Russian guitar music? I had no idea such a thing existed. Very new territory for me. And quite pleasing.
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New audio recordings of blog posts from Romantic Christian blogs are now up at New World Island's YouTube channel (see sidebar or link below). The Fire - Cormac McCarthy's Faint Vision of Hope in the Sorath-Eclipsed World of "The Road"2/1/2023  Post-apocalyptic novels have become a genre all to themselves, but few capture the desolate aftermath of Sorathic destruction as hauntingly and oppressively as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which some have described as one of the bleakest and most agonizing novels ever written.
Set in the wake of an unspecified apocalypse – most likely a nuclear war, even though the film adaptation of the novel widened the scope to include the trendy warnings of climate-induced catastrophe – The Road tells the stark story of a man and his son desperately struggling to stay alive and reach some unknown destination in a world in which there is essentially nowhere to go and fundamentally nothing left to live for. McCarthy is a strange writer; a breed all to himself. Dark poetic flourishes that shrivel into the unpoetic beauty lace the foundation of his terse and Hemingwayesque style. Thematically, he stands within that small, select group of storytellers that recognizes and understands the devastating evil that is Sorathic destruction. In his other novels, McCarthy confines Sorath to senseless, savage upsurges that erupt onto the façade of real-world tranquility like volcanic explosions; in The Road, McCarthy gives destruction free reign over God and Creation, depicting a world in which Sorath reigns triumphant: It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of the ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. It’s snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom. On the surface, The Road is a story of physical survival – a narrative focused on the instinct to stay alive in a world where there is nothing for which to live. Beneath the surface, McCarthy’s post-Armageddon tale explores the apparent impossibility of remaining spiritually aligned with God and Creation when both God and Creation appear to be no more. The central motif that attests to this spiritual theme is “the fire”. Invisible and only referred to, the fire becomes the sole motivation and hope through which the story and its characters cling to meaning. At the most obvious level, the fire represents the love between the man and his son – one of the only examples of human love left in the world. The man and the boy both guard the fire as they stumble ceaselessly through senseless landscapes of death and despair. They remind each other that they are “carrying the fire” and use this designation to distinguish themselves from the bad guys who -- to paraphrase a line from Charles Bukowski’s Dinosauria, We -- are radiated men eating the flesh of other radiated men. There are certain boundaries the man will not cross as he struggles to keep his son alive in the ravaged world of The Road, yet his focused love and fixation often reduce his behavior to the animal level of ruthless survival. Here McCarthy utilizes the boy and transforms him into the barely audible whisperings of God – survival, yes, but not at any cost. Within the borders of this dark world gone to hell, the fire the boy safeguards glows like a muted beacon, a soft reminder of the reality of life beyond survival. A soft reminder that Sorath’s destruction can only be countered by love, faith, hope, and creativity, and that as long as these exist, God exists, as does Creation. Dr. Charlton has published an excellent piece in which he calls upon Christians to become "Martyrs of Repentance":
We are all sinners; and sin over and again all through our lives - because sin is whatever is Not aligned-with God's creation. . . . Yet, no matter how deep in corruption and no matter the societal pressure towards evil; if a Man can recognize, acknowledge, and repent his sins and accept whatever the consequences - then, at that moment (and for eternity, if martyrdom is his fate), he becomes a light to dazzle The Enemy and push-back the darkness in this world. The one thing that has perplexed me more than anything else over these past three years is the open and vehement resistance Christians put up when it comes to repentance. I'm under the impression that Christians have begun to regard repentance as a sign of stupidity or weakness or, worse, as something that is somehow inherently un-Christian or ant-Christian. I can't -- for the life of me -- wrap my head around this palpable resistance to repentance. At times, I think the resistance may stem from the discomfort of having to acknowledge that one has sinned. At other times, I feel it must emanate from diluted conceptualizations of what qualifies as sin. Overall, I sense it emerges from the misguided notion that to acknowledge sin is to lose a decisive battle in the spiritual war; that the spiritual war can only be won by avoiding and overcoming sin. Perhaps repentance makes Christians feel like losers rather than winners. Let's set something straight - the two sides of the spiritual war do not consist of a side of sinners versus a side of sinless saints. Sinners comprise both sides of the spiritual war! The only meaningful difference between the two is that the side that is for God and Creation consists of repentant sinners, while the ranks opposed to God and Creation teem with unrepentant sinners! What many decent, church-going, Bible-thumping, obedient, humble, intelligent Christians fail to understand is that unrepentance is how decent, church-going, Bible-thumping, obedient, humble, intelligent Christians like them end up on the wrong side of the spiritual war. What seems to have gotten lost in the mix is the simple reality that repentance is one of the best possible ways to overcome sin and win the spiritual war. As such, it is something Christians should embrace rather than resist. Every opportunity to repent should fill our hearts with a surge of fire and life, and we should welcome it with open arms. We don't win the spiritual war by trying to be or pretending to be sinless, but by repenting sin. By sincerely acknowledging and repenting sin. It really is that simple. So, the only remaining question for me is: Why the massive resistance to repentance among Christians? Christianity is a religion in the world, but it is not a worldly religion. With this in mind, it should be clear that our thinking and actions are not limited to the confines of this world but extend well beyond its temporal boundaries. Of course, this in no way reduces the temporal significance of our thinking and actions.
What we think and do during mortal life directly impacts the world and our mortal lives – yet our thinking and action must transcend these immediate limits and include eternal considerations. What we think and do in this world affects the world and eternity. As Dr. Charlton has noted many times on his Notions blog, our mortal lives in this world are temporary, but the thinking and doing in which we engage in this temporary state is eternally significant. Moreover, it also affects and shapes eternity. From this perspective, our thinking and actions in this world are inevitably inflated and amplified within the context of eternity. Contrary to popular belief, our thinking and actions in this world do not merely echo in eternity – they are “picked up” and amplified. But this only applies to thinking and action that aligns with God’s eternal creative purposes. Thinking and action that does not align with these eternal purposes are not inflated or amplified in eternity. Instead, they are deflated and confined to the limits of this world, replete with its temporariness and its entropy. Within this “quarantine”, the forces of evil can harness these deflated thoughts and actions and amplify them to suit their objectives of ensuring individual and mass damnation. Thus, deflated thoughts and actions are also of eternal significance. They cannot diminish or weaken Heaven; however, they can render Heaven inaccessible. Thinking and action in this world that aligns with God’s creative purposes usually appear weaker than thinking and action that oppose God’s creative purposes. From a purely worldly perspective, temporal thinking is far more powerful than spiritual thinking. Temporal thinking utilizes fear, force, and entropy to attack the temporal body that houses and generates spiritual thinking and action. The aim is simple – assault the spirit through the body. Confine the spirit to this-worldly thinking. Poison the eternal significance of thoughts and actions. Provide eternity with nothing to inflate or amplify. Keep all thinking and action “deflated” in the temporary, entropic world. In reality, thinking and action in this world that aligns with God’s creative purposes are always stronger because it has the potential to affect not only this world but eternity. Thought and action that aligns with God’s creative purposes provide the spiritual forces for Good with usable “material”. It beckons them toward co-create with the individual who generates such thoughts and actions. It inspires them to inflate and amplify the individual's thoughts and actions in ways the individual himself can barely imagine. Evidence of this can be seen in the example of people like Vendel Enrédy, who escaped the communists in Hungary for a brief time after the Second World War but quickly chose to return to his native soil well aware that doing so would lead to his arrest, torture, imprisonment and, possibly, death. From a purely temporal perspective, Endrédy’s thinking and actions make absolutely no sense whatsoever and appeared to have accomplished nothing. He was arrested shortly after his return, tortured, put on trial, found guilty, and imprisoned in the worst conditions imaginable. After six years, he was liberated by freedom fighters participating in the short-lived Hungarian Revolution. Following the failed rebellion, the communists decided against re-imprisoning him and instead placed him in a seniors’ facility for aged and retired clergy, where he lived out the remainder of his days until he died in 1981. Did Endrédy’s thinking and action have any positive effect on the world? Arguments can go either way. On the one hand, you could say his thinking and actions had no positive effect on the world at all, and that his thoughts and actions has nothing to do with positive developments like the rebellion against the communists or the dilution of hardline communism after 1956 or the eventual collapse of communism eight years after his death. On the other hand, you could also argue the opposite. Either way, the eternal significance of Endrédy’s thinking and actions in the temporal world is real and undeniable, and I am certain that his thinking and actions in the temporal world have been amplified in eternity. Furthermore, I firmly believe Endrédy's thoughts and actions in this world added something to eternity, something that God alone could not have added on his own. This does not imply that only heroic thinking and action is amplified and inflated. On the contrary, I believe seemingly mundane thinking and action have the potential to be inflated and amplified in ways we cannot conceptualize -- as long as the thinking and action aligns with God and Creation. Earlier this week, William Wildblood published an incisive post on the peck and regret. I highly recommend it.
The post started me thinking about regret and repentance. In particular, about the misguided notion that regret and repentance are essentially synonymous -- to the point that the mere feeling or expression of regret automatically qualifies as repentance. Regret and repentance do shadow the same ground in many ways, but they are not necessarily the same. Not by a long shot. Although repentance necessarily involves regret, regret does not necessarily need to involve repentance. A good example of the latter is a restaurant patron who forgoes his trusted choice at his favorite restaurant in favor of sampling a new dish on the menu. After he tries it, he finds it bland and regrets not sticking to his usual menu choice. The restaurant patron's regret may be authentic and deeply felt, but it does not require repentance because he has committed no wrongdoing. Nor has he engaged in sin. He simply made a bad personal choice. Though the choice certainly affected his enjoyment of the evening, it did not oppose or work against God and Creation. The same applies to other mistakes and poor choices that lead to negative consequences. A married couple who purchase their first home at the peak of a housing bubble may regret their decision later when prices crater, but they do not need to repent it. A man who chose to study law rather than medicine may regret his choice if he finds legal work unfulfilling. However, the regret he experiences regarding his choice of vocation requires no repentance (unless the work he engages in directly opposes God and Creation, but that’s a separate issue). Simply put, feelings of disappointment or sadness over the unfavorable consequences of past decisions that did not oppose God and Creation require no repentance. Past decisions that opposed God and Creation do require repentance. These feelings of disappointment or sadness should help us to distinguish when repentance is needed and when it is not. Unfortunately, regret often does more to hinder than aid repentance. Things start to get tricky when decisions that oppose God and Creation instill no sense of regret, which is almost always a sign of deep spiritual disconnect. Most individuals who feel no regret over their opposition to God and Creation are either willfully unaware of God or directly opposed to God. But what about individuals who profess to believe in God and claim to understand the reality of sin and the need for repentance? This is where the birdemic and the peck become "problematic", especially for Christians. Many Christians have begun expressing regret for their decision to take the peck. The vast majority of this regret stems from the apparent ineffectiveness of the peck and/or its reported adverse health effects, which leads me to wonder – would that regret exist if the peck had been “safe and effective” as advertised? Would the Christians who now lament taking the peck show any sign of regret if the peck had protected them from transmission and not presented any potential side effects? I hate to say this, but I don’t think many of them would. Moreover, I firmly believe that most would feel immensely good about themselves and their decision. Furthermore, I posit that few of them would be all that troubled about the totalitarian technocratic surveillance society the Ahramanic bureaucrats so passionately wanted – and still want -- to make permanent via a peck program or some similar demonic configuration. I have encountered very few pecked Christians whose regret for having taken the peck extends beyond “safe and effective” concerns. I have encountered very few pecked Christians who recognize and understand that the decision to take the peck, even under the sway of ruthless coercion, was in direct opposition to God and Creation. I have encountered very few pecked Christians who have comprehended, let alone expressed, the need to repent the thoughts, actions, and behavior they exhibited during the birdemic and its peck campaign. Barely any of the pecked Christians I know have regretted, let alone repented, their direct or indirect involvement in the peck program’s extended totalitarian atrocities, wicked coercion, dehumanizing measures, demonizing tactics, and degrading practices. On the contrary, most are under the impression that their peck-related thoughts and actions require no repentance at all. Regret? Sure. But repentance? Nah! As far as they are concerned, the peck-related decisions they made are akin to the example of the restaurant patron’s decision described above – a regrettable choice, but not wrong and certainly not against God and Creation; hence, no need to repent. I ask the following of Christians who hold such views: Was anything related to the birdemic and its peck campaign even remotely True, Beautiful, Virtuous, or Good? I realize that all of it was vehemently promoted as such, even by most church authorities and leaders, but was it so? The prerequisite for repentance is the acknowledgment of sin. Without the acknowledgment of sin, there can be no repentance – only regret -- maybe. Although I sympathize with all the regret pecked Christians are feeling at the moment, I sincerely believe such regret to be insufficient, primarily because it works against the acknowledgment of sin and the very real need for repentance. I say this not as some holier-than-thou authority on sin and repentance whose thoughts and actions are sinless and pure, but as a fellow sinner who understands that the problem for Christians is not sinning, so much as the refusal to repent. The spiritual disconnect between birdemic/peck sin and the refusal to repent is too massive to ignore, refute, or dismiss. Christians who continue to ignore, refute, or dismiss the need for such repentance are inevitably on the wrong side and will remain there until the need for repentance is acknowledged. Note added: This will likely be my last post on the birdemic/peck and repentance. Christians who still don't get it are intentionally refusing to "get it", and there's not much that can be done about that. Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.
The quote above is one of Stephen Vizinczey’s most memorable quips, and it rings more true today than it did decades ago. Vizinczey’s observation directly challenges the progressive sacred cow trumpeting education as the miracle solution for all idiocy, particularly for behavior lacking good sense or judgment. The insight requires no explanation or elaboration; its truth is on display everywhere. Positively fortified stupidity via education is the engine of the world’s modus operandi. With that in mind, it is worth noting that Vizinczey was an even-tempered atheist. Thus, his perspective on stupidity and education is limited because it fails to consider the spiritual. He confines stupidity to the material realm, within which learning can offer no cure. A rather bleak prognosis, to say the least. Stupidity takes on a different quality once the primacy of the spiritual is acknowledged. On the one hand, all sin is stupidity. On the other hand, not all stupidity is sin. The Christian perspective includes possibilities and opportunities for spiritual learning and offers a cure for the stupidity that is sin. Christ redeems sinners and forgives virtually every single stupid thought and action that opposes God and Creation, but only if sin -- the reality of that particular and curable form of stupidity -- is acknowledged and repented as sin and not merely as sinless stupidity.  This is the final installment of Vendel Endrédy's Prison Memoirs, continuing from yesterdays's post (bold added):
I am not yet able to make a closure and move on. My thoughts repeatedly return to the prison; I relive each of its scenes time and again. I cannot help it. Prison transforms a human being in some fundamental way. The first thing I tell myself in retrospect is that for no earthly treasure would I give away the sufferings of these six years. I was given an immense amount of gifts. I finished an education, graduated and now I hold a diploma on which it stands written: an improved human being. I would have been a bad student of physics if I had not seen in my prison-life a basic law of modern atomic physics proven: “All matter is ultimately light.” Today even voice can be pictured. Even that is light. We pick up a few grams of dust from the ground, we may precisely measure and calculate the energy its atomic particles could release. It has been proven that a city like Budapest with more than a million inhabitants could be provided with light and heating from the energy contained in a small amount of matter. Thus, the second conclusion I come to is this: every piece of trash, no matter how riff-raff and valueless it is, can become light, eternal light, if God’s Sun shines on it and releases it from the burden of the horror of evil. This is why I am unable to feel hatred toward those who have hurt me, those who tormented me. I hate none of these evil men. I like to pray for them from the bottom of my heart, asking that they may convert and become good human beings. With this I think I can come to a closure and finish all that I was able to tell about my six years spent in prison.  Endrédy in 1957 Continued from yesterday's post (bold added):
On November 1, 1956, a guard opened my cell. Three men in civilian clothes entered with the greeting that sounded like a dream: “Praised be Jesus Christ! The Most Reverend Abbot of Zirc is free!” It was about 6 PM as I exited from the Central Prison. I was the last prisoner to leave - the last one, because my name could not be found on any list of inmates. I spent a total of six years in prison as a “secret prisoner,” kept in anonymity in uninterrupted loneliness, without any work or occupation. Of these six years, eight months were spent in custody of the secret police with on-going interrogations, twice with physical torture. By these methods, they “proved” me guilty of crimes I never committed: high treason, espionage, counterrevolutionary conspiracy, possession of foreign currency. The last one of these was true. They would have pardoned my crimes if I had accepted the role of testifying as a chief witness, with a signed statement, to the immoral lives of the Hungarian bishops and religious superiors, including my own. Since I refused to accept my role as a witness in such a “satanic comedy,” they limited their “proofs” to my personal life. After the mockery of a so-called trial, played out in detail in the presence of a five-member team under the presidency of judge Olti, I was sentenced to 14 years in prison. I have never seen the text of the sentence and, in spite of my repeated requests, I have never received it. Until the trial I was kept in three locations, all three in Budapest: # 60 of Andrassy Street [today a museum called The House of Terror,], Main Street in Buda and Marko Street in Pest. My imprisonment continued in three more places: on Konti Street, Budapest, in the state Prison of Vác and in the “Gathering Prison” of Budapest. Let me make my reader feel the weight of 6 years in exact numbers: 6 years and three days are equal to: 72 months and 3 days or 315 weeks or 2195 days or 53,040 hours or 3,682,400 minutes. Each second of this time I was in an environment in which I felt overpowered in my whole being, by two rather different yet all-consuming ways: The first method was that of the secret police, which in a thoroughly diabolical way tried to destroy me physically and morally. The apparatus of the juridical organization only added to it by choreographing a “satanic comedy,” as it had been determined by their bosses in Moscow. The second method was my life in prison, where my personhood was simply abolished and I was handled as a mere physical object. An object is deaf, mute and blind. A prisoner is not supposed to see or hear or speak. The experience of prison weighed on me as if I was entombed alive. I felt almost physically that shackles kept in bondage all my physical senses. I was never allowed to be in contact with my natural family or my brothers in the Order. I received no letter or parcel for six entire years. It was three days before my liberation [by the Revolution] that I was allowed to speak to my nephew. For three years I was not allowed to go for a walk. For almost two years I lived in an unheated prison cell in which my fingers and my toes and also my left ear suffered frostbite. I encountered physical filth and dirt so incredibly bad that most human beings would not be able to imagine it. I lived in a prison cell in which, during one night, I killed hundreds of bed bugs as they invaded my body. Three times I was treated for life threatening infections of my legs and once for another skin disease, all caused by filth. My only source of consolation and strength was the Eucharistic sacrifice which I offered in a prisoner’s uniform at those times when I was allowed to do so. No bell rang; only my heart was singing about the Lord’s mysterious presence on the table of the prison cell. He became my companion—my mysterious and only cellmate—amidst the desert of my life in prison. He heard each one of my sighs and groanings, He wiped away every tear from my eyes, by which I expressed my desire for my dear Cistercian brethren and other loved ones: “Will I ever see them again? Will I ever again embrace those to whom I spiritually belong, those who are mine and whose father I am, as well as my many relatives?” Yet unexpectedly, one day the door was opened and I was able to walk again on this Hungarian soil upon which the Freedom Fighters’ blood was shed, and I was again able to go home to my monastic family, all scattered but most of them still alive! Ever since I started living with them again, the prayer we say every morning is so much more meaningful: “Make us worthy to be free…” |
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