Held my nose to vote against the Liberal party. I say vote against because there is no one to vote for. There is no CHP candidate in my riding. Is there a lesser evil in this election? When someone like Trudeau could be the potentate? Absolutely. Have you listened to the guy? Holy Toledo.
*
Looks more and more like the gluten-is-the-devil hype is dying down. Looks like it is turning out to be - oh, I don't know - just
another one of those extremist diet health crazes that come and go like
the plague. Looks more and more like - oh, as common sense dictates -
highly refined processed grains
combined with short leavening time-periods using commercial yeast consumed on a regular basis to the detriment
of consuming actually good food is the problem (combined
with little to no exercise), and consistent
consumption of highly refined sugars to boot. Golly. What would we do
without the experts? Saw a headline the other day about how antioxidants could help to cause cancer. No one knows anything really.
I still remember this one blog
post by a Catholic blogger lady who has a book or three published getting alarmist about gluten to her thousands of readers, linking to another lady who basically said all grains - even rice - are little better
than poison. She had it all figured out (the other lady, not the Catholic blogger lady), charted, squared, articulated -
the science and everything, like she was a scientist - with that
unmistakable, unerring estrogen energy that says I am full-proof, hear me lecture. To which I wondered out loud in my own blog post
(which I'm too lazy to link to) that I find it reprehensible that Jesus
would use for the institution of His Eucharist something that was little
better than poison.
Here is one assumption that I bet we'll find out later was totally
wrong: that all food we consume must be chock-full of vitamins and
minerals and other nutrients, and if there aren't any, or few, either in its raw or cooked state, then it's not good for us. This will be
disproved. Just watch.
People without responsibility on
social media going on about this, that and the other thing. Maybe some
readers of the anti-gluten lady decided to cut out all gluten from their diet,
not having any allergy to it before - and then developed an allergy to
it because they had cut it so drastically out of their diet? Who knows,
right? Human biology is amazingly complex.
People all
over the social media lecturing and
influencing their readers about this, that and the other thing - from
gluten to Vatican II to the Synod on the Family. They just know it all.
Pope Francis has been making some serious mistakes. He's a Machiavellian
villain. He's a fuzzy simpleton. He causes confusion. He's an anti-John the Baptist paving
the way for the anti-Christ. He's a product of the polyester 70's. He's not even the Pope. He's
Judas. He's a Peron populist crowd whipper-upper. He's well-intentioned
but mistaken. He errs in doing this, that and the other thing. He should
have unleashed the wrath of God on Congress. He should not have spoken
to the U.N. (he opened the fragrance of the Gospel to them! How dare he!
He was handing over to them authority for their evil agendas!) He should have come out wearing the
mozetta. He should be reading LifeSiteNews. He should be studying with
prayerful diligence the words of Rorate Caeli, Pewsitters, 1Peter5 and
the Holy Catholic Remnant. He should be doing this, that and the
other thing. You know how it is. How it is when people have every
simulation of received knowledge - but do not have the ability to go out
of themselves.
*
I watched
Seven Samurai last night. I have seen it several times before. What a great movie. There are a couple moments that flop in my opinion - like the villagers making way for the old granny to kill the captive in order to avenge the death of her son. Meh. But hey, they were pagans, so whatever.
I even let the intermission play out. I love intermissions. I've said many times before (not on this blog I don't think) that filmmakers should bring back the intermission. People of course would regard it as a mortal sin, because a movie is way too long if it exceeds two hours - and, really, just sitting there with the music playing? That's asking way too much.
Everything is such a joke now. Films ought to be absorbing. The intermission is great for a number of reasons. Just practically because people have to urinate. But it allows a kind of recollection, a coming away from the film that is actually an immersion in the film. The next person to make the Lord of the Rings films - and thereby leave the Peter Jackson series to moulder in the dust - should utilize the intermission. Break each book into two parts (and the books already are broken into two parts). Each part will be one theatrical release, one movie, that runs about four hours long, two hours before and after the intermission, or thereabouts. Thus will be released six movies, each one around four hours long.
But the false law of efficiency that herds people into predetermined units of time says that's a horrible mortal sin. Gone is the capacity for attention, attentiveness. Thou shalt not linger. Move along. On to the next piece of candy. Click, click, click.
*
Few things are as obnoxious as cheaply bought cynicism. It is the
usual stock-and-trade of hoi polloi, the inflated currency by which the mass populace
avoids the acceptance of suffering, or simply, the acceptance of
reality. The cheap cynic seeks to preemptively overextend the action of
disillusionment onto everything, and by this he seeks to control, and by
this he seeks to avoid the contact of reality. He would darken the light
of every doorway with his rot-gut and have people accept it, with him
in the picture as the capstone wounded anti-hero, while he himself won't carry a jot or tittle upon his own back - though he
will, of course, make a big show of seemingly carrying the world on it.
He seeks to be a
master of reality in order to dispose of it.
Precisely in this is he indecipherable from the manipulative sentimentalist.
*
Progressive Christianity, or Universalism, succeeds only in nullifying Heaven.
The
height of heaven and the descent of Christ from it always keep their
radical standard, toward which we move, by sanctifying grace, which
displaces us from making a home of the hell in our hearts. Or, if you
will: from making a home of the
but-I'm-not-a-bad-person indifferentist illusion already-giving-the-lie-that-one-has-a-skin-flint-hard-necked-stubborness in our hearts. The emphatic "progressive" removal of the consideration
of eternal hell ends only in emphatically removing the glory of heaven.
Above
all though, I suspect that it incubates a wounded pride at the thought
of heaven's truth and goodness; its height and breadth; that it goes
under the auspices of being wounded - wounded pride. Pride is wounded
precisely because it is pride. Spiritual pride would rather that the
grace given wound it and that it take pleasure in this being wounded,
and by this "prove" that the grace is ineffective, than that it submit
to the grace.
Submitting to the grace, by the way,
leads to a very different kind of being wounded. Here one notices
something interesting. That the worst does not manifest as an opposite
to the good, but as
anti to it, like Antichrist. Most essentially, we resemble Christ in sharing
His wounds. That's putting it briefly, but it's true, essentially. As Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen talked about in a late homily: when
we die and go before Christ the "measure" will be His asking
show me
your wounds, show me the scars, on your hands, in your side; the wounds
that you bore, for My sake and for others'; not that you bore out of
resignation, but out of love for Me. The life of Me that you took on,
that you let Me give to you. My abundant life of which there is no end. When I was a babe before you, did you
become as a little infant? When I was scourged with the punishment
reserved for the worst offenders, did you become as the worst of sinners
receiving my mercy? Did you let my wounds shed light on your wounds - the wounds you knew not were there, trusting in Me?
We do not have faith in order to
"get into heaven"; rather, we have faith in order to love the One who is
more real than we can imagine.
Anyways, spiritual
pride, that ever subtle thing, concocts a fantasy that it
has put itself beyond the reach of God, but using the instance of the
grace of God to perpetuate the lie. It may retain some semblance of
"struggle" (this may actually make it look all the more woe-is-me
heroic) but essentially it denies that act of humiliation by which God
identifies himself with one's own soul, one's own self, in that place
within that we ourselves have not the capacity to reach (Christ is more
present to us than we are to ourselves), and abiding there, inspiring
and watering our own self-abasement, the growth of new life, together
with Christ, in Christ.
Self-pitying, pride is a kind
of sick, perpetual enjoyment of oneself at the expense of trampling over
others and the precious grace of God, which is to say, over the
self-emptying life of Christ crucified. And that is a horror to behold:
that pride in doing this, actually consumes grace like a black hole, all
the while pretending that it is, in some way, beyond the working reach
of grace. It is a deeply pervasive lie born of the father of lies, and
it is amendable to people in all walks of life, from the hedonist
materialist to the traditionally formed religious. And, of course, the progressive.
The
progressive Christian, or Universalist, does not care all that much
about there being or not being a Hell, if it's transitory or if it's
been emptied; what he emphatically does
not want there to be is an eternal High Heaven.
