Advent

It is Advent Sunday, the first day in the liturgical calendar for Western Christians, and the first of the four Sundays of Advent, the period that begins now and ends with the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour on Christmas.   It is, like the longer period of Lent that leads up to Easter or Pascha, the Christian Passover celebrating our Lord's Glorious Resurrection, a period for penitence and sober reflection.   I should say, that is what the period of Advent traditionally has been in the Church.   There is now a secular Christmas which falls on the same day as the celebration of the birth of Christ, and with it a secular Advent that is more-or-less the opposite of what Advent is all about in the Church.   Secular Advent comes in a long and a short version.   The short version is that which is evident in the secular version of Advent calendars.   An Advent calendar is the kind where you count down the days to Christmas by opening a door, eating a candy, or some such thing.   Religious Advent calendars begin with Advent Sunday which may, as this year, fall in November (the 27th is the earliest it can fall).   Secular Advent calendars typically begin on December 1st.   That is the short version of secular Advent.   The long version starts when the Christmas decorations go up.   This was remarkably early this year.   I  saw a house in Winnipeg's West End - that is the name of the section of town, not an accurate description of its location - lit up as if they were in competition with Clark Griswold, back in September.

Secular Advent, as stated above, is typically the opposite in tone and spirit to what Advent is supposed to be in the Church.   It is more of an extended version of secular Christmas, with parties and gift-giving and the like, and thus resembles Carnival, the pre-Lent festive season for those of the Roman Communion that corresponds to the more reserved Anglican Shrovetide, more than it does Lent itself.   That is what has been the norm for decades.   It does not look like it will be the case this year.   Grinches all around the world have seized the opportunity of the mass hysteria generated by media hype about the Wuhan bat flu to steal both the secular and the Christian Christmas, taking Advent to boot.   Here in the Dominion of Canada the chief Grinch has been Captain Airhead, who managed to retain his position as Her Majesty's First Minister last year despite being hit by at least three scandals any one of which would have taken down anybody who did not belong to the Canadian equivalent of the Kennedy family, but the provincial premiers, especially our own premier in Manitoba, Brian Pallister,  who cannot seem to make up his mind as to whether he is a rectal orifice or a squirt bottle used to clean the same, has come close to surpassing Captain Airhead in his Grinchiness.   He shut down the small businesses that depend upon the Christmas shopping rush to balance their books for at least a month in that very period, then, when they complained that they were being treated unfairly, instead of doing something that would actually help, ordered the larger stores to seal off everything except food and a few other "essentials", thus giving all the  business in the province for other items to Amazon.   He ordered the Churches to close and seems determined to make those Churches that have insisted upon their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of worship in defiance of his orders into scapegoats for the failure of his restrictions to produce the desired effect of lower case numbers.   I shall, Deus Vult, be addressing that scapegoating at greater length later this week , but note that this unconstitutional and totalitarian ban on in-person Church services includes even drive-in services where everyone remains in their own car in the parking lot and which cannot possibly contribute to the spread of this or any other disease.    He even had the nerve to lecture Lower Canada's premier François Legault over the latter's less Grinchy policy with regards to family gatherings over Christmas.   Sadly, Mr. Legault's response was merely to say that Mr. Pallister did not seem to be aware of the precautions surrounding the Christmas exception in his province, rather than the "va te faire foutre" that the situation seemed to call for.   Mr. Pallister is not content with trying to steal Christmas from Manitobans, he wants to steal it from other Canadians too.

Mr. Pallister, whose inability to think outside the lockdown box when it comes to the bat flu evinces his lack of understanding the meaning or perhaps even of having read Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Read Death, shows by his efforts to steal Christmas that he  has failed to grasp the lesson of Dr. Seuss's story about the Grinch as well.   In the end, despite all the Grinch's efforts, Christmas came "it came just the same".   It is perhaps too much to hope that Mr. Pallister's small heart will grow three sizes when this very thing happens this year.  Denied his annual vacation in Costa Rica because of bat flu travel restrictions he seems determined to make everybody as miserable as he is.   Those who do not understand the purpose of penitential seasons like Advent and Lent might conclude from this that he has restored the original spirit of the period.

They would be wrong, of course, because gloom and misery do not add up to penitence.   Indeed, they are even more a part of despair than they are a part of penitence or repentance.   Despair, you might recall, was in medieval moral theology, the mortal sin opposite to the theological virtue of hope and amounted to the repudiation of the latter.   In its most extreme form it was the belief that one had sinned beyond the capacity of God's grace and mercy and expressed itself in suicide.   The mental anguish that tormented the eighteenth century poet and Olney hymn writer William Cowper in the latter years of his life, from which he received release only shortly before he was allowed to die in the peace of assurance of God's forgiveness, was pretty much the textbook example.   In is a recurring subject throughout Shakespeare, the ending of Romeo and Juliet being the most obvious example although it is expressed best in all that King Lear says after he enters, in the third and last scene of Act V, carrying the dead body of Cordelia, the only one of his daughters, as he realized too late, who had been truly loving, devoted, and loyal.   Despair is so serious a sin because it precludes repentance.   Penitence or repentance, always includes hope.

True penitence or repentance involves a sober reflection upon one's own mortality and that which is ultimately the cause of the dread which the inevitability of one's own death inspires, one's sin.    "It is appointed unto man once to die", St. Paul wrote to the Hebrews, "but after this the judgement."   The Greek word translated repentance is often given the definition "change of mind".   It is, in fact, formed by adding a preposition which when used in compounds has the meaning "again" to a word referring to thought.    The image is of looking upon one's thoughts, words, and deeds of the past and recognizing how far short of God's will, whether expressed in the Ten Commandments or the Greatest and Second Greatest Commandments to which our Lord pointed, we have fallen.   The basic Greek word for sin in the New Testament, the same used by Aristotle in his works of literary/theatrical criticism/theory to denote the "fatal flaw" of a tragic hero, means literally to miss the mark, to fall short of the bull's eye.   This sort of reflection falls short of being repentance, however, and leads to despair, if it is not joined to faith and hope.

This is why seasons of penitence are always seasons which look forward to a faith and hope inspiring event.   Lent looks forward to the remembrance of the events whereby sin and death were defeated, the Crucifixion, in which Our Saviour allowed Himself to be unjustly executed by wicked men, that He might offer Himself up as the One true sacrifice that takes away the sins of the world, and the Resurrection in which His triumph over sin, death, and the very gates of hell, was declared to the world.   Advent looks forward to His birth, and what His birth signifies, the Incarnation, God coming down to earth and becoming man that He might lift man up to God.     Faith rests upon God's revelation of Himself and His love and saving mercy to the world in these events and it is faith which gives birth to hope, which is but faith looking forward, and charity or Christian love, which is but faith in action.   Repentance prepares our hearts to receive God's saving revelation of Himself in faith.

So, denied the shopping, partying, and revelry of secular Advent this year by Satan-possessed politicians and doctors determined to preserve our mere existence by forbidding us to truly live our lives, let us reflect in the true spirit of the season, on our sinfulness and mortality, repent, and embrace in faith and hope the "dawn of redeeming grace", to borrow Dr. Luther's words, in the events remembered at Christmas.   If we do so, Christmas will come just the same despite the efforts of politicians and physicians to prevent it.

The Approach of Winter

At midnight, as Remembrance Day ended and at least four weeks of Code Red lockdown on the province of Manitoba began, it was snowing in Winnipeg.   Within a couple of hours the ground was white and, as of noon on the twelfth, the snow was stilling coming down.    This is not unusual for Manitoba around this time of year.   This city is referred to as "Winterpeg" for a reason.    While the forecast is predicting a rise to low but above freezing temperatures on the weekend and again around Wednesday of next week, overall the highs predicted for the next two weeks are below the freezing point.   Weather forecasting is notoriously unreliable, but at this time of year unforeseen complications often include sudden and quick-moving low pressure systems sweeping the prairies and bringing a ton of wind, snow, and cold along with them.   As we get this taste of the long winter we know is inevitably coming, grocery stores and other businesses fortunate enough to be considered essential by the health bureaucrats and politicians who arrogantly think they have the right to designate other people's businesses and livelihoods as otherwise, have been reduced to twenty-five percent capacity.    This means long lineups, out in the cold, waiting to get into the store to buy what you need to keep you and your family from starving.

 

Let us think about that for a moment.

 

How many of you when you were growing up, heard your mothers say to you, too many times to count, something to the effect of “get inside, do you want to catch your death of pneumonia?”

 

I think it is a safe assumption to say that the vast majority of you would answer “yes.”    Unless you have suffered from a lifelong agoraphobia, in the conventional sense of a fear of the outdoors rather than the more technical clinical sense, chances are good that when you were a child you would play outdoors in cold and wet weather, with little thought to protecting yourself against the elements, prompting such an expression of maternal concern.

 

Now consider the irony.   Brent Roussin, our local public health mandarin, has issued orders that will require people to stand outside in cold and most likely wet weather for long periods of time.   The purpose of these orders is to prevent people from catching their death from the severe type of pneumonia that, in a small minority of cases, those who contract the bat flu virus experience.

 

Who do you trust more, Brent Roussin or your mother?

 

There are those who will answer by saying that this is an unfair question.   Roussin is an expert on these sort of things, after all, and our mothers, except, of course, for the ones who happened to also be physicians and epidemiologists, were not.   All of that, however, is another way of saying “shut up, don’t think for yourself, just listen to the experts and don’t ask questions.”

 

It is also advocating for stupidity.

 

It is obvious to anyone with any amount of life experience and common sense that Roussin’s orders are going to result in more people getting sick rather than less.     Not only are we entering a period of cold and wet weather, in which, thanks to the public health orders we are all going to have to stand outside in long lineups, this is a season in which people always get sick.  It is the period in which sunlight hours are the shortest, everyone has a Vitamin D deficiency and therefore a weakened immune system, and, consequently, the bugs that are always with us are able to do their worst.

 

This is a huge problem for us because, as I have discussed previously, Roussin and the premier’s attitude since the end of September has been one of piling restrictions upon restrictions upon restrictions when the previous restrictions failed to reduce the number of cases, blaming the failure on the disobedience of the public, and threatening and bullying people.  What are the chances that they are finally going to realize – or, rather, admit – that the problem is not with the public, but with this entire approach?   It doesn’t work and no amount of hiring more enforcers, raising the fines, berating and haranguing us, and taking away more of our rights and freedoms, is ever going to change that.    Unless Roussin and Pallister finally acknowledge this, they will just keep piling rule after useless rule upon us.   Since, unlike with the first lockdown, we are transitioning into the period of maximum sickness rather than out of it, that will be going on for a long time.

 

The person whose job it is to raise these kind of questions, challenge the government when its policies and actions are stupid and wrong, and fight the government when its actions infringe upon our traditional and constitutional rights and freedoms, is the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.   That may yet happen at the Dominion level, where the Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, has been urging the provincial governments to take drastic measures to stop the spread of the bat flu.   I have my doubts.   Erin O’Toole should have spoken out long before now.   The only leader of a Dominion level political party who has consistently spoken out for the traditional rights and freedoms of Canadians against these draconian lockdowns has been Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party of Canada, who has no sitting Members in Parliament.   At the provincial level here in Manitoba, Wab Kinew has been doing the opposite of his job.   He has been demanding more restrictions than those the government has been imposing, criticizing the Health Minister for meeting with and giving a hearing to people who expressed their opposition to such measures, and, most recently, condemning the government for relaxing one of the more odious elements of the recent public health orders, i.e., restricting social interaction to within the immediate household.   I wonder if it ever occurred to Mr. Kinew, who is married and has three sons, to think about what such an order would mean to the many people who live by themselves, far more today than in previous times?

 

Lockdowns do a lot of damage and, furthermore, they hurt a lot more people than the bat flu does.   While socialists like Kinew and his echo chamber in the local CBC and most of the “private” media, justify their support of lockdowns in spite of this fact on the grounds that the harm lockdowns do is merely economic whereas the virus kills, this reasoning is entirely spurious.    Enforcing extreme social isolation upon a society where loneliness was already a problem will increase the rates of suicide and addiction.   Note, with regards to the latter, that once again stores specializing in booze and the mind-destroying toxins that can be extracted from certain cultivars of hemp are deemed essential and allowed to operate at a time when all religious services have been ordered to close.   Lockdowns, not to put too fine a point on it, kill.

 

To attempt to stop the spread of the bat flu with a lockdown is a major violation of medical ethics.   It is also incredibly stupid.  That you cannot lock people away from a plague is not exactly a new insight.   It was the point made by Edgar Allan Poe in his The Masque of the Red Death, originally published in 1842.   Perhaps the egalitarian socialists who support lockdowns think they have avoided the hubris and nemesis of Poe’s Prince Prospero by locking away the common people as well as the wealthy, but the harm inflicted by lockdowns falls disproportionately on the poor.    We are, again, entering the winter season.   With the new health orders, homeless shelters are operating at reduced capacity, public places such as libraries are closed to them, as are restaurant dining rooms.   With all the businesses closed and jobs lost due to the earlier lockdown measures and these new ones, I very much doubt there are fewer homeless in this province than at this time last year.   All of these physicians who have been petitioning the government for stricter lockdown measures, as if crashing everything else in an attempt to prevent the hospitals from crashing made any sense, ought to stripped of their medical credentials and busted down to jobs that cannot be done by video teleconference from home.

 

As we enter into winter the demonic spirit behind the lockdowns becomes even more apparent.  With winter comes Christmas.    Indeed, the last Sunday of the current liturgical year, Christ the King, or, what used to be called “Stir-up Sunday” after the first words of the Book of Common Prayer’s Collect for that day, is the Sunday after the next, only a little over a week away.   The lockdown orders currently extend into at least the first two weeks of Advent.   The Jewish festival of lights, Hanukkah, is scheduled to begin this year right after the time the lockdown orders as they currently stand expire, but if the current four weeks of province-wide Code Red lockdown does not stop the spread of the bat flu, and it is hardly likely that it will, the next thing on deck will be for the same Grinches that stole Easter and Passover earlier this year, to steal Christmas and Hanukkah too.    Having robbed us of the joyous celebration of our Lord and Saviour’s Glorious Resurrection, they appear set to rob us of the joyous celebration of His Nativity and Incarnation as well. 

 

The ordinary thermometer cold of winter is not enough for these people.   They wish to drive the warmth of faith from our hearts as well.

 

 

 

A Lesson From Leroux

 

Gaston Leroux, after pursuing a career in journalism, which involved everything from theatrical criticism to international correspondence, turned to writing fiction in the early 1900s. In his native France, he is remembered as an author of detective fiction, as being more-or-less the French equivalent of his English contemporary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. His first detective novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908), featured his amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille, who, as is often the case with fictional detectives, had a number of biographical similarities to his creator. In this novel, Rouletabille solved the mystery of how a scientist’s daughter ended up beaten unconscious in a room in her father’s castle that was locked from the inside. (1) 

Outside of France, however, he is best known as the author of one of the classics of Gothic horror, ranking right up there with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Drawing upon the many rumours surrounding the Palais Garnier opera house that had been completed in his childhood, an actual incident featuring a falling chandelier that took place there in 1896, and the entire spectrum of his journalistic experiences, he created the famous story that features a deformed and criminally insane polymath with the mononym Erik, who lives on the lake in the basement of the opera house – this lake actually exists – pretending to be a ghost to terrorize the cast of the opera and extort money from its managers, and an angel in order to transform a chorus girl into a diva. The Phantom of the Opera was, as was customary at that time, originally serialized, before being bound and published in French in 1910. The first English translation appeared the following year. 

The story has been re-told many times ever since. The first movie version – and by far the most faithful to Leroux’s novel – was a silent film that appeared in 1925, featuring Lon Chaney Sr., the legendary “Man of a Thousand Faces”, as Erik. There have been many more. It has also been adapted for stage more than once, the most well-known version being, of course, the musical that debuted in 1986, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, originally starring Michael Crawford as the Phantom and Lloyd Webber’s wife-at-the-time, Sarah Brightman as Christine Daaé, the chorus girl turned diva soprano, and is now the longest running musical on Broadway, and the second longest in London’s West End. (2) It was in this version that I first became familiar with the story when a production of the musical came to Winnipeg’s Centennial Concert Hall in 1993 and I went to see it with my high school friends Cynthia and Tamara, although I read Leroux’s novel shortly thereafter. 

My title may, in fact, be slightly misleading, as the lesson I wish to draw from the story is, in fact, best illustrated in Lloyd Webber’s adaptation, which presents the most sympathetic version of Leroux’s Erik.

Unlike motion picture adaptations other than the 1925 original, Lloyd Webber followed Leroux in making Erik’s hideously deformed face something he was born with, rather than the result of acid being thrown in his face, as in the 1943 remake starring Claude Rains and many subsequent versions or a deal with the devil, as in the unfortunate 1989 version starring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund. Consequently, he has had to wear a mask for any social interaction all of his life. Even more so in the musical than in Leroux’s novel, although it can be found there as well, this is offered as a partial explanation of his cruel and sadistic behaviour. Granted, the mask requirement was only one part of the whole situation of society having rejected him in disgust at his appearance, but consider how he is made to express it in one notable scene towards the end of the musical. He has just abducted Christine from the stage of the opera in the middle of a production of his own “Don Juan Triumphant”. Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny and his rival for Christine’s affections, is hot on his trail, but for a brief time he has Christine alone with him again in his lair. The following interaction takes place. 

Christine: Have you gorged yourself at last in your lust for blood? Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh? 

The Phantom: That fate that condemned me to wallow in blood, has also denied me the joys of the flesh. This face, the infection, which poisons our love. This face which earned a mother’s fear and loathing, a mask my first unfeeling scrap of clothing. 

The words which Lloyd Webber et al., place in the mouth of the Phantom here, echo those which Leroux had placed in the mouth of Erik at a much earlier point in the story in his novel. In chapter XII,  Christine and Raoul have escaped to the roof of the opera, where Christine tells Raoul about her experiences with Erik in his subterranean home the first time he had spirited her away.  After she had snatched away his mask, Erik had entered into a spiel of self-pity, which ended with: 

Why did you want to see me? Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me! ... When my own father never saw me and when my mother, so as not to see me, made me a present of my first mask! 

Returning to Lloyd Webber’s version, Christine at this point treats his self-pity with scorn, informing him that “this haunted face holds no horror for me now, it’s in your soul that the true distortion lies”, at which point the scene shifts gears with the arrival of Raoul. What I wish to draw your attention to, however, is the sharp contrast between the way Erik talks about his fated and trademark mask in the above quoted lines, and the way all of the other characters talk about their masks in an earlier scene in which everyone appears masked. 

The scene is the first in the second Act, and is based upon chapter IX in Leroux’s novel. In the musical it is set six months after the events of the first Act. The Phantom has not been heard from in the meantime, and the Opera is hosting a gala event in the form of a masquerade ball to kick off their return to production. The entire cast joins in on a number entitled “Masquerade”, the chorus of which goes:

Masquerade! Paper faces on parade. 

Masquerade! Hide your face so the world will never find you. 

Masquerade! Every face a different shade. 

Masquerade! Look around, there’s another mask behind you. 

Everybody at this ball is having a grand old time and enjoying the fun of their self-chosen masks. At least until Erik shows up dressed as Edgar Allan Poe’s Red Death. (3) 

Now let us consider what lesson we might draw from this striking contrast. Masks can be a source of great fun and enjoyment when they are voluntarily put on in circumstances like that of a masquerade ball. Yet they can be a source of incredible trauma if they are forced upon a person, especially in childhood. 

There are a lot of people today who are in need of this lesson. This month will end, as October always ends, on the eve of All Saints Day, for which reason the last day of October is known as All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween for short. It is traditionally a day in which people voluntarily put on costumes, including masks, for purposes of fun. Kids traditionally dress up in their costumes and go from house to house, ringing the doorbell or knocking, and saying “trick or treat” when the door opens. The person in the house then either gives them candy – or, if they are a health nut, something more nutritious – or risks having a trick pulled on him. This year, a bunch of adult party-poopers, who have been acting like paranoid lunatics since March, all because a virus that poses next to no threat to anybody under sixty-five and without multiple pre-existing medical conditions, has been spreading around the world, have demanded that Halloween and trick-or-treating be cancelled for this year. It is not “safe” they say. 

These same people, who give every impression of having had their brains sucked out by a zombie, are responsible for the fact that the kids who are being forbidden the fun mask-wearing experience of Halloween this year, have been forced to wear masks every day in school since it resumed last month. They are often required to wear them even when outside at recess – assuming the school allows them out at recess. 

 As Christian fantasy novelist and Chalcedon Foundation editor Lee Duigon put it a few weeks ago, “Good grief, they’ve made school even worse than it has always been.” 

Am I saying that all of these kids forced to wear masks all day, every day, are going to end up hiding out in the basements of theatres, dropping chandeliers on people, abducting beautiful singers, murdering people with nooses, and threatening to blow up their cities (4)? 

Perhaps not, but they are likely to be incredibly traumatized by it. This mandatory mask policy at schools amounts to one gigantic case of child abuse. 

Everybody who is in favour of it deserves to be horsewhipped. 

(1) There is an entire subgenre of mystery fiction featuring just this sort of dilemma. It is called the “locked-room mystery” subgenre. Edgar Allan Poe is usually regarded as the founder of the subgenre. The acknowledged master of it, John Dickson Carr, considered Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room to be his favourite. An early and excellent example, and my personal favourite, is Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas. 

(2) Lloyd Webber also composed a sequel musical entitled Love Never Dies which opened in 2010. He had started working on it years earlier with journalist-novelist Frederick Forsyth. Forsyth had developed their ideas into The Phantom of Manhattan, a 1999 novel which, like Love Never Dies, is a sequel, not so much to Leroux’s novel, the ending of which hardly leaves room for a follow up, as to Lloyd Webber’s adaptation. While Love Never Dies and The Phantom of Manhattan are versions of the same story, the genesis of both is such that it would be a gross oversimplification to say the former is an adaptation of the latter. 

(3) The Red Death is a character from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842). The parallel Leroux originally intended by having Erik show up in this costume is that in both stories the character was a very unwanted party-crasher at a similar event. Considering the nature of the lesson I have been drawing from Leroux’s story, it will be worth our while to briefly summarize Poe’s story here. The Red Death, in Poe’s story, is a plague which Prince Prospero, the main character, attempts to avoid, by putting himself and all of his friends in lockdown behind the castle walls of his abbey. After six months – the ironic parallels just continue to pile up – he throws a masquerade ball, much like the one in Leroux’s novel. He takes his guests through seven rooms, each decorated in a different colour, the final room of which is all in black, with blood-red illumination. When the spooky clock in the room chimes midnight, Prospero and his guests notice someone dressed in a blood red shroud, with a skull for a face. Angry that someone would show up dressed as the very plague he had been hiding from, he corners the man with a dagger but drops dead when the man turns to look at him. When all of his guests then mob the Red Death and force him to remove his mask, there is nothing beneath, for it was the actual plague personified. Their attempts to lock themselves away from him had failed completely. 

(4) This part of the story was really watered down by Lloyd Webber. In his version, the Phantom offers Christine the choice of staying with him or seeing Raoul, whom he had trapped in his Punjab lasso, die. In Leroux’s novel, Raoul and his guide the Persian, a character eliminated from most adaptations except the first, get themselves trapped in Erik’s torture chamber. Christine is a given a choice – signal that she is willing to live with him forever by turning a switch shaped like a scorpion on his mantelpiece, or signal her rejecting him by turning the switch shaped like a grasshopper The grasshopper switch would have detonated a cache of gunpowder beneath the torture chamber large enough to blow up the opera house and much of the surrounding section of Paris.