repeal the 8th amendment. In ‘Goodbye to Catholic Ireland’ Mary Kenny explains how the vote to protect the unborn in 1983 was seen as part of the natural pro-natalist character of the Irish people. If anyone wondered how you change the fundamental character of a people within a generation the answer is now obvious. You help the economy to enjoy all the benefits of full consumer capitalism a la the Celtic Tiger, and you flood the media with liberal globalist propaganda. It helps also to have a Church utterly bereft of moral authority both because of historical child sexual abuse by members of the priesthood, and because it has itself embraced a relativist pluralism that no longer has the courage to proclaim the truth of Christ.

Tempest Part One

“The Watchman he lay dreaming

Of all things that can be

He dreamed the Titanic was sinking

Into the deep blue sea”



I recently heard the new releases of Bob Dylan’s ‘Born-Again’ era output (roughly 79-83), and realised in what should perhaps be a bit of a ‘duh’ moment, that whilst the overtly confessional Christianity of those records has faded, his output certainly from the early 90s onwards, has been more or less informed in its more transcendent moments by the Christian mythos, which does not mean that every good thing he’s written since then shows signs of this, but a close listening to the best of it certainly confirms the thesis.

I realise this is actually against a lot of the received wisdom - a recent Guardian article about the film of the Born-again years ‘Trouble No More’ basically says he had 3 years of going weird then forgot about all that Christian stuff. That suits the Guardian narrative. It’s also nonsense.

I would argue that a work like ‘Tempest’ from the 2012 album of the same name is a powerful meditation on the last judgement, revelation, faith and the creative act which itself is entirely incomprehensible outside of the Biblical tradition which informs it through and through.


In this song Dylan references perhaps a key figure from his own song mythos, the Watchman. The song All Along the Watchtower, which Dylan plays at the end of every live show, is itself a Biblically inspired fragment whose sudden abrupt ending and haunting wordplay present us with an apocalyptic scenario. “The hour is getting late” reminds us that the end is approaching. The two riders approaching and the Lords on the Watchtower echo a passage from Isaiah 21:5-9:

“Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield.
For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.
And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed:
And he cried, A lion: My lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, and I am set in my ward whole nights:
And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.”



But whilst the earlier work clearly uses Biblical imagery to create an imaginative environment which acts as a foil to the ‘false talk’ of the joker and the thief, the perspective is still very much a negative one - a rejection of the falsity of modernity in line with ‘Gates of Eden’, but unable to envision an alternative. ‘The wind began to howl’, and in the face of this approaching tempest they remain mute.



On the other hand, in ‘Tempest’ 44 years later, Dylan fleshes out this skeletal narrative with straightforwardly Christian imagery and he does it masterfully. I believe it’s his best work of the last 20 years. I have to add a caveat here: he does reweave an older song to make this one - it is of course a traditional folk standard - The Titanic, a version was recorded by the Carter Family. But that version is more straightforwardly moralistic, less mysterious, than Bob’s, even though there is a moral core to Bob’s version.



Before we get to the repetition of the Watchman imagery, I want to mention a few key themes. First, we’ve already seen that All Along the Watchtower envisions an apocalyptic scenario. Here we are taken deeper into the meaning of apocalypse - a Greek word meaning ‘unveiling’. This is evident in the way the veils are lifted and truth is seen in all sorts of ways in this song. But most directly:



The veil was torn asunder

'Tween the hours of twelve and one

No change, no sudden wonder

Could undo what had been done



Or the Captain reading the Book of Revelation in the gloom, his cup filling with tears. Or take this passage:



Brother rose up 'gainst brother

In every circumstance

They fought and slaughtered each other

In a deadly dance



We can see from these passages why Dylan is interested in the Titanic story: it provides a narrative universe within which to explore the question of imminent doom, judgement and the meaning of one’s actions in the light of eternity. In Matthew 10 we find:



“The brother also shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the son: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and shall put them to death. And you shall be hated by all men for my name's sake: but he that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved.



And when they shall persecute you in this city, flee into another. Amen I say to you, you shall not finish all the cities of Israel, till the Son of man come.



Therefore fear them not. For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed: nor hid, that shall not be known. That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops. “



Dylan alludes to the end times throughout the song, but those times are not considered from a distance but rather seem suddenly all about us - who can deny that part of the horror of the imagery of brother slaughtering brother derives from its familiarity to us from the events of the last century?



“Nothing is covered that shall not be revealed”



In Tempest, the Watchman is asleep. This is a delightfully comic image which helps to drive the tragedy. The Watchman had one job, and failed. But also the Watchman stands for all those who are appointed, either through their official position, or through their own work, guardians of culture, morality and reason, those whose job is to ‘stay awake and watch’:



(Matt 24:42: “Watch therefore: for ye know not on what day your Lord cometh. But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what watch the thief was coming, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken through. Therefore be ye also ready: for in an hour that ye think not the Son of man cometh.”).



They have succumbed to the forces of the unconscious. And as a result the people are also dragged down into the dark depths. What are the consequences for an age when those whose mission is to be guardians and prophets have failed in their duty? The agony of Christ in the garden of Gethsemane also contains warnings. Discovering his disciples asleep when he returns he says to them “Could you not stay awake and watch with me for even one hour?” The chief mark of the modern age is the choice to anaesthetise and to numb, to fall asleep rather than bear the burden of being awake in the spirit.



As Deacon Lawrence tells us in this post on 'Leaf by Niggle' "Throughout His ministry Jesus reminds us of the importance of preparing for the Kingdom that is to come." So, like Tolkien in Leaf by Niggle, Dylan also takes on this task - he becomes the Watchman, and in his dreamlike vision of the sinking Titanic he alerts us to the truth.



Which is partly the reason why the Watchman's dreams are telling him the truth - he dreams the Titanic is sinking! Normally our dreams are odd fantasies. This inversion of normality adds to the sense of doom and foreboding. The Watchman is trying to tell people in his dream but can’t get the message across.



Some of the most moving moments of the song derive from the actions of the people on the ship. In part 2 I will look at them in more detail.

Concern

“We’re all really worried about you” an old friend recently told me in a message. What had happened? Had I contracted a nasty disease? No. Had I developed mental health issues and become depressed? Not as far as I’m aware. Had I suddenly expressed a desire to give up everything and run off to Rio with some woman of easy virtue I’d met in Ipswich or somewhere? Definitely not.

What had happened was that since I’d become a father and returned to the Church I had started to try and live and witness to my faith in a more solid way. I had started to openly express the view on social media that abortion was wrong. For simply asking for arguments on Facebook to support the view that abortion was wrong, for an A Level revision guide I was writing, I was told by one old friend they were going to ‘stage an intervention’ (presumably akin to the drug addict ones where they gather round and confront you with your addiction) on me. Another person (not someone I’ve ever liked to be honest) called me a nasty bigot and said that my revision guide was probably shit. Others (Australians so we’ll cut them some slack) started commenting about the sex abuse scandal in the Church and essentially said I had no right to an opinion on such matters as I had never been pregnant. “Don’t like it, don’t do it” she said, like that was an argument. A lot of people got very inflamed.

Which is odd. If you have no right to an opinion about something unless you’ve actually undergone it, then most people have no right to an opinion on anything. Or perhaps they meant it in the soft sense that you are not allowed to have an opinion on something unless you can potentially experience it. Now it seems fair that I am very ill-qualified to talk about the experience of racism against black people in England. I would hesitate to pay much attention to something I said on that. But I could still extrapolate from that to make a general moral point about racism. Equally, I am never going to actually experience having a baby within me which I don’t want, but it is absurd to think that because of this I cannot discuss the morality of abortion. In fact, I would have even more claim than this anyway, as I someday may have contributed 50% of the genetic make up of the being whose life is in question.

I’m actually still smiling at the absurdity of “don’t like it, don’t do it” as an argument for anything other than not going on a scary rollercoaster, or eating a particularly hot chilli. It amply illustrates the emotivism which underlies most of what passes for moral discussion now. Either there are some things which we believe it is possible to say ‘you should do this’ or ‘you shouldn’t do this’, or we just cannot talk about what ‘should’ happen at all, in which case, my Australian friend needs to quit telling me I shouldn’t be allowed to have an opinion on abortion.

So if you say “we’re all really worried about you”, what you should really say is “we’re sorry you appear to have gone backward and rejected the only sane position on this issue - there is nothing to discuss until you fall back into line with our view - and until then I will express my arrogance and disdain for your bigotry as concern for you”. That would be much more honest.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Philokalia

"If our intellect is inexperienced in the art of watchfulness it at once begins to entertain whatever impassioned fantasy appears in it, and plies it with illicit questions and responds to it illicitly. Then our own thoughts are conjoined to the demonic fantasy, which waxes and burgeons until it appears lovely and delectable to the welcoming and despoiled intellect. The intellect then is deceived in much the same way as lambs when a stray dog comes into the field in which they happen to be: in their innocence they often run towards the dog as though it were their mother, and their only profit in coming near it is that they pick up something of its stench and foulness. In the same way our thoughts run ignorantly after demonic fantasies that appear in our intellect and, as I said, the two join together and one can see them plotting to destroy the city of Troy like Agamemnon and Menelaus. For they plot together the course of action they must take in order to bring about, in practice and by means of the body, that purpose which the demons have persuaded them is sweet and delectable. In this Way sins are produced in the soul: and hence the need to bring out into the open what is in our hearts. "