I have seen several pieces recently about why men in particular stopped going to Mass since the late 1960s.

Everyone dances around the answer, which is extremely simple:

Western men stopped going to Mass because heterosexual men naturally and rightly find faggotry to be utterly repulsive and repellant, and want nothing to do with it, and the priesthood was consciously infiltrated and populated with sodomite men and men who were conditioned to act like sodomites, after WWII.

Forty-nine words.

Questions?

Feel free to quote me.

 

 

 

1.  While it is certainly true that we are an Easter People, yes, it is possible to over-engorge on Russell Stover’s coconut cream-filled eggs.  Not that I would have any direct, personal experience of anything like that.  It was just a random example I came up with.

2.  Rant + Tangent = Rangent

When true Christian faith in a culture is weak-to-absent, superstition fills in that vacuum.  One of the main vectors of superstition in the post-modern, post-Christian west is this business of obsessing about food.  Since people no longer worship God or believe in the concept of sin or penance, they instead embrace superstitious faux-penances to feel like they are engaging in something “religious” and “penitential”, and make sure that EVERYONE SEES THEM PUT ON THEIR LITTLE DIETARY SHOW, like the Pharisees praying on the street corners for show in Matthew 6.  I’m sorry, but I’ve had just about enough of that crap.  And have you ever noticed that the people who are constantly refusing to eat perfectly good food for these complete bee-ess reasons are the same people who are always “sick”?  Uh huh.  Dat ain’t no koinkydink, Homeslice.

And what it also does is trivialize the conditions who have actual, legitimate allergies or G.I. conditions.  A good pal from back in the cattle business days suffered from horrible irritable bowel syndrome.  It was crippling, and it was real.  A River Dweller here in Riverville had his stomach lining burned off as a kid from constantly being given aspirin back in the ’70s.  As a result, he has to be very, very careful, especially with acidic foods.  There are people with incredibly dangerous celiac allergies that could kill them, and they have to carry around Epipens just in case they inadvertently ingest wheat.  That’s real.

I have heard two people within the past few years declare that they had “decided” to no longer have celiac/gluten allergy.  On behalf of all of the people who genuinely suffer from this condition, I just wanted to smack the both of them.  You DECIDED to no longer have a GENETIC AUTOIMMUNE DISORDER?  Oh rilly?  You know what I think?  I think you decided that eatin’ that sammich was more satisfying to you than putting on your little attention-getting display of post-Christian superstitious nonsense.

Now let’s talk about one of the biggest, most successful and STUPIDEST cons out there today.  ORGANIC FOOD.  Guys, it is a complete racket.  It is a way to get gullible, post-Christian superstitious people to pay anywhere from double to quintuple for foods that are NO DIFFERENT than the other foods, because there is a massive drive within the faithless heart to feel above, segregated and superior to the unwashed masses.  “We simply cannot be expected to eat the same food as the plebs….”  In other words, to feel like an oligarch.  The only thing you can say is that the stuff marketed as “organic” tends to be the “prettier” produce.  The big, fat, nicely-shaped tomatoes go to the “organic” bins, and the average stuff goes to the regular bins.  And you pay three times the price.  But if you think for a second that THAT MUCH FOOD is being produced with zero fertilizers and zero pesticides, and it looks THAT GOOD, then I have a beach house in North Dakota you might be interested in, too.   I remember when Wal-Mart entered the “organic” game years ago and talking to the meat packers and the big supermarket meat buyers, and everyone said the same thing: The day Wal-Mart entered the “organic” market is the day the word “organic” lost what little meaning it may have had before that.  Yup. My response for years to anyone who asked me if some foodstuff was”organic” has been, “Yes, I’m quite certain that that broccoli contains carbon.”

Finally on this rangent, revisiting a topic near and dear to my heart:  HALAL MEAT.  Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever buy ANYTHING that says “halal”.  First, your money may very well be going to support the Caliphate.  Would you have bought “certified Nazi schnitzel” back in ’44?  Nope.  Second, musloids are taught by their psychopathic political system to be liars and cheats AS POLICY, and that the goal of all business is to screw over your neighbor as hard as possible.  So, how this manifests is by halal kill plants being FILTHY DIRTY (cleanliness costs money) AND by halal killers putting “deads” in the human consumption chain.  What is a “dead”?  It is a beast that died of itself before being slaughtered.  Some kill plants offer the service of hauling away and “tanking” deads (boiling the carcass down to goo suitable for dog food or fish food or some such), and thus yielding at least some revenue, because the resulting “tankage” does have a value, albeit far, far less than meat for human consumption, obviously.  Many halal plants will haul a dead carcass off a place that may have been dead for days, and then just slip it in the human consumption line.  So the rancher PAYS THEM to haul it off, and they pocket full wholesale price for the carrion which people then eat – oftentimes their own neighbors and community.  Because, please remember, the primary victims of the islamic political system are the PEOPLE INSIDE OF IT.

Let’s visit the way-way back for the very first piece of mine that ever went viral:

NEVER buy meat that is marked as “Halal”.

I am in the cattle business, and believe me when I tell you that Halal kill plants are CONSTANTLY being cited and shut down by the USDA for horrific infractions. Most of these plants are in Michigan and upstate New York.

One of the things that halal kill plants are notorious for is putting already-dead animals in the human consumption line. They will go pick up a dead cow off of a farm or ranch and instead of putting it in their rendering tank where the resulting “tankage” is worth pennies on the dollar as pet food or industrial products, they will shackle the dead animal on the normal kill line and process it as human food which is the highest-dollar product.

Since Islam teaches dishonesty (taqiyyah) and no regard for one’s neighbor, this kind of sickening behavior is standard.  Halal plants are also notorious for general citations for filth and uncleanliness. I have toured normal cattle slaughter plants, and guys, you could eat off of the floor. Everything is white and men walk around with water hoses and steam guns constantly keeping everything in a state of spotlessness.

Halal plants are filthy. A lot of Halal meat is also labeled as “organic”.

Again, don’t be fooled into thinking that “halal” means “better”.  It isn’t. I would never, ever knowingly eat halal meat purely from a food safety perspective.

This was a follow-up post to the one above.

Here is an email sent to me second-hand by a reliable source. I will not reveal who the author is, because he did not send this to me directly – this is admittedly second-hand. But he is a meat inspector from back east who is retired from the United States military. Here are his words, with my redactions:

Mr. X,
I recall you talking about inspecting muslim butcher shops in {Location redacted – eastern U.S.} What are your comments on the below?? {Referring to Ann’s blurb on halal kill plant filthiness from August 17th post}

Mr. X’s response:

Most are filthy, their process is a damn joke. It is all about money, they do nothing different except they are filthy with their work in slaughter and processing. I’d never eat the shit, but again the USDA is reluctant to enforce the Laws to regulate them like they do with other operation of likeness. I have shut down operations for hours and days to try and get them into compliance, I gave “HELL” when they tried to pull some shit on me through their Political connections. Have had Senators and Congressmen to call me in the past. I always told them, change the Law if you want exceptions to the Law, but do it for everyone, Thank You. Needless to say they stopped calling me. There are some places in this Country where they have large groups of Muslims that the Regulations are not enforced very well. HALAL slaughter was a topic at almost every meeting that I attended, but no one wanted to piss them off. (Except me.) All of them in {location redacted} knew me, an Official for the City of {city name redacted} called once to thank me for cleaning up several HALAL operations in their area, wanted to know how I did it. Very simple I told them, Tell them what you expect and don’t issues Permits for exemption.

Not only does this kill plant inspector confirm that halal kill plants are chronically filthy, and that halal slaughter and processing is nothing but a money-making racket, but he also states that high-level politicians including congressmen and senators, cowed by the musloid thug political groups, attempt to intimidate and coerce food safety inspectors to overlook egregious food safety violations in muslim kill plants.

Hello? Journalists? Is this not a dream story? Breitbart? Beck? Someone? Hellooooooo . . . ?

Oh, and since you are going to ask, here’s my take on kosher killed meat. I don’t buy kosher meat as policy because the slaughter method is unnecessarily stressful to the animal given today’s technology. Kosher kill demands that the animal be 100% conscious at slaughter. Cattle are walked into a chute with a brace that pushes their chin all the way up, exposing their necks and immobilizing their head. Then a very long, very sharp blade is inserted in the side of the neck and passed all the way through the neck and out the other side. In one swift movement, the blade is then pulled through the neck, severing the blood vessels and slicing through the windpipe. The animal then bleeds out and loses consciousness in a matter of seconds.

In conventional modern kill, cattle are rendered totally brain dead with the use of a captive bolt air gun. The cattle are walked onto a moving support that comes up under their bellies and chests. You would swear that the cattle actually LIKE this sensation of being supported from below as you watch it because they are totally calm and just ride along like they are on a fun cattle ride. The track of this “ride” turns a corner where a man on a catwalk above and behind gently reaches down with a captive bolt gun and “knocks” the animal directly on the top of the skull. The animals never see the man, anything coming at them, or anything in front of them. It is just lights out. They die pretty-much ideal deaths. And yes, it is true that some kill plants play soothing classical music on the kill line. Not all, but yes, some do. Within seconds, the animal, which is now 100% brain dead, although the heart is still beating, is shackled and hoisted onto the moving “chain”. With the brain-dead animal now hanging upside down, a highly-skilled man cuts open the neck vertically, reaches in and severs the jugular and carotid. Since the heart is still beating, the animal’s body helps gravity to quickly pump the blood cleanly out of the body. It is a very efficient, very CLEAN, and extremely humane slaughter.

The kosher argument is certainly nuanced, and I don’t think for a second that kosher kill should be prohibited, but I do think it is unnecessary. The Levitical slaughter rules in the Old Testament, namely the requirement that the animal be 100% conscious, were handed down by Our Lord to Moses to keep people from eating ALREADY DEAD animals, and to keep people from eating horribly ill animals that couldn’t stand on their own, which presented a food safety hazard to humans. It is all very common sense.

And, the kosher slaughter method that I just described is actually AS HUMANE AS COULD HAVE BEEN EXPECTED up until not very long ago. But today we have great technologies that allow for animals to be rendered brain dead with zero pain or perception of the blow. The time between brain death and actual slaughter is mere seconds. Rational thought tells me that this is clearly NOT a violation of the spirit of the Levitical protocols.

Further, as Christians, we have Jesus’ words in Mark 7 in which He makes all foods ritually clean by pointing out (in wonderful physiological detail) that everything a man eats comes out the other end as crap (I’m paraphrasing) and so therefore we need to worry about what comes out of our HEARTS, because THAT is what can REALLY defile a man.

And He saith to them: So are you also without knowledge? understand you not that every thing from without, entering into a man cannot defile him: Because it entereth not into his heart, but goeth into the belly, and goeth out into the privy, purging all meats? But He said that the things which come out from a man, they defile a man.

For from within out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and defile a man.
-Mark 7: 18-23

That’s Our Lord. Bringing the common sense. Don’t you just love Him? Pass that good, Christian bacon.  And the maple syrup, if you have some….

Not to sound like a broken record (or skipping CD for you younglings), but I think one of the reasons I am struggling to summon the drive to comment on current events is the fact that nearly everything I read is built upon a false premise.  And when you have to not just rebut conclusions, but the very premises those conclusions are built upon; when every single conversation, argument or exchange requires total remediation of the base premise, and no matter how many times you do this, no progress ever seems to be made… it gets tiring.

So with regards to Iran, the question is why is the Obama regime giving them nukes, actually advocating FOR the Ayatollahs?  No one can make any sense out of these events, when the answer is obvious, and has been obvious all along for that tiny group of us who have manfully engaged the historical dataset and dealt with it like adults.

Barack Obama and his handlers are not loyal Americans.

They are non-state, non-uniformed enemy belligerents.  

They are conscious enemies of the Constitutional Republic of the United States who infiltrated and overthrew the Constitutional Republic in a cold coup, and are now willfully destroying any remaining structures or paradigms that could support an internal counter-revolution, while building up and supporting previously extant alliances with other enemies of the former United States, most notably with their rapidly coalescing islamic mercenary army, as well as any and all Marxist kleptocracies.

So long as the delusion persists that “we all want what’s best for America, we just disagree about how to go about it…”, there is no hope.  The base premise MUST be true in order for any logical corollaries to be valid.

Barack Obama and all of the brains and actual executors of policy in the Obama regime are NON-STATE, NON-UNIFORMED ENEMY BELLIGERENTS.

Once you acknowledge this simple, obvious-since-the-very-beginning truth, EVERYTHING, and I mean absolutely EVERYTHING that has happened and continues to happen, not only makes perfect sense, but is fairly easily anticipated.

I haven’t been accurate over these past years because I’m magic.  I have been as accurate and prescient as I have been because I have been working from TRUE PREMISES, which were and are simply established by manfully engaging the objective dataset of reality.

Here is a rant excerpt from three years ago.  And I had been beating this drum since the usurpation in ARSH 2008.

Writing about current events has become almost impossible. I sit down at my computer, and nothing happens.  Oh, I have plenty to say, but you can only say stuff so many times over and over before you just start to feel like a hack, luxuriating in the act of screaming.  And that’s no good.

I’m doing the Andrea Shea King show on Friday morning and have specifically asked Andrea to focus the show on secular current events, just to force me to engage.

In the mean time, here is my video series from July of ARSH 2012 on the French Revolution and its parallels to the situation in the overthrown U.S.  Given the recent escalation in forcing acceptance, ratification and PARTICIPATION in the sodomite agenda, this presentation is, every day, even MORE relevant and more prescient and more terrifying than it was three years ago.  No one believed that the sodomites posed any threat.  No one believed that sexual perversion would be a catalyst of tyranny, genocide and war.  It was just a sideshow.  It was just a curiosity to be pitied, and nothing more.  It was JUST SEX, after all.  And as we learned from the Clinton years, SEX DOESN’T MATTER.  Riiiiiight.  And John the Baptist was a creepy loon obsessed with Herodias’ and Herod’s sex life because that’s what happens to people who don’t get laid. They get all judgmental and bitter.  Do I have that about right?  Mmmmmmmm?

From Part 2:

“It was a mistake, a deliberate and not accidental mistake, which was to oblige the clergy in order to remain faithful to the Church and to its priestly vows, to refuse to obey the State.” –Fernand Mourret

“Jesus Christ gave the most explicit commandment to render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s and Himself gave the example in loyally following the precept, by performing a miracle to pay the tribute… However, that authority has limits beyond which it cannot go; there are sacred objects over which it may not hold power; and all the measures it would undertake to the prejudice of the spiritual authority should be regarded only as errors into which it has fallen, and not as laws that it could have prescribed.”

Those of us who have been calling out this massive threat, both in the secular world and in the Church, have been accused of being “obsessed” and even latent or “down-low” sodomites ourselves, engaging in “compensation” and “projection”.  Well, this lady didst protest not nearly enough, as it turned out.  I hope you all wake up before YOUR livelihoods are destroyed, YOUR children are recruited into sodomy, and the bullet enters YOUR head.

 

 

If you want to see where this is all going, how bad it is going to get, and what is going to have to happen before it ends, we already know, and this is it.  In fact, this will seem mild and civilized compared to what is coming for us.

Veni, creator Spiritus
mentes tuorum visita,
imple superna gratia,
quae tu creasti pectora.

Come, creator Spirit,
visit the hearts of Your people.
Fill with supernal grace
the hearts You have made.

Qui diceris Paraclitus,
altissimi donum Dei,
fons vivus, ignis, caritas
et spiritalis unctio.

You who are the Comforter,
gift of the highest God,
living fount, fire, love,
and balm for the spirit:

Tu septiformis munere,
digitus paternae dexterae
tu rite promissum Patris
sermone ditans guttura.

bestow the sevenfold gifts,
You finger of the hand of God [Father]
fulfill the Father’s promise,
enriching us with holy speech

Accende lumen sensibus,
infunde amorem cordibus,
infirma nostri corporis,
virtute firmans perpeti.

Kindle light in our senses,
pour love into our hearts,
strengthen our weak bodies
with abiding courage.

Hostem repellas longius
pacemque dones protinus;
ductore sic te praevio
vitemus omne noxium.

You drive the foe far off,
and grant lasting peace;
thus with You leading us,
may we avoid all harm.

Per te sciamus da Patrem
noscamus atque Filium,
te utriusque Spiritum
credamus omni tempore.

Through You may we know
the Father and the Son as well,
and in You, the Spirit, with Them both,
may we have faith forever.

Deo Patri sit gloria,
et Filio qui a mortuis
Surrexit, ac Paraclito,
in saeculorum saecula.
Amen.

Warmest greetings to one and all.  Happy Easter.  Christ is Risen!

One of my very favorite pieces of music in the whole universe:

 

All we that in mystery
Holy Cherubim portray
As the life-creating Trinity
With thrice-holy hymn we adore and praise
Come, let us cast off all earthly care
And forget every vain employ

For the King of All comes in triumph
By unseen hosts of angels
Brought to us that bid Him welcome.

Alleluia!  Alleluia! Alleluia!

Several emails have come in asking advice on cultivating an authentic, genuine “personal relationship” with Christ.  The answer is simple, and it comes from Our Lord Himself who has told many mystic saints and doctors of the Church the same thing: THINK AND PRAY ABOUT MY PASSION AND DEATH.  Why?  Because thinking about Our Lord’s torture, agony and excruciating death forces us to confront Him as a Person, True God AND True Man.  Legal systems don’t sob until their capillaries burst.  Philosophies don’t suffer the agony of unrequited love.  Imaginary friends don’t lay down their lives.  Bureaucracies don’t fight asphyxiation by pushing themselves up on their impaled feet.

Only a PERSON can do these things.  Only a DIVINE PERSON did.  And remember, He would go through His ENTIRE PASSION just for you alone, and He would go through it REPEATEDLY for you alone, in fact as many times as you assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and even more.  That is how much He PERSONALLY loves you, PERSONALLY.

Think about that early and often, and I promise that you will develop a PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP with Him.

———————————————-

The key to beginning to understand the Incarnation, God becoming Man, is Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. If you recall, after the Last Supper in the Upper Room, Jesus and the apostles, except for Judas who was on his errand of betrayal already, went to the Garden of Gethsemane. John tells us that Jesus went there with the apostles frequently to pray, and thus it would be one of the first places Judas would have known to look for Him. The wheels of the Passion are in motion. Jesus knows exactly what is coming, and that it is coming within a matter of hours. He withdraws a short distance from the apostles to pray, but close enough that they can still see Him. He asks the apostles to simply stay awake (because it is now the middle of the night) and to watch and pray. Jesus withdraws and begins to pray. But what the apostles see is horrifying. Jesus isn’t calmly and serenely kneeling in prayer. Jesus is literally laying on the ground, curled up in a ball, writhing in agony. Our Lord is a quivering, trembling, sobbing mess. Jesus is in such stress and agony that the capillaries in the sweat glands in His scalp and forehead are bursting, and there is blood in the sweat that is running down His face, mingling with His tears, and dropping on the ground. This is the first bloodshed of His Sorrowful Passion. Sobbing and shaking, Jesus BEGS the Father to let the events of the next twelve hours pass from Him if at all possible, but resigns Himself to the will of the Father. Reading this, some may be unimpressed with Jesus. Afterall, many, many men and women have gone to their torture and execution fully aware of what was coming, while managing to maintain their composure. Some men, especially, might be tempted to view Jesus and being somewhat cowardly in the face of His Passion, and thus be a bit turned-off by the whole scene.

Yes, Jesus is terrified. He is more terrified in this moment than all of the terror felt by mankind in all of history combined, rasied to the power of infinity. His terror is literally testing the limits of the human body. If any of us felt anything even close to the sort of fear that Jesus felt, we would drop dead. People can and have died purely of fright and/or intense psychological stress, usually by means of a heart attack precipitated by massive adrenaline production.

But the real question is, “What is He afraid of?” His terror and agony are NOT purely centered around the physical means of His death. He is not trembling and sobbing because he is thinking solely of the pain of being scourged, or the pain of being crucified. He is curled up in a ball crying so hard that He is sweating blood because He is thinking about WHO is going to torture and kill Him.

When God took on human flesh, He took on EVERY ASPECT of our existence. He experiences things the same way that we do – except with complete purity and at an infinitely amplified level. And that includes love. And being that He is also completely God, He is in Himself infinite knowledge and infinite love. In a nutshell, this means that Jesus went through His entire life on earth completely in love with every single person. Every person He saw or passed on the street He had known from all eternity; He had created that person atom-by- atom accordingly in the fullness of time; He had intimate knowledge of that person’s every thought, desire and deed; He was infinitely in love with that person.

Can you imagine what simply going into town and walking through the market must have been like? Every face He passed was His beloved. Every person who brushed by Him was a souce of simultaneous joy and the pain of unrequited love. Every laugh He heard was a laugh He wanted to share, and every whimper of sadness was sadness He wanted to share, every struggle was a struggle He wanted to help, and every bit of pain was pain He wanted to soothe. And not in an abstract, altruistic way. He wanted to engage these things personally, as we would with our intimate beloved. But He couldn’t. Can you imagine having all of that love pent up inside of you, with your beloved so near, and have to hold it all inside? Are we starting to get an idea of how terrible and wonderful the Incarnation is?

Now consider that His love for mankind was not limited by time.  He feels that level of love for every human being that has ever existed and will ever exist.  You were present in His mind 1982 years ago just as much as the Apostles, and you have been present in His mind since before the beginning of the universe itself, as are all of the people who have yet to be conceived in this world.

Let’s go back to the Garden. Jesus takes a couple of breaks from His prayer to go back and talk to the Apostles, who are His best friends. Yes, He loves everybody, but the Apostles are different. They know, to a small extent, who He is. They have spent many days and evenings together working, playing, eating and just talking. Jesus has told them who He is, and He has told them in no uncertain terms that He loves them. And they have assured Him that they love Him too. Their relationship is not one-sided. Jesus – God Incarnate – has gotten to experience reciprocal human friendship and love with these men, infinitely lopsided though it may have been.

Jesus has just spent a considerable amount of time in agony a stone’s throw away from His beloved friends, and when He comes back to them, He finds them all asleep. He is dying. (My soul is sorrowful even unto death.) He asked them, His beloved best friends, to simply stay with Him, watch, and pray. And they couldn’t even stay awake. And this happened twice. Heart. Ache. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Now here comes Judas. As with every other person, Jesus is loves Judas infinitely. Judas is the person Jesus loves most in the world (and that goes for every person because Jesus is God and thus has infinite capacity.) And Judas has sold Him out. It is one thing to be betrayed by an enemy. It is quite another to be sold for 30 pieces of silver (which assuming one ounce pieces would equate to just under $1000 today) by the person you love most in the world. And just to make it as terrible as possible, Judas has told the guards that the man he kisses, the man to whom he gives the gesture of FRIENDSHIP and LOVE, is Jesus. And so when Judas kisses Him and Jesus says to Judas, “You betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” there is agony there that can not be described. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

The guards. Every single one of them is the subject of Jesus’ infinite love. And they despise Him. Jesus could have stopped it all at any time, not by some act of miraculous violence, but by asking the commanding guard if he remembered that certain tree he used to climb as a child, or that certain toy. He could have frozen them in their tracks by simply reminding them of their own experiences and feelings – which He had already shared with them because He had been with them the whole time. But He didn’t, because He couldn’t. If He didn’t let them kill him, there would be no hope of ever being with them in heaven. Agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Now before the High Priest Caiaphas. Same thing. Except Caiaphas, and the rest of the Sanhedrin, have been as their entire vocation and purpose in life, praying for the coming of the Messiah. They have been praying to Jesus (unwittingly) for Jesus (unwittingly). And Jesus has heard their prayers, and the prayers of all of the priests for generations past, and is finally, finally now standing in front of them. And remember, He loves them each personally. They look Him up and down and utterly reject Him. “No, no. You’re all wrong. You’re not what we want. We want a big macho-man king to vanquish the Romans and sit on the throne and then make us all rich by association. LOOK AT YOU. YOU’RE ALL WRONG. WE DON’T WANT YOU. Go to hell and good riddance.” Agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Pilate. Selfish indifference. “Look man, I neither know nor care who you are or who you say you are, and frankly, I think you’re just another loon. I have a lot on my mind and I simply can’t deal with crap like this.” Agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

The Roman scourgers. Jesus was whipped and flagellated until most of His skin was gone by men whom He loved infinitely and intimately. Can you imagine how He felt as he walked to the pillar, turned and saw the faces of his scourgers, and seeing the face of every human being looking back at Him? Can you imagine being slowly and brutally whipped to the brink of death by the person you love most in the world? Say your spouse or best friend? It would be one thing to be whipped by a total stranger. But to be tortured by the person you love most in the world? Unfathomable agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

The crowds. Everywhere there were crowds of people looking on – the scourging, the trial, the streets he walked while carrying His Cross to Calvary. Every single face was intimately loved. And every single face, excepting Mary, John, Mary Magdalene and a few other women, were either viciously hostile or completely indifferent. I wonder which was worse? The reason I ask is because the opposite of love is NOT hate, as most would assume. The opposite of love is indifference. There is no greater blow that can be made to a human soul than indifference. How many people saw Jesus that day – locked eyes with Him – and honestly didn’t give a rat’s @$$ either way. “Live. Die. Whatever. Just don’t bother me. You’re messing up my plans. YOU’RE MAKING MY LIFE HARD. Now I’m going to have to go completely out of my way to get around You and this damndable mess You’re making.” This may have been the worst agony. This is the reality of the Incarnation.

Almost everyone treats Jesus with indifference to one degree or another. We are all inflicting that agony on Him. How, you ask? By sinning. We know that our sins hurt Him infinitely, but we commit them anyway. Few people sin because they actively HATE Jesus and want to hurt Him. A few do, but not too many relative to the broad population. No, most people are just indifferent. There He is at the pillar, and our sin is the next lash. And we do it anyway. CRACK! Because we’re indifferent. And again, and again.

“Live. Die. Whatever. Just don’t bother me. You’re messing up my plans. YOU’RE MAKING MY LIFE HARD. Now I’m going to have to go completely out of my way to get around You and this damndable mess You’re making.”

“But I love you. This is all for you.”

“That’s your choice, and your problem, Buddy.”

Agony beyond words. This is the Reality of the Incarnation.

That is why Jesus was sobbing in agony in the Garden. He didn’t fear the physical pain. He feared being utterly, completely and totally rejected to the point of toture, execution and the indifferent witnessing of this by the person He loved most in the world, which is YOU. And ME.

He feared not being tortured and killed, but being tortured and killed by the person He loved most in the world. And despite this, He still chose to go through with it all. He went all the way to the end, just so there would be a CHANCE that one day we might knock on HIS door and say, “I love You, too. Have mercy on me, a sinner.”

In Thy sight are all they that afflict Me; My heart hath expected reproach and misery. And I looked for one that would grieve together with Me, but there was none: and for one that would comfort Me, and I found none.
Psalm 68: 21-22
I find it stunning how many emails I receive from protestants excoriating me for mentioning Our Lord’s Passion, or for any feelings of wanting to make reparation for my sins and the sins of the world, or for wanting to comfort Our Lord in the Garden, in whatever hamfisted way possible, because “it is already done” and “nowhere in the Bible does it say anyone has to suffer for anyone else’s sins.”

I find these emails to be the saddest of all. I can understand how there can still be people emailing me asking if they should get out of their 401k or IRA. I can understand how people can walk around with zero understanding of the financial system, and even of simple arithmetic. It is terrifying, but I can understand it.

What I cannot understand is people who proudly proclaim their deep, intense “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” having absolutely no interest in or compassion for Him personally. I tell you over and over again that the Eucharist, that is the consecrated bread and wine is ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY JESUS CHRIST, and there is ZERO INTEREST. None. Zip. I tell you He is here physically and you can not only go be in His physical presence, but you can also physically take Him into your body if you enter into the Church.

Not interested.

Because, you know, when you are in a deep, intense “personal relationship” with someone, you have NO INTEREST in seeing them, being close to them, or being physically intimate with them.

And beyond that, when you are in a deep, intense “personal relationship” with someone, when they are suffering, the only thing that matters to you is whether or not you caused the suffering, and if so, are you legally dispensed from the liability.

I’m not a sodomite. Neither did I actually kill any of those babies with my own hands. It is His job to bear that guilt. He chose to go into the Garden and take it. He chose to sob until His capillaries burst. This is a purely legal question. If I didn’t do it, or if He legally contracted to suffer for my sins, then it is all on Him, and I’m certainly not going to dive back into any suffering with Him … I mean, that would be missing the point, right? I’m saved. He took it, and so, LET HIM HAVE IT.

It seems to me that the only “deep, personal relationship” in that psychopathic thought process is with one’s self.

Our Lord is a Person. A Divine Person. He is also the Person Who engineered and created the universe. Time is one of His engineered constructs. For Him, all of time is one, big NOW. Thus, everything that ever has happened or ever will happen is perpetually present and happening to Him. He is perpetually in the Manger in Bethlehem. He is perpetually in the Garden in agony. He is perpetually on the Cross. He is perpetually resurrected. He is perpetually ascended to the Father.

We meet Him upon the Cross at every Mass, in which He folds time so that we can all be physically at the foot of the Cross. Why does He do this? Because He looks for one that would grieve together with Him. He is comforted by the compassion of the very people who put Him on the Cross, and He provides this ability for temporal transcendence so that EVERYONE who loves Him can be with Him at Calvary, not just the few people who were there 1982 years ago. He does this so that Peter and the rest of the Apostles who fled could be there. He does this so that the little peasant woman in 9th century France could be with Him. He does this so that we can be with Him.

On Holy Thursday, He is especially comforted by those who truly, truly love Him, not as a piece of contract law or legalistic device, but as He is, a Person, and He affords us the chance to be with Him in the Garden; to approach Him as He lies prostrate in the dirt, sobbing, shaking, and already bleeding from the inside out, and ask to stay with Him and suffer with Him.

You do realize that is what the word “compassion” means, right? “Com” means “with”. “Passion” means “suffer”. To have compassion is to desire to “suffer with” another person.

It seems to me that if you really have a “personal relationship” with Jesus Christ, then the thought of NOT going to Him in the Garden, not just on Holy Thursday, but every single day of your life, is intolerable, regardless of who caused His agony, or whether or not it is “legally covered”. If you are indifferent to the suffering of another, please stop lying to yourself and the world by claiming that you are engaged in a “deep, personal relationship”.

“… And I looked for one that would grieve together with Me … I sought for one that would comfort Me …”