A Letter to Gavin Ashendon

 I am American, and so I say this from some ignorance of your society, but I know enough about the West and how it is now operating to suggest the following: we have to think outside the box that has been built for us through dumbed down education, media, politics, etc.. We live under the illusion in the West that we are in independent democracies that we must fix. We are not. We live in an oligarchy at best, a rabid capitalist kleptocracy at the obvious level, and a criteriocracy in reality, I believe.

One of the operations of this last type of rule is to keep groups in society at each other's throats, using fear and violence to turn races and ideological and religious values into weapons that serve to keep the populace divided and weak. This often happens through hits and senseless over-kill violence. A wide-focus example that everyone should be able to see: The genocidal government of Israel has been using this to great effect in the Middle East---until now, perhaps. The US is co-opted and politically owned by billionaire shadow powers like Zionists and technocrats (why else do you think there has been no accountability for Epstein crimes in the US? Epstein was in bed with both these groups). Beyond this, there are layers of puppets and masters rooted in long hallways of history...this is what has to be unmasked: you have to know who exactly you are fighting with. For example, the refugees and immigrants from the Middle East are, many of them, themselves victims of a program of aggression and destabilization on the part of Western nations serving the interests of Zionism---why does your government, like ours, allow massive, uncontrolled immigration? A destabilized world is a world in which you can traffic people and arms and money, a world ripe for speculation.

You have an economist, a brilliant woman, Ann Pettifor, who theorizes that our world is run by a gambling ring, an increasingly smaller group of speculators playing for high stakes with all our lives; Whitney Webb, the great American investigative journalist, has uncovered some of these layers and the move amongst some of these groups is also towards a world where there are a few who've achieved immortality as "transhumanists" and who have got rid of most of us as tech takes over the servile work needed for a "quality" life. There is also a great documentary about the City of London called "The Spider's Web"---this also shows you, from another perspective, the bigger web. I have listened to you a number of times and I respect your honesty and courage; I do think you may be too focused on the British milieu and therefore in a certain kind of bubble. The real issue, I've come to understand (especially after Covid), is—again—much, much larger, and we cannot understand what is happening in our own countries unless we first understand that "the Epstein class" and above do not work within any one culture...that has been a source of their strength; they use our patriotism against us; they control us by turning common people seeking a common good against each other.

Of course you are right about Chesterton and Belloc and distributism...this is the antidote to a criteriocracy, along with the strengthening of the Catholic Church; I can see quite clearly that the "catholic" nature of Christ's Church was also meant as a powerful force against the perennial conspiracy to take over the world (study the history of the Church's fight against Freemasonry and World Atheistic Communism). The Church Militant has seen the deeper, transnational enemy at work because She was meant to...and to provide a true unity amidst healthy cultural diversity.

In this particular case of Ms. Widdecombe, I know this can sound far-fetched...but I would just look instead more closely to the possibility of a government hit ordered by these shadow groups (even using interagency cooperation as is very possible in hits like this in America) of a vulnerable lady who stood up for morality; she sounds as though she was exactly the type of humble, straightforward, English person (Hobbit) who valued her local community and the common good, exactly the type of murder victim to engender confusion and friction between groups, in England especially to stoke the questions about Islamic/immigrant versus rooted English; a "thin" and frankly, moronic theory about a bookseller or random thief could be designed to generate exactly your sort of questions: again, they always need to turn groups against each other to maintain control through confusion and division.

It is a Satanic principle at work: "Solve et coagula." Christ's principle is "salve." How do we come together in Christian charity to fight the matrix?

A Letter to Dr. Marshall

 Dr. Marshall, 

I appreciate your apparent love of the Church and I understand your desire to remain within Her, because I too am a convert from Protestantism. Many of us converts seem to understand existentially the line between "in" and "out" because we know what it is to be "out." I came into the Church in 1997, knew Michael Davies and liked him personally, along with others in the traditionalist movement before Benedict's motu proprio. As a new Catholic, I looked through the different positions, a highlight reading Bishop de Castro Mayer's compelling story of trying to protect his flock from, as he saw it, harmful innovations. These seemed to me to be well-meaning, loving people who wanted the best for the Church. Slowly, though, I realized—partly because I was a convert—that the SSPX was a line too far...for me, that line was approval by the ordinary. Before the motu proprio, this seemed quite clear to me. After the lifting of excommunication for SSPX bishops many years after the consecrations in 1988 and the "freeing" of the Latin Mass, I watched the Church begin returning to some health and balance, with what I saw as the unhealthy self-identification of "traditionalist" and "remnant" dissipating bit by bit. The resurgence of young people in these communities I saw as a direct result of this open balance. Of course, we both know the events after Benedict abdicated, which, in my view, set off a new (but repeated, too) fire of zeal and self-defense in groups like the SSPX. 

I say all this as "ethos": I am not contemptuous of people attached to the Latin mass. I love this rite, along with the Novus Ordo as promulgated and even as celebrated sincerely in my local Spanish parish, along with the Chaldean rite, the Carmelite rite, the various Byzantine rites. I enjoy seeing the elements that all hold in common, as these are likely those included since the very beginning. Most of all, having been converted near-instantly by a direct experience of the Eucharist, I believe that the Lord is happy wherever there is humble and reverent love for Him as He deigns over and over to bring us, through the Sacrament, to the foot of the Cross. 

However, my long experience has taught me that to call oneself "traditionalist" does not actually make sense in light of the long history of Catholicism; and, as Josef Pieper states, words carry the weight of either truth or an attempt to control reality for others, and worse, for oneself. I, who attend my local parish and see Vatican II as legitimate development, am also "traditional," because Tradition is one of the pillars of the Church. Therefore, calling oneself "traditionalist" is opposed to what? Am I not traditional? I have finally understood it as an unhealthy, defensive categorical tool, effectively separating oneself from other Catholics, and the separation bears within it a judgement on other Catholics who "accept the changes." The irony, of course, is that those who accept a legitimate Council as legitimate are actually behaving in a traditional way, and to try and "school" the Church without a direct mandate from God is, ultimately, an early-modern Protestant action.

Therefore, in the case of the recent SSPX consecrations , I am not sure that "lack of prudence" is quite the right concept: it weakens and therefore obfuscates the reality of what has been going on for a long time, from the beginning of the fraternity. An institution carries within it the original charism, or spirit, on which it was founded. And this, to my knowledge, has never changed for this group. Founded in disobedience of legitimate authority, out of self-justified, defensive, rationalized zeal, the SSPX has never been fundamentally about prudence, in reality. They thought, as Bishop de Castro Mayer did, that what they were doing was both zealous for the glory of God and prudent for later generations, but I think they were misapprehending their authority. That which does not apprehend reality cannot be considered phronesis, that prudence which sees reality, sees the mean in virtue and ties the virtues together

Something I recently studied in the Old Testament may throw some light on this: Phineas in Numbers acts out of zeal for God, and kills a leader who has gone astray, "expressing God's jealousy"; he does not kill all the Israelites; in his zeal, he acts ultimately for mercy, as Moses does after the Golden Calf by breaking the tablets, asking God to allow him to express the jealousy of God in a human way, so that they did not have to face the infinite wrath of God. In this Moses prefigures Christ, of course. Elijah also acts with zeal for God in asking for the drought, but then God abrogates this, ending the drought, and Elijah seeks God at Sinai and is ultimately retired. God honors the spirit of Elijah, as Jesus does, but he brings Phineas peace and Moses is honored because they expressed their zeal in light also of the mercy of God, and more deeply as a human expression of God, not an attempt to replace the jealousy of God, to be God and to act as God in the situation, a role reserved expressly for God, one only Christ can actually fulfill as a human being. In other words, acting with prudence is knowing whose authority one acts within, an awareness of our own authority and the limits of it, and the heart of God which is also " the quality of mercy [that] is not strained." 

Analogously—perhaps I'm going out on a limb—I see the zeal of the SSPX as the kind which acts for God on one's own initiation and interpretation instead of expressing zeal in its appropriately human form, which again is seeing oneself in light of an authority whose law is humility, charity, mercy, and evangelization, seeking the lost even at cost to itself. What is the proper authority? It is the Church of Rome: Pope and Cardinals. Of course, what happens when that authority seems to implode? I see it, too. One's zeal should be tempered in the reality of the perennial struggle between human weakness and God's righteousness. The way through is love and humility and faith that God will work through His Church as time moves on, to humbly ask God to help us be a solution in charitable zeal. But it seems apparent that the SSPX is not fundamentally about the prudence that conjoins all the virtues, but rather more purely about self-justified zeal, the emblem of this being the self-justified "mandatum" read at the service. This has ended in schism, with thousands of innocent children whose families are attached to this group drawn further away from the Church, out into the darkness. 

All of this is of course, echoed in the Church Fathers, most particularly St. Ignatius when he says, in his letter to the Magnesians, "As therefore, the Lord did nothing without the Father, being united to Him, neither by Himself nor by his apostles, so neither do ye anything without the Episkopos or the Presbyteroi. Neither endeavour that anything seem reasonable and proper to yourselves apart . . . ." As we both know, the ultimate Episkopos is ensconced in the Church of Rome; this is a legitimate development. Therefore, what the SSPX is throwing off out of an interpretation of zeal is the authority through which God works. This is not in the realm of prudence; it is in the realm of pride.

Of course, I realize that Pope Francis has been a scandal. This has made things more difficult; it is more difficult now to be prudent for all of us, and it has been a temptation to just throw out "everything Francis" as in 1988, there was a desire to throw out "everything JPII": I do think that objectively, Francis is much, much more problematic. I do not have the answer to this, but to be part of the solution within the Church as much as I humanly can. The Cardinals and Bishops who are suffering under this time of confusion as the Church works through it, suffering within, tempering zeal in the fire of God's mercy and love, are the models we must look to. None of them are perfect. But they are in the Church, and not primarily out of prudence (perhaps a more appropriate word for you to use in your argument is "craft"), but out of the love of a parent and a shepherd seeking to steward the Lord's flock in his enclosure. 

With you in Christ, 

T. R. Kozinski

Ariel

Into my 

settled, still space you came back, like a sprite, an Ariel 

just whisked off the beach along the wild coastline of California, 

the scent of sand, seaweed, salt spilling out around you, 

all over the wooden floor under the candle, the neat carpet and cranberry couch

in my study, as I think of my adult children, now about your age. 

I receive your wild but earthy spirit, a bright, deep well, a fusion of contraries,

like a soft breeze of brown and blue, flowing current, sweet soil.

I think you are surprised to see my grey hair, the lines and fatty deposits 

around my eyes. 

Your wide, clear brown eyes 

look into my soul, searching for happiness, for peace; 

I am a puzzle to you. 

But I have drunk deep the dreams you carried like water in abalones, 

as you roamed in flip-flops and chased ideals obliquely, maybe just missing the mark

and piece by piece, building yourself 

into me.

The Brevity of Life

Like drops of water, some shining for an instant in free-fall, others swathed in grey, invisible, our lives run their course and disappear in the sea. Some fall from low-hanging clouds and their journey is brief; others fall from a great height, changing from ice to snow to water as the place of disappearing approaches. Fragile, changing, ever so brief—does this mean meaninglessness? 

This weekend, two young college students died in their car, sitting outside their dorms talking; a malfunction in the car likely producing carbon monoxide poisoning. They simply fell asleep, it seems, never to awaken again in this life. Brief droplets, ever young. It makes one think hard about the value of life and the goodness of God. How can life be so very fragile and taken so easily, so senselessly, it seems? An age-old question, but just as painful as the first death. Something in us recoils and refuses to try and square this with Providence; some ask the hard question, receive no satisfaction, and turn away bitter, the water of life turning bitter. 

I remember, too, a grainy, friend-filmed video of Carlo Acutis clapping his hands with joy and predicting his own death, another brief and shining droplet, coursing its way through this world. I visualize him, and other saints, simply stepping off the train of life; they were gone, in a sense, before they were gone: they stepped away from the focus on accomplishments and wealth and projects, progressivism, politics, except as any of these had to do with love, with the love of God. All that is inside the train, hurtling through time, is the compilation of our daily concerns, competitions, connections; if all we pay attention to or know is what is within that train, if we don't know or wish to know what is outside it, the whole world that stands still, symbolizing eternity, the Real World, two things will occur: we will make the wrong things important, and the rules of the Real will not truly inform us, meaning that morality and sacrifice are rendered meaningless; second, we will not see the train as a train, and our reality will be severely truncated, and our spirits will grow only to the edges of the brief, impermanent, small world we are aware of. But the saints are already living in that larger world, in a sense, and so when living on this earth, they saw the train that it is and all inside it as it is seen by God from Reality, as much as God would allow them. And, so, when the signal to go to that world came, they jumped from the train like an Old Western cowboy onto a horse and sped like wind into that far country to find Him. 

I also just watched A Hidden Life, about St. Franz Jãegerstätter, who refused the oath to Hitler and was guillotined for this at thirty-six years old. Many told him that his death was senseless; his widow and children were deprived of him for most of their lives. 

Life. 

It must be something beyond this, beyond this narrow train, or God does not care. It must be that this life is, just simply, brief in the light of eternity, and that we, who reach the age of reason, within it confirm or deny who we were meant to be: therefore, it is an essential, deeply important element of our existence, but yet so very brief, as brief as a race. Those little ones who do not reach the age of reason are gathered like early, pure drops of water. 

It changes everything, if one looks at life this way. 

Your every moment, charged with depth and death, a jewel because of the rarity and scarcity, yet just a fleeting shadow in comparison with Real Life, beyond tears and sorrow and separation, for those who sought God beyond the doubts and the tinges of despair we can identify with. This absolute brevity makes me less grasping and more grateful, surprisingly, which makes me think this must be true: the saints must be right, both in the intensity with which they loved those around them in every precious moment (which the film about St. Franz shows artfully and beautifully), and in the way their gaze was already turned beyond all the gathered moments of earthly life; the moments in their earthly lives gathering towards a single call, the Presence that drew them to all that truly lasts, the way St. Carlo Acutis clapped in expectation and St. Franz wrote just before he faced execution, "I am completely bound in inner union with the Lord."

Detachment also begins to make much more sense; far from being a kind of spiritual, military-aesthetic discipline for suffering without a further end, it becomes, simply, a reflection of a true desire for the greater world, for union with God and true union with those we love, to see more as God sees. Detachment becomes the most obvious choice, and suffering, inasmuch as it persuades us to look beyond ourselves, beyond the inside of the train car to look for God, can be a severe mercy, though God does not ask us to create suffering for ourselves or others, of course, but simply to see what does happen with different eyes, which only He can give us.

So much becomes unimportant, and yet some things become immeasurably important: where I live, the clothes I wear, the admiration for my accomplishments fade; the search for the face of God becomes everything. In between is the purpose He has for you that you may not understand completely in the brevity of your falling from cloud to the eternal sea of God, but because He cares for you and knows you, He will tell you about it after the veil of falling water recedes, and you rest at last on an eternal shore, real land at last. 

Grace in a Gray Sky

 

there is grace in a gray sky

drops syncopated, minor notes 

winding, tiny wind-streets for white birds

who live for water

Image courtesy of MaryLynne Wrye, still from I Fly Over, 2022, https://www.marylynnewrye.com/i-fly-over. 

The Faces of Silence

There is the Empty Silence,
when the little hands waving out the car window disappear down the road
and suddenly the home seems a loosely-knit box of nothingness,
and it must be filled by music or the washing of dishes;
when the streets are empty at three am
and there is still a long way to go;
when train times pass, the station suddenly bereft of purpose;
or the long winter months in age or illness.

 

There is the Full Silence, 

when the last note of the piano has dissipated 

on a particularly beautiful piece 

and before the applause begins;

when a crowd is waiting in solidarity 

for the screen to flicker 

and for the talking head to explain; 

or around the dying person’s bedside, 

just as the soul leaves the pupils lax. 

The Holy Spirit revolves around the Fullest Silence: 

when the Logos descends, the Silence grows heavy. 

The priest bends low over the bread and wine, 

his voice lowers into the Secrets: 

the centrifugal Spirit closes in on the altar 

becoming the naval of the universe. 

The bells ring out,

like a best man tapping his wine glass with a knife.

We can match the air of our inner self 

to all those around us and to the still, Silent Lord;

those who answer the golden call 

answer in the silence of the heart 

Dido in Hades

Dido, once me, believed 

love-vows could be witnessed by the storm:

Breaking surf, unbroken, whipping wind

raising a rain shower—

the will of the gods an encircling wave

bringing the torch that the bridegroom gave.

Aeneas, steel, countered: 

"Gods live in the mind and in the storm:

Phoibos' flame transcends the Shaker's swell,

balancing blood's fervor"—

his clear-cut piety a glass to fire,
reveal, and drown my funeral pyre.

I, shade, then existed

so the weather was nothing to me:

Waning sliver-moon, airless, dead night

cloaking a soul inured—

what harrowing God comes now, a flaming turn,

straining my flint-will twixt bend or burn?

The Light Garden

Something about being small children 

in a Himalayan light garden 

goes beyond grief. 

Flying your kite from rooftop,

you caught my heart because you were born there, 

among the barren, brown-shouldered mountains, 

a tiny baby, a star in the deep, empty sky. 

Light, falling unbroken by tree or tower, 

fell upon our necks in playful swipes,

its dance in the endless sky 

a festival in Eden 

for snow-bright archangels,

not for missionary, Western children

rearranging our Western doll houses 

on the empty plateaus below.

When we left Afghanistan, 

metal wings hesitantly lifting in the air— 

I dreamt over and over of fire, 

our cradle-loves burning 

back into dust, 

the curling, tortured remains 

of homes and Himalayas crying out:

You can never come back.

Yet, beyond all fire, 

like the still waters of Band-e Amir, 

blue light-catchers, 

you look across at me in the flames, 

the way Afghan eyes still stare 

within my burning wilderness, 

a look of ancient purity, 

sorrow mixed with mercy.