Question

What if the Anti-Christ was pro-life and pro-traditional marriage/family?

Integralism is ultimately syncretism of the worst order.

The New Paganism (don't ask me which paganism)

Performing the dragon dance after the Pope's mass in the stadium in Thailand.




A landscape with dragons.

This is Ominous. The steadily creeping evidence of the rise of the syncretistic Neo-Religion is Disturbing.

European medieval culture with peasants embellishing the passion of Christ in outlandish plays that introduced myths was paganizing Christianity and eclipsed the light of Christ, but this is beyond the pale.

Awake! The end is near! Follow after me!

Medlars really, seriously, are a great little fruit. I pick them after we've had a couple of light frosts. The bletted texture - it's stiff and toothy and sticky, not gooey. The taste is apple butter like, with a tiny hint of clean chalk to let you know what you're eating is not rotten but perfect. If you were to sieve out the five stones from the fruits and incorporate the mash into a cake or bread, it would be fantastic.

The constant vitality of great mother earth

"To describe the divine action within the maternal womb, the Psalmist has recourse to classical biblical images, comparing the productive cavity of the mother to the 'depths of the earth', that is, the constant vitality of great mother earth" --Benedict XVI, General Audience of 28 December 2005

H/T: Kevin O'Higgins via D.W. Lafferty

One cleric on twitter was asking what sorts of things could possibly constitute an ecological sin, so he would know for penitents coming to him for confession. He was asking snidely of course, like that proved something. Which reminds me a bit of people who get annoyed by priests who instead of giving them Hail Marys or Our Fathers for their penance, give them the penance of "making an act of kindness", or a number of such acts, and they say, "But how am I to know if I've fulfilled the penance?" Like really? You don't know what could possibly constitute an act of kindness? How are you going to make it into the kingdom of heaven?

Anyways, you don't know what could possibly constitute an ecological sin? You could read Laudato Si' to find out. One good basic place to start is to ask yourself, "Do I waste food?"

Just think of all the generations previous for whom the wasting of food would have been abominable. All the generations going way back, and the experience of food shortages during wars, famine, economic depression, no mass transport and no giant corporations: if anyone from those generations were to have wasted food, you can be sure it would have burned their conscience and it would be a matter they would take to confession.

Yet what to them was abominable, for us today is par for the course and an intrinsic product of our systems. Do you ever decide to leave something in your cupboard or fridge that is about to stale-date or expire, simply because you don't feel like having it for dinner, because it would be dull, and you prepare some other foods instead?

Your cupboard or fridge, in effect, is then a kind of pagan shrine in which you offer foods to the idol of your bodily impulses. You offer your food to the god of waste. At least the pagans of old would actually eat the food they offered to their idols.

It is inexcusable, and relativistic, to say that a huge percentage of food is already wasted in the production and transport system, and that your personal wasting of food doesn't amount to anything and is just an inevitable part of the system. The teaching of the Church is aimed at both the instigators in the larger corporate systems and individuals in those systems.

This is where the ecological understanding comes into play. The food wastage today is simply not comparable to what food wastage would or could have ever been back in those previous generations. Because, as with money-as-debt, or debtflation, what we have today is huge production that equates to huge waste, but not because it is huge production. In other words, we don't have super waste because we have superabundant production; we have superabundant production purposely done for the sake of becoming huge waste. You have to understand how perverse it is; how offensive an abuse it is of God's creation, earth.

So while this sin is, like all old sin, traceable to one of the seven deadlys, like say gluttony, it comes in a newly perverse application as it were. It is a massive abuse of the production of the earth, as usury today, in an almost incomprehensible form, is the abuse - no, not only of money - but the abuse of peoples' labour and productions and talents and goods.

The Catholic Church responded to the "sexual revolution" - something that was generally a century in the making - and Pope Saint Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae.

And oh, the dissent!

The Catholic Church responds to the rapacious abuse of the earth (a revolution very much analogous to, and in tandem with, the abuse that is usury and contraception) - something that has been generally a century in the making - and Pope Francis issues Laudato Si' and seeks to define these abuses as sins, to be entered in the Catechism, which haven't been entered before simply because there has not been this level, or kind, or quantity, or system of abuse of the earth and its material goods ever before in human history. Absolutely analogous to how the world had never before seen a chemically mass produced pill that prevents ovulation, and which therefore had to be addressed, and defined, as a sin.

And oh, now the Church that Christ himself founded on rock is about to be assumed into a globalist secular new pagan eco religion!

Instead of listening, better to hedge our bets on saying it's the Great Apostasy and hello Apocalypticism of the New Protestant Order!

Because we don't follow any man (the Pope), but we follow our own isolated consciences! Because absolutes!

LOL

Oh, the immense confusion! It's so immense! We need clear definitions! And did we mention immense?

Such and such are sexual sins.

Oh a courageous defender of the faith! Would that we had more leaders like him, so clear!

Such and such are ecological sins.

Oh the new paganism!

LOL

Humanae Vitae had its dissenters, and Laudato Si' has its dissenters.

Good luck with all that!

How can there be sins against nature (such as sexual sins) but there can be no such thing as sins against the common home that is the earth?

Seems pretty common sense to me.

Don't worry. After some private discernment you will likely find that your sins against the common home have been committed in ignorance and thus your culpability in them has been lessened. But persisting in them after having learned what they do to God's creation and future generations, or not making efforts to curb them or avoid them, is to put your salvation on the Slippery Slope.

"If the average Catholic reader could be tracked down through the swamps of letters-to-the-editor and other places where he momentarily reveals himself, he would be found to be something of a Manichean." --Flannery O'Connor

If you listen to what Pope Francis is saying and doing you will not go astray.

FYI

Better not get out of bed in the morning - that's the Slippery SlopeTM!

You know when Jesus said, "It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man" - did you know the first thing that went through the Pharisees' minds upon hearing these words?

The Maccabee brothers.

Scorn the feminine and scorch the earth?

Maybe it's scratch a misanthropist and find a misogynist?

Or vice versa?

"If the average Catholic reader could be tracked down through the swamps of letters-to-the-editor and other places where he momentarily reveals himself, he would be found to be something of a Manichean." --Flannery O'Connor

It's a fundamentalist problem

Jesus is not a "fixer". Jesus does not objectify us, even as objects of his redemption.

More later.

Mote meet Log

Why is it syncretism only when it's eco-pan-feminist-gaia stuff, but never mars-capitalist-mammon-imperial-supremicist-domination stuff?

Go out and proclaim the Gospel to all the nations - why yes, let's align that imperative, or snyc it up, with the cultural domination possessed by the rich and powerful using the tribal tactics of world! Don't worry, the Gospel won't get maligned in the process because we preserve tradition!

Good luck with all that!

Ballpoint

Misc.

At the grocery store one evening a young man was playing the public piano; it was one of Chopin's etudes. You know the one: the rolling, windy, rollicking, unhinged, mad one. He was getting ahead of himself a bit, stumbling and jumbling the keys; he clearly had just learned the piece, but that was irrelevant. It was a Chopin etude being played in a grocery store. To hell with the simpering emotional cliches on the speakers. It was great to be checking out items while listening to his playing...until I turned and saw the woman beside me with her mobile device out recording it. That turned me off. The thought that she was doing it for material to post on her facebook or on whatever was one thing, but the overestimation she was giving to the incident - a piano beginner sort of stumbling on a piece that's not particularly complicated in comparison to the composer's other works - had the paradoxical effect of cheapening it. The charm, the ordinary human charm, was blasted in an instant like it was more than her right to suck all the good vibes out of this natural occurrence of blooming human culture. Good grief, like I said, it pissed me off.

*

I had atemoya fruit the other day for the first time. I know it's not the finest regarded of the moyas, but is still considered top notch. I let them ripen properly like avocados, and I know I didn't have the ultimate tree-ripened specimens, still, all that considered...I could easily go without. The full on sweetness, sure, it was nice, and the texture too, great. Except it was also kind of horrible. So smooth, the way the fruit flaked apart in nice creamy but firm sections, the mouth feel: what in all other circumstances should have been sublime had the opposite effect of reminding me very distinctly of fully cooked, mild, white fish meat falling off the bone, like tilapia. Indeed, I started thinking of tilapia while eating the atemoya, and I began to gag and would nearly have thrown up if I didn't keep it in check with a will of iron.

So for those of you who will eat atemoya in the near future: remember, whatever you do, do not, I repeat, DO NOT THINK OF TILAPIA!

*

The neo-formalist school of poetry is basically a load of humbug. I say that entirely from the perspective of poetry reader. I haven't written a poem in my life - or at least that's the way I feel about what I have written. But the New Formalist cult has all the weary preening bullshitting of the thoroughly auspicious appropriators; poets who cling with too much attachment and with too much science to the effects they have felt from poetry, and fall into the trap of reproducing it - and that is precisely the failure - by execution, by imitation.

*

I came across a news article saying that the 90's show Mad About You is going to get rebooted, and I was quite delighted - even more delighted to hear that Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt regularly get together about every month for lunch because they care about each other a lot. That was very sweet, to know they weren't just actors doing their thing and that the sense I had from the show was that there was something real being produced between them. Yes, I would watch the show when I was in high school. It just had a good feeling about it. That, and I had a crush on Helen Hunt.

*

Listening to anti-Francis Trads more and more is like listening to someone making sounds inside an aquarium inside an echo chamber inside a lead-coated underground bunker. Completely obsessed with symbols, they reduce and dehumanize and are quite superstitious. Good luck with that!

Heart these apples so much

These apples on the old tree in the field look unremarkable. Late October/early November, they're still on the tree and they look overripe and done. Not so. This apple - both apples that I picked using on old long branch someone kindly left in place leaning against the tree to knock apples off up where they are too high to reach - was so good, so scrumptiously delicious. Crisp, juicy, and the flavours!

These ones have a certain banana undertone. Not banana banana, but banana flavour banana, banana candy banana. Sharp, and I loved the superficial blemishes they have on the skin that means people won't be picking them. Miniscule cankers and scabs, completely innocuous and only on the surface of the skin, and you can see the stuff on the skin - you know, the stuff, like what grape skins have and cabbage leaves have, that makes them suitable to ferment without adding yeast, because it's already there on the skin. You have to get that stuff inside you.

I remember when I first saw Apocalypto in the theater, there was that scene where the survivors of the attack on the village are taken captive and they're crossing the rapid river. One of the women prays to Ixchel as the children stand abandoned on the shore. She says, "Gentle Ixchel. Tender mother of mercy. Keep them from harm. Please. Keep them."




I remember being so moved by that moment, because of the obvious resonances with the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was like, "I see what Gibson was doing there."