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 Stopped Clock

The proverbial stopped clock is right twice a day. I am using the expression metaphorically to refer to the person who through the ignorance which decades of academic decline and progressive media brainwashing have induced in our electorate now occupies the office of Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s government in the Dominion of Canada. I don’t think his actual track record is quite as good as a stopped clock. Indeed, twice a year might be pushing the boundaries of what is credible. Nevertheless, he was right on Monday. Or as close to being right as I have seen from him in a long time. 

He was in Montreal for some purpose or another related to the bat flu and the upcoming rape – thank you Dr. Paul Craig Roberts for pointing out the analogy – of the populace with injections of some noxious and satanic witch’s brew, when somebody asked him about the violent, Canada-hating, thuggish mob that tore down the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald on Saturday. His response was to say:

Those kind of acts of vandalism are not advancing the path towards greater justice and equality in this country. 

Now, this was a poor way of saying “it was wrong.” Justice and equality should never be linked because equality is often the exact opposite of justice. Justice is doing right by everybody. Equality is treating everybody the same. The image of equality is that of treating a stranger as well as you would treat your own brother. This is how it sells itself. The reality of equality, however, is that of treating your own brother as if he were a stranger. This is the opposite of justice, which demands not that we treat everybody as if they were the same, but that we treat everybody right, which is much more difficult. Equality is the easy, lazy, substitute for justice.

Furthermore, even if he had not added equality to justice in this way and had simply said “greater justice”, this wording suggests that the vandals were striving towards a worthy and admirable cause, they just went about it the wrong way. In reality, however, those who tore down Sir John’s statue were, like past zealots who have sought to erase history – and for those who think otherwise, while the past cannot be erased, it is entirely possible to erase history, for history is not just the past but, in the words of John Lukacs, “the remembered past” – are not admirable but misguided seekers after justice. They are the mob, the easily enflamed masses, stirred up by those who have incited hatred against our country, its history, its institutions, and its traditions.

I will return to that momentarily. Allow me to first conclude my reflection upon the Prime Minister’s words by saying that while it was a poor way of saying that the vandals were wrong, it was indeed a way of saying it, a condemnation of their actions. Erin O’Toole the new Conservative leader, Maxime Bernier the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, François Legault the Premier of Quebec, and Jason Kenney the Premier of Alberta each and all said it much better, but he did say it. It is right to give credit where credit is due, even if I am thinking of Sawyer Brown’s linking that proverb with thanking “the devil for the trouble that I get into” as I write this, and so kudos to the Captain, Canada’s stopped clock, for finally getting something right, in a way. 

Now, having gotten that out of the way, let us turn our attention back to the mob and the diabolical minds that have stirred up their passions and misdirected their energy. 

There are those who have tried to justify the actions of the mob by slinging mud at our first Prime Minister. Rather than re-invent the wheel, for those seeking answers to such people I refer you to Stephen K. Roney’s rebuttal of Bruce Katz, which can hardly be improved upon. To those looking for a fuller defence of Sir John I refer to my essay from two years ago entitled “Speaking Out For Old Tomorrow.” For those wanting a comprehensive rebuttal of the anti-Canada, Critical Race Theory, narrative as found in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee Report and the more recent report of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Committee, I refer you to the aforementioned Stephen Roney’s excellent book Playing the Indian Card: Everything You Know About Canada’s “First Nations” is Wrong.

The toppling of the statue, however, was an act of violence, directed not against Sir John A. Macdonald as an individual, but the country of which he is a symbol. Sir John A. Macdonald was the leading figure in Confederation, the discussion in which the provinces of British North America agreed to join into a federal union with our own Parliament under the Crown. He was the first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada and the man who saw her through the period in which she was most vulnerable to the various powerful commercial and political interests from the republic south of the border who wished the Confederation Project to fail that they might swallow up the pieces. He was the one who spearheaded the construction of the railroad which effectively thwarted the designs of Manifest Destiny and saw it through to its completion. It is no coincidence, that the Critical Race Theorists’ attempts to blacken his reputation take the form of a spurious and anachronistic deliberate misreading of everything he did in order to meet the obligations of the Dominion government under the treaties signed with the Indian tribes, and that those treaties just happened to have been negotiated as part of the process of building the railroad, settling the prairies and uniting the east with the west. The Critical Race Theorists know what they are doing and it is the Dominion of Canada the country, not Sir John A. Macdonald the man that is really under attack here. 

On a larger scale, of course, the attacks of this nature that we have seen occurring across Western Civilization are attacks upon that very civilization as well as the countries within it.

Neither the Dominion of Canada nor Western Civilization is beyond scrutiny and criticism, of course. Both are made up of fallible and deeply flawed human beings since other than the Son of God these are the only kind that can be found on this earth this side of Eden and prior to the Second Coming. The universal failings of human nature are a perpetual and unanswerable argument against those who would point to the inevitable shortcomings of human leaders, institutions, countries, and civilizations as grounds for razing them to the ground. Revolutionaries, no matter how lofty the ideals they preach, are fundamentally incapable of replacing an old order with a perfect and pristine new one, for they cannot escape participating in the same flawed nature as those who built the old one. In the end, all that revolutionaries can ever accomplish is to destroy all those things which meliorate the human condition and allow for the possibility of a good life for fallen human beings. We ought never to forget the words of the late Sir Roger Scruton that “good things are more easily destroyed than created.” 

The Dominion of Canada, established on a foundation of loyalty, honour, and continuity, has been blessed with an abundance of those good things. To list our constitution of parliamentary monarchy, and the civil rights, prescriptive liberties and judicial principles of the Common Law tradition, is to speak only of the most obvious civil or political examples of these. The way our political leaders and mass media commentators, from all sides of the political spectrum, feel constantly compelled to reduce all of these to “our democracy” has trivialized them, but that is a topic for another time. It is these good things that are under attack, when mobs stirred up by demon-inspired Critical Theory intellectuals, wage war on our country and civilization, by attacking its symbols and historic figures. 

If only the Prime Minister had included all of that in his answer.