For This Time Of Tumult

     The Feast of the Nativity is two days away. Most people “prepare” for it by shopping. We do things a little differently here at the Fortress...but then, I suppose you’d have expected that.

     Amidst the shopping frenzy of the pre-Christmas weeks, there’s the Sturm und Drang about the theft of the presidential election. Make no mistake about it, Gentle Reader: a number of earthly powers, apparently including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of these United States, conspired to ensure that Donald Trump would not get a second term in the White House. As the presidency is the most powerful post in the First World, they who have stolen it undoubtedly intend to use it to advance their interests against us the hoi polloi. However, the swag they coveted might yet be snatched from their grip, so stay tuned.

     It’s got a lot of us on edge, with good reason. Many fear a reign of terror by usurpers hostile to every American value and tradition. That they were willing to steal a national election in so bald-faced a fashion tells us how determined they were and are to have their way with us. As has already been said by others, the Founding Fathers would be shooting by now. They’d be stacking corpses like cordwood.

     Where, then, is mental comfort to be sought? Where can we find respite from our anger and our fears?

     Perhaps not in any Earthly refuge. America has always been that refuge. That our land should fall to the tyrants and exploiters was unthinkable before this. Now, with the prospect visibly upon us, leering through our gates, where are we to flee?

     Should we flee, we would be pursued, doubt it not. That’s what those who seek absolute and unlimited power do. But the point is moot, for there is nowhere to flee. All the frontiers of old have been closed. We must either submit, or stand and fight.

     In either case, we will need sustenance, especially moral and emotional sustenance. The Christmas season can provide that.

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     Permit me, please, a tangential digression.

     Among persons not charged with any offense under the penal statutes, I can think of no one I revile more than the late Saul Alinsky. However, I must concede that he had strategic and tactical insights of importance. He proffered them to those who adhered to the Marxist revolutionary philosophy he advocated, but they are of utility to us as well. One of them is of particular importance at this time:

     Power is what you have, and what the enemy thinks you have.

     Match that to another thought about the nature of power over others. Wherever, whenever, and by whomever it originated, it is a sovereign remedy to fear of what the political usurpers might have in mind: their power consists almost entirely of our willingness to concede it. Were we to stop conceding it – in other words, refuse to accept their claim to it – we could go about our proper business in something approaching tranquility.

     “The State is based on threat,” said Robert Anton Wilson. The threat, of course, is that unless we submit, our rulers will exercise coercive force to bend us. Police, guns, courts, prisons, and so forth. They work tirelessly to make us think of that threat in Tyrannosaurus Rex terms: gigantic, terrifying, and unstoppable. Yet it is not so. Compared to us, they are few and weak. Were we to deny them the power they claim merely by refusing to submit, they would be helpless.

     Think about it in numerical terms: there are approximately 6 million persons in the direct employ of the federal government. Imagine that every last one of them is armed and ready to be deployed against us. But there are approximately 100 million armed private American citizens. Moreover, those armed Americans have been alerted to the ascension of evil and are ready to act should the occasion warrant. Thanks to the protections of civil privacy that remain, the usurpers cannot know who among us might fire upon them...or when, or where. Henry Bowman had the arithmetic right.

     The usurpers cannot afford to be overbearing. A significant attempt to abridge our rights would provoke the largest and bloodiest insurrection in the history of the world. When it was over, every one of them would be dinner for crows. They can try further salami tactics, and I have no doubt that they will, but any major incursion against Americans’ rights would be the end of them. They’re evil, but they’re not so stupid that they’re unaware of the size of the deterrent they face. The demonstration planned for January 6 will remind them.

     If we remain armed and ready to act, and if we can keep the usurpers aware that we’re watching them closely, we can keep matters stable. So it’s reasonable to be confident that a major stroke against our rights won’t be coming. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

     Here endeth the digression.

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     Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.
     Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the LORD'S hand double for all her sins.
     The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

     [Isaiah, 40:1-3]

     Georg Friedrich Handel chose those verses from the Book of Isaiah to open his famous oratorio The Messiah for a reason. They are the clearest and strongest of all the Old Testament prophecies of the coming of the Savior. Moreover, they say, quite plainly, that He who is coming will be God. Not a temporal ruler, a commander of armies or a giver of laws, but the Ruler of All Things. The classical Hebrews who dismissed the Redeemer because He was no temporal king, not a warlord come to free Judea from Roman rule, missed Isaiah’s most important point.

     And surely Jesus of Nazareth could not have been a temporal king:

     [W]hen God came to earth there was no room in the inn, but there was room in a stable. What lesson is hidden behind the inn and the stable? What is an inn, but the gathering place of public opinion, the focal point of the world’s moods, the residence of the worldly, the rallying place of the fashionable, and those who count in the management of the world’s affairs? What is a stable, but the place of outcasts, the refuge of beasts, and the shelter of the valueless, and therefore the symbol of those who in the eyes of public opinion do not count, and hence may be ignored as of no great value or moment? Anyone in the world would have expected to have found Divinity in an inn, but no one would have expected to have found It in a stable. Divinity, therefore, is always where you least expect to find it.

     If in those days the stars of the heavens by some magic touch had folded themselves together as silver words, and announced the birth of the Expected of the Nations, where would the world have gone in search of Him? The world would have searched for the Babe in some palace by the Tiber, or in some gilded house of Athens, or in some inn of a great city where gathered the rich, mighty and powerful ones of earth. They would not have been the least surprised to have found the new born King of Kings stretched out in a cradle of gold and surrounded by kings and philosophers paying to Him their tribute and obeisance. But they would have been surprised to have discovered Him in a manger laid on coarse straw and warmed by the breath of oxen, as if in atonement for the coldness of the hearts of men. No one would have expected that the One Whose fingers could stop the turning of Arcturus would be smaller than the head of an ox; that He Who could hurl the ball of fire into the heavens would one day be warmed by the breath of beasts; or that He Who could make a canopy of stars would be shielded from a stormy sky by the roof of a stable; or that He Who made the earth as His future home would be homeless at home. No one, I say, would have expected to find Divinity in such a condition; but that is because Divinity is always where you least expect to find it.

     Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the greatest of American Catholic preachers, never delivered a more telling stroke than in those few words. When we seek power, whether for ourselves or to act for us, we look to palaces. We look to the high and puissant of this world, those who wield weapons capable of destroying an enemy or bending him to their will. We never think to look in stables.

     But there is no enduring power in palaces, nor in the men who inhabit them for a little while. Their time is brief. They fall and are forgotten like Ozymandias’s statue. All that truly endures is God Himself: He whose mortal form was born in a stable, whose first resting place was a manger.

     On Friday we shall celebrate once again the Feast of His Coming in the flesh. Take heart, for He is with us always, just as He said to His Apostles.

     Even unto the end of the world.