Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Expected of the nations and their Saviour. Come and save us, O Lord our God.
Year: 2022
On the Beach, With Benedict and Hope
Pope Benedict XVI, in his second encyclical, the 2008 Spe Salvi (Salvific Hope) offers a distinction from the Letter to the Hebrews: We as Christians do not place not our hope on the hyparchonton – all the goods and securities of this life, the bigger barns filled with food – but the hyparxin– the true[…]
King of the Gentiles and the Desired of all, you are the cornerstone that binds two into one. Come, and save man whom you fashioned out of clay.
A Mostly Un-masked Messiah
Jordan Peterson recently lamented that at his church the other day, 70% of the attendees (mostly elderly) were masked, and that a ‘mask formation’ psychosis has set in, a perpetual fear of germs floating in the air. One even sees drivers, alone in their vehicles, masked, their eyes fixed ahead, as though looking for clearer[…]
Rising Dawn, Radiance of the Light eternal and Sun of Justice: come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.
Better that only a few Catholics should be left, staunch and sincere in their religion, than that they should, remaining many, desire as it were, to be in collusion with the Church’s enemies and in conformity with the open foes of our faith. (Saint Peter Canisius, +1597)
Key of David and Sceptre of the House of Israel; you open and no man closes; you close and no man opens. Come, and deliver from the chains of prison those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.
Root of Jesse, you stand as a sign for the peoples; before you kings shall keep silence and to you all nations shall have recourse. Come, save us, and do not delay.
O, Adonai and Ruler of the House of Israel, you appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush and on Mount Sinai gave him your law. Come, and with and outstretched arm redeem us.
Obsessed with Death
In his 1987 novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, physician-turned-author Walker Percy imagines a town whose inhabitants are reverting to simianism, that is, becoming more ape-like, a reverse evolution, or devolution, if you will. Their speech diminishes into monosyllabic grunts, they display brutish hypersexuality, not excluding paedophilia. They also begin to euthanize the old and sick. Hence,[…]