The true meaning of Easter

It crossed my mind for the first time today to look up the origin of the word "Easter", especially whether it has any relation to "east"; I was right - and this supports my developing thesis that Christianity is ultimately meant to be an East-West synthesis of balance and harmony between the two opposite directions, which in fact represent two opposite philosophical worldviews and outlooks.

The term "Easter" derives from the same root in the proto-Indo-European (i.e. Caucasian) language family that gives us "ost" in modern German and its equivalent "east" in modern English - a term that means "to shine", as in the rising sun in the east; the Anglo-Saxon goddess "Eostre" is apparently most widely believed to be the direct etymology of "Easter" into present-day English, as first used by the famous monk St. Bede in the early 8th century whilst evangelizing the Germanic barbarian conquerors of the British Isles.

(One doesn't even have to do any particular research to draw the connection between a shining goddess of the East and the Resurrection: after all, Jesus arose from the dead just before daybreak and was first seen by two women, St. Mary Magdalene and one of the "other Marys" in the Gospels; indeed there are Church Fathers who believe that in fact it was Mary, the Mother of Jesus, who was actually first to meet her risen Son even though this is - apparently deliberately - omitted from the resurrection accounts.)

So why is the reference to "east" in the language of an explicitly White European culture so crucial in our understanding of the mainstream Christian faith, given that the very holiest day of the creed is so Eurocentric, yet literally points towards Asia? Think of it this way: Christianity is essentially a Western, even European religion, yet one that orients (pun intended) its entire focus eastward - towards Jerusalem, of course, but in a more general sense towards the ancient wisdom believed to be found in the East, not the West.

And therein lies the crux of the Divine revelation embedded within all Scripture as borne out by both Tradition and actual history of Holy Mother Church: the West represents the freedom of the unearned and unmerited Mercy and Grace of God in Jesus Christ, but this liberty's ultimate expression is in the willing offering of itself as a sacrifice to the Law and Truth of God the Father as represented by the rigid patriarchy and hierarchy of the East - all, of course, in the loving unity of the Holy Spirit.

So what is Easter, then - just what makes it the holiest of holy days? It is literally the once-for-all passage from Death to Life: the bright Sun of the Son of God rising anew from the East in such a way, having lifted the veil separating Law from Grace - that is, East from West - that humanity can at last serve God unshackled by the bondage of sin, liberated by said Sun of the Son to march all the way into the glorious Western dusk by returning an oblation of thanksgiving every moment of the way back to the Easter(n) dawn.

Stunning addendum to the "1990 prophecy" describes the post-truth era

[Note: I originally wrote this blog post a year ago, March 23, 2017 - but the intervening 12 months have confirmed to me in a deeper way its fundamental truth.]

There has just emerged, on the recently passed Feast of St. Joseph (March 19), a stunning addendum to the so-called "1990 prophecy", apparently given to the same anonymous mystic and locutionist who received that revelation of a generation ago:

"A new and great evil has now come and settled and will be there for the duration. It was a choice by man, including My people, who find deception in rancor and rancor where was ordained love. Not for years will an interior light return for those whose god is gold and whose love is cold. Not since times in history deep ago have My children so been skewed in what they perceive with eyes that distort and minds that form reality in a way that has no true destiny. Flee to Saint Joseph, and the Blessed Mother of the holm oak who tells us that brightness can be found only by those who practice the diligence of prayer amid consternation. Those who framed the future in accordance with their own time tables now find disbelief in prophecies though they unfold around you." 

-From Anonymous, March 19, 2017

The accompanying note on the Spirit Daily webpage concludes with an admonition that this has been disclosed strictly "for your personal discernment." So let me take a stab at it here on this blog (I would've shared this on Facebook but judged it was too sensitive and too long to do it there anyway.)

It was a choice by man, including My people, who find deception in rancor and rancor where was ordained love.

The fundamental underlying aspect of our fake news-driven, post-truth era - the bedrock upon which the entire tangled web of confused bits of nonstop information and data is built - is a deeply corrupted interior condition of the human heart on a widespread societal level.

Because man - even Christian man - no longer truly believes that his own sin is the cause of his unhappiness, but rather the sin of others, the world at large has become a free-for-all of exchanging every manner of insults, threats, and general irreverence towards one's fellow man.

Hence, we have the interesting paradoxical phenomenon of professed believers finding enemies of their faith in every nook and cranny of an admittedly hyper-secularized world out to destroy it, yet increasingly completely blind to the evil that resides much closer to home: indeed, within their very homes. The contemporary Christian has collectively fallen into a dangerous trap: focusing so much of his spiritual attention and strength in an existential battle against external foes, he not only loses sight of the commandment to love the enemy instead of hate him, but becomes woefully unprepared for the snares that the Devil lays for him in his own family, among his own loved ones.

Statement of a Chinese-American Catholic on the Vatican's accord with China

My brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ and in His universal Church,

I address you on a matter of great importance for our present time and potentially for all eternity - and also one that is near and dear to my mind and heart as a Catholic American of Chinese ancestry. This is the matter of the reported deal between the Vatican and the communist government of the People's Republic of China concerning the appointment of bishops on the mainland.

I understand why some of you are incensed that this apparent capitulation to the most central demands of the authoritarian atheist regime in Beijing is now close to fruition, with Pope Francis himself edging close to marking his papal seal of approval on it. I realize your concern for the long-suffering underground Catholic Church in China, which has endured with great courage and perseverance over nearly seven decades of unchallenged communist rule to pass on the torch of the faith to present and future generations of Chinese Catholics.

But my Chinese ancestry and heritage and my unique background and history as an immigrant to the United States, this great bastion of individual liberty and religious freedom, where in turn I was blessed to find what I believe to be the only ultimate authentic freedom - that of willful submission to Christ Jesus via His ordained Vicar on earth -  compels me to admonish and exhort you to avoid jumping to such immediate and definitive conclusions, especially if it leads you to suspicion as to the personal spiritual and moral integrity of our Supreme Pontiff, Francis; or even if it undermines your trust in his judgment.

Remember first and foremost that you are Catholic - not merely Christian, but Catholic. Your loyalty and obedience to the Pope does not require that you agree with everything he says or does; it does not require that you have a high or even particularly positive opinion either of his moral character or of the soundness of his teaching; it certainly does not require that you keep your dissenting opinions to yourself, as if these aren't invaluable in contributing to a deeper and broader understanding of our common holy faith.

But that faith should ever challenge and remind us of the words of the Eternal Word Himself to Simon in the 16th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, by which the unshakable Petrine office was established: "Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church; and the gates of Hell will not overcome it."

These words have ever been the sanctuary of the countless holy men and women that have paved the way before our present time into the Kingdom of Light promised by Our Lord and actualized in the earthly pilgrimage by the Real Presence of His Body and Blood in the Eucharist through the most sublime intercession of Our Blessed Lady; they must likewise now be our own mighty and invincible fortress against all internal and internalized doubts we may find ourselves harboring - however uncomfortably or even unwillingly - against the hierarchy of the Vatican going up to the very Throne of Peter itself.

For Our Lord has always known that the mere specter of what the faithful themselves may perceive or fear to be self-betrayal - a self-denial of the Truth of His very Word - is a far graver menace to His flock and the untold masses of souls therein than can be all the violent powers of physical and material persecution that all the enemies of the Church over two millennia combined can ever muster. Were this not so, would He have gone to such lengths to state the superlative degree of trial by fire that His beloved Church would be expected to endure and finally prevail over - all while ever firmly planted on the Rock of Peter?

Our glorious Catholic and Apostolic Church has survived through internal schisms and heresies since its earliest days; it has prevailed over numerous and repeated instances of temporal authorities attempting to usurp its spiritual prerogatives, even if this was sometimes a long, hard attrition in which some battles appeared irretrievably lost at times; and perhaps most important of all, the Barque of Peter has even persisted and emerged stronger through the tempestuous adversity of very great - even overt - sinners occupying the helm's post and staffing its command crew.

Through none of this are we to succumb to the temptation of doubt as to where the final victory will be and to whom it will belong: it will not belong to those for whom the world seems more powerful than the Word, but to those to whom even a Church seemingly gone astray can only be cause for purer sacrifice of thanksgiving producing deeper joy; it will not be with those who curse our holy Church, but with those who bless it; it will not be borne and celebrated by those whose scandal at the denial of Jesus is so great that they resign it to being a mistake in the mysterious Providence of the Most Holy Trinity, but by those who with indomitable assurance can hope with certainty that the greater the betrayal, the greater will be the mercy of redemption that Peter himself experienced when he was finally able to accept the Lord's offer of complete forgiveness with the simple admission, "Lord, you know everything; you know I love you."

What's in the heart of the Trinity? A consuming holocaust

Today was the centennial of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, and I will take this occasion to introduce what I speculate to be perhaps one of the most sublime (if not even the most sublime) secrets of the Most Holy Trinity:

The eternal three-in-one Godhead has as its human reflection the Holy Family, and when the two are juxtaposed the result is two interlocking equilateral triangles - a top-pointing one comprised of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit joined to a bottom-pointing one comprised of the Virgin Mary, the Lord Jesus Christ, and St. Joseph - which form the Star of David; additionally, the very center of both triangles is the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is a consuming holocaust of complete and utter abandonment of the Divine Essence to Itself in the depths of the soul of the Virgin Mother of God.

Accordingly, the symbolic representation of this is the above flag of the State of Israel with the addition of a Nazi swastika at the center of the Star of David; the top and bottom blue stripes represent the waters above and the waters below - i.e. the waters of the heavens and the waters of earth as initially mentioned in the Book of Genesis - and this is itself a reflection of the death-to-life and life-through-death duality of holy baptism. Taken together with the interlocking triangles, one facing up and the other down, this composite symbol is also a visualization of the binary nature of Jacob's ladder: ascent and descent between heaven and earth with the eternal burnt offering of the holocaust as the fulcrum upon which the bidirectional transition repeats itself in an endless, infinite loop.

I was at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception this evening for a general consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for the Fatima centenary (by Cardinal Donald Wuerl) when I determined that I should commit this theological surmising to writing today; in particular, what moved me was my recollection of my earlier attendance of noon Mass at Georgetown University's Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart (famous for being in the classic horror movie The Exorcist; in fact I went to the chapel and returned via the "exorcist steps" off the Potomac river).

Receiving the Precious Blood of Christ during communion, I fell into one of those disorderly operations brought about by mental distraction, causing me to take a smaller, merely token sip of the consecrated wine than I was subconsciously intending to; this triggered my scrupulous retracing of everything that could (and in my mind, should) have gone better according to my will, which consumed me for the following hour and a half almost as I walked back to work and struggled to start my afternoon tasks once in the office again. I tried to cling desperately to the Real Presence I sensed in the wine I had just taken, and then afterwards I clutched at straws to recollect the Real Presence in the bread I had eaten as well (since I'd totally forgotten about that to exclusively focus on the wine); but truly it could only have been Jesus clinging on to me for this whole time as I was unable to cling to him with my unruly mental passion of perfectionism.

This was my day's holocaust, I later ascertained at the Shrine during the Fatima centenary ceremony...a consuming fire of purification by God's love - by the Most Holy Trinity - which I increasingly sense must become my daily experience of self-immolation in my heart and soul.

For like Jacob - whom God renamed Israel as a result of that inaugural encounter - I have no will whatsoever to submit to the will of God, and my resistance causes me great suffering and even a hell itself (after all, willful resistance to the will of God is the very definition of hell); but also like Jacob, I come to realize that in fighting with God, I prevail because God can only prevail in the end over me.

He is God and I am not; he will ultimately wear down even my strongest resistance, because that is as a mere nothing in the face of his Divine Providence. I will be consumed in my very nature of being by him whether I like it or not - I will be a burnt offering in his perfect love's purging flames whether I like it or not. May the holocaust become my daily, even constant reality of immersion in his unfathomably pure and indescribably purifying mercy. Amen.

(A more detailed technical explanation of the symbology I've introduced in this post will come later.)

Columbus was crazy because he challenged reason, not superstition

On this quarter-century anniversary of the 500-year mark of the Discovery of America, it's interesting to note just how much the legacy of Christopher Columbus has been put up for grabs even in this preceding generation.

As a kid in elementary school in the late eighties, I still remember how we were taught the standard Rip Van Winkle urban legend about Columbus being such a bold and daring shatterer of conventional medieval ignorance - pushed by the backwards, Inquisition-peddling Catholic Church - of the earth being a flat wafer with an edge somewhere out there on the water that you'd fall clear off of. In hindsight, I may have been the last generation in the public school system of this country in large urban areas to get such a positive - if still badly skewed - accounting of the great mariner who "found" America centuries after the Vikings already came here.

By the late nineties, Columbus Day was no longer celebrated by many Americans, but all the bad press that Old Christopher was by then getting about being a genocidal imperialist megalomaniac was only further obscuring what should have been an even bigger scandal all along: contrary to popular belief, Columbus went against scholarly wisdom based on the highly accurate scientific knowledge of his day, and not crude religious superstition, in venturing to sail westward and not eastward to reach the coveted riches of the Orient.

Indeed, as a more balanced and nuanced view of Christopher Columbus begins to emerge, both sides of the debate over his place in history have much food for thought: those who choose to dwell on the negative aspects of the Spanish colonial legacy are being compelled to temper their particular focus on him as some kind of unique and singular bearer of evil to the Western Hemisphere, whilst those who prefer to emphasize the positives have no choice but to acknowledge that, yes, the man apparently did have a screw or two loose.

The salient fact that should strike us in the 21st century is that America was finally permanently settled by Europeans - as opposed to merely passed by as another foraging station - on essentially the romantic whim of a Genovese adventurer whose sheer obsession with the idea of doing something out of the ordinary turned that whim into an actual enterprise. To reach that point in his own personal journey, Columbus had to be at least a wee bit loony, if you want to be realistic about it.

In the first place, he was pretty amazingly persistent. By the time Queen Isabella of Castille finally approved his first voyage of 1492, he had already dealt with a whole decade of rejection in all the royal courts of Europe of consequence that could finance his aspirations. You have to be rather thick-skinned - one might even say shameless - to still stick with such a horribly bad idea.

Now it'd be one thing if it was ignorance that was at the root of all that rejection; but the exact opposite was the case: the European monarchs at the time were Renaissance-enlightened sophisticates, not peasant bumpkins with no conception of ancient Greek mathematics and astronomy, which had long since established not merely the rough shape of the earth, but very well near its actual size as well. Surely, then, what in the blazes could Christopher have been thinking?

Apparently, he put all his faith in an outdated and inaccurate map which underestimated the circumference of the earth by at least several thousand miles - conveniently, one might add, the breadth of the Americas - and this is what ultimately led to his doom and disgrace at final failure to reach the Far East. But considering the weight of expert opinion against him, it's hard to imagine how he could have not wavered to the point of finally abandoning the westward expedition.

You might here interject that by 1492, he was such a desperate man - and Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain were so desperate to somehow dent the massive Portuguese lead on the high seas along all the eastward routes round Africa to find India - that the initial foray to the West Indies was literally a Hail Mary. But despite the undeniable element of truth to this, it hardly suffices to explain both his and the Spanish crown's eventual gamble: such ventures are in the end undertaken not out of pure desperation, but out of calculated risk.

Of course, the movies have done much to peddle the melodrama that Isabella was his lover - if not physically then at least emotionally - and that this was ultimately a kind of royal feminine self-indulgence. But this only shows how much of a deficit of logical explanation there is for the 1492 discovery there is whichever way you cut it for cerebral assessment.

What, then, are we left with? Columbus was crazy indeed - because he went against reason, not superstition, in persevering to secure his Occidental flirtation. When you look back at it over half a millennium later, you can only marvel at how God delights to use even the silliness of quixotic fantasy to fulfill His own inscrutable designs...because at least such puerile imaginings have a tendency of stretching the limits of human narrow-mindedness in a way that logic alone never could. Being all-knowing already, God needs idiots to help Him - not wise men.

All you can say, after all, is that America was indeed opened up for European colonization - and thus the religion of Christianity - in 1492 by an eccentric Italian dabbler in Mediterranean commerce, who turned a plan as outlandish in its literal end-of-the-world character as going through a fabled backdoor waterway to convince the Emperor of China to join a Crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, into an epoch-changing event; and that this was the Divine Providence in action. Who else but a crucified Lord of Hosts could have even thunk it?

The Rosary is the best Bible study of all time - period

On this Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary (October 7) in the centennial year of Our Lady's celebrated apparitions under that title at Fatima (1917), it's worth recounting not just how powerful a prayer the Rosary has been since it was introduced to the church in the middle ages, but more to the point, perhaps, just why. To put it quite succinctly and bluntly: the Rosary is the best Bible study of all time, period.

Unfortunately, not only have many Protestant congregations traditionally viewed veneration of Mary as inherently idolatrous and thus reflexively speak negatively of the Rosary, but even Catholics tend to see it as a "grandma devotion" for old women with nothing better left to do in life but say Hail Marys endlessly day in and day out.

The ironic thing with this, of course, is that the only purpose of the Rosary is to conform one's own life challenges and trials with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ Himself. Or in other words, the Rosary brings into sharp focus our only real business on this earth from the moment we're born all the way up to our return to the dust.

Indeed, if Sacred Scripture is ultimately about only one subject - namely the Word made flesh Himself - then it must behoove any student of such a rich and massive compendium of texts from two to three thousand years ago to zero in on a single unifying theme that ties all of Scripture together. In the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we have precisely this one great strand of revelation that binds all the rest together: that God took human flesh in the Incarnation for the express purpose of suffering and dying on the Cross to expiate sin and thus join sinful humanity to Himself in the life of Heaven even while still on earth.

If you could come up with a better summary for what Christianity is all about in the most practical everyday terms, I'd give you my whole fortune if I had one and go into massive debt just to give you more.

If we pray the Rosary daily - especially all 15 traditional decades and not just the day's prescribed five - then daily we are confronted with these three fundamental questions:

1. How did we humble ourselves today to receive Christ into our hearts? (Joyful Mysteries)
2. How did we suffer and die with Christ (not literally but ontologically) today? (Sorrowful Mysteries)
3. How did this suffering and death bring us to a new peace and joy today that we know can only come through such a union with the crucified Christ? (Glorious Mysteries)

That's our faith in a nutshell...period. Which makes the Rosary the best Bible study of all time...period.

Church history explained through the Holy Family: Part II

The Silent Martyrdoms of Joseph and Mary

In this second part of a series in which I attempt to explain church history through the Holy Family, I will have to devote my entire attention to the silent martyrdoms of Joseph and Mary on behalf of Christ their Son during their earthly lives and thus ultimately on behalf of His Mystical Body, the church. Because this is a topic not directly treated of in Scripture, it is not well known or understood by the faithful, especially in our increasingly unmoored and individualistic (even within the church) modern and postmodern times; but it is absolutely essential and foundational to any subsequent explanation and understanding of the history of the church in the two millennia since the Holy Family lived its earthly life in Nazareth.

I start where I left off in my first part: the loss and finding of the twelve-year-old Jesus by His parents in the Temple in the Gospel of Luke.

The young Christ's adulthood effectively began in this celebrated episode in which He was lost to Joseph and Mary for three days in Jerusalem to debate with the Jewish teachers of the Law in the Second Temple. St. Luke apparently determined that this single event said so much about what kind of life Jesus would subsequently have with Joseph and Mary that he saw fit to then skip right to the start of His public ministry some two decades later - after mentioning only that the adolescent Son of God was again subject to His earthly parents upon returning to Nazareth and that the Blessed Mother stored up more ponderings of Him in her heart. Indeed, the key aspects of not only the future Sacrifice of the Cross of Christ Himself, but also the sufferings of reparation for sinners that would be borne by Joseph and Mary in their remaining earthly lives - which would ultimately amount to martyrdom - were collectively made present in this drastic coming-of-age incident.

For in the end, Christ's Passion and death would be the free choice of Joseph and Mary to cooperate with the Father's plan to offer up the Son - their own Son - as an oblation to satisfy the debt incurred by the entire species on account of Original Sin. It was Christ alone Who in His own body would destroy the dividing wall of hostility between the Law of God on the one hand and the Mercy of God on the other; it would be up to His parents, however, to offer the proper prayers and penances on behalf of their Son to pave the way for His ultimate Sacrifice, and this they did humbly and quietly in the remainder of his adolescence and adulthood until the death of Joseph and the start of Christ's public ministry shortly thereafter.

Mary's Martyrdom of Church Motherhood

For Mary, these two decades were a preparation and even preliminary experience of the "martyrdom of mercy" she was to later suffer in its supreme expression at the foot of the Cross: the painful witness of losing her Son according to her very own flesh and blood so that she could give spiritual birth to His many brothers and sisters, namely the church. On their journey back to Nazareth after finding Jesus in the Temple on the third day, it became clear to the Blessed Mother that never again could she have her Son for herself as before: He now truly belonged to His Father, and as such truly belonged to all Israel and all humankind. No longer could she lay any exclusive claim to Jesus, but instead she would have to open the chambers of her heart even wider to embrace the worst sufferings of the poorest sinners - in whose redemption by her Son's blood she was to herself undergo an entirely new maternity.

Although it was this latter hope that would ascribe meaning to the ordeal of separation from Jesus, in practical terms it could only mean that from hereafter Mary must wholeheartedly immolate her beloved Son in the depths of her being on behalf of every single one of the countless lost souls who would not have any chance of knowing Him otherwise but through a mother's deepest tender sorrows; only through her pierced heart of mourning for her Son would she - and thereby He as well - be united to the tragically fatal condition of the human race, namely that of being cut off from the Father on account of Original Sin, utterly unable, ultimately, to fulfill the latter's commandments. In taking upon her own Sorrowful Immaculate Heart the penalty of that first transgression, Mary would thus redeem the misery of sinners through her Son's broken and crucified Mystical Body, to which her tears of blood (figurative as well as literal) on the spiritual Mount Calvary across the ages would, as the very substance of the Holy Spirit Himself, join those furthest from the Law to the very fulfillment of the Law. Her martyrdom of mercy was to be, in effect, a martyrdom of ongoing (and everlasting) ecclesial motherhood.

Joseph's Martyrdom of Church Fatherhood

For Joseph, these two decades before his foster Son's public ministry were a preparation and even preliminary experience of the "martyrdom of justice" which he would ultimately undergo as the last of the Patriarchs of Israel to fall asleep - and therefore their light and champion in the realm of the dead. Upon his own shoulders, Joseph would have to take and carry all the scrupulosity and legalism that God's chosen race had come to cling onto for dear life and identity in a world where rival nations with pagan beliefs were larger and stronger. Great as his love could only have been for Mary and Jesus, Joseph's charge was to love his people Israel - and the future Israel the church - with no less zeal to serve and protect; his personal affection in the former case must not hinder in the slightest way his dedication to the latter mission he had received as God the Father's earthly vicar.

Far from belittling or circumventing the holy Law of the Torah in any manner whatsoever, Joseph had to observe it - and impart it to no less than Christ Himself - with ever deepening care and attention, so that through its fulfillment in his own life he could lay the spiritual foundations for the New Law of Grace that his foster Son would introduce. This Joseph achieved through ever greater perfection in works of corporal and spiritual penance and mortification on behalf of the Jewish religious establishment which was utterly incapable of accepting the coming judgment of the Cross - and therefore especially needed his sacrifices, if not for conversion during Christ's life, then certainly for eternal life one day in the Kingdom of Heaven which, as Scripture attests, will never be revoked as a pledge from God to His people Israel.

In a yet deeper and more ultimate sense, however, Joseph's living sacrifice of his very self was on behalf of the eternal Patriarchy of the Law: with the Messiah having come into the world, this preexisting order of Moses would in every generation be challenged and eventually upended with the unstoppable, unceasing current of Grace that would flow out from the church to continually renew both the people of God themselves and the wider world through them. Especially in the later epochs of church and world history - as Christendom acquired the unprecedented practical knowledge of science and technology, thus enabling each successive generation to feel less imperative to respect its traditions than the preceding one - this self-abnegation of the guardians of the letter of eternal Truth would grow more acute. Joseph's martyrdom of justice was to be, in effect, a martyrdom of ongoing (and everlasting) ecclesial fatherhood.

The Martyrdom of Christ: A Reconciliation of the Martyrdoms of Joseph and Mary

From the silent martyrdom of both His parents, Jesus Himself would take his cues as He matured from adolescence into young adulthood, and then further as He spent the final years of His earthly life before the start of His public ministry. In a real sense, the mission of salvation that He had been born to undertake was at its core a mission of reconciling the opposing and contradictory martyrdoms of Joseph and Mary: the latter an oblation of complete submission to the Law of Truth, the former an oblation of complete submission to Mercy and Grace.

Long before His public ministry began - indeed, it can easily be seen to have started that very day when as a twelve-year-old prodigy in the Temple Jesus was abruptly compelled to return home with His parents - the Word made flesh had to live out this interior existential conflict within Himself. He had come into the world as Grace and Truth Itself, but such would be the ever-present tension of which His brush with the Jewish Temple hierarchy and its aftermath was a mere foretaste: ultimately it would be His own family - not merely His earthly parents, but ultimately His Father in Heaven Himself - that would crush and crucify Him, using, of course, first Joseph and Mary but then also sinful men as His mere instruments.

For beginning with His loss and finding in the Temple, Christ would be destined to continue shaking up the established powers-that-be in Israel with radically fresh revelations of Grace, only to be compelled - principally by His own parents in the flesh - to resubmit Himself to mere human authority, namely that of human parents at home and that of human teachers in the organized faith. In this, Christ experienced in His own body the conflict and thereby reconciliation of the two humanities which it was God's mysterious plan from before the beginning of the world to achieve through His only-begotten Son's incarnation: the final harmony between the Law of Truth and the seemingly incompatible (in human logic and conception) Law of Mercy and Grace. Or in other words, the mysterious communion of Christ's holy parents - Joseph and Mary.

Church history explained through the Holy Family: Part I

Among the things I have been trying to figure out lately is just how the different branches of Christianity - principally the threesome of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism - form a single integrated unit. It is now my belief that these three ecclesial domains of the Christian church - Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant - are the embodiment and reflective mirrors of the three members of the Holy Family, namely St. Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ, respectively, in the common Christian era.

Just as Christ came into the world through the Holy Family in order to actualize the promise of salvation for His people Israel in the Holy Land while opening that same door to God the Father to the Gentiles, so has He also collaborated in the ensuing two millennia with St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary to establish a new Israel - His church - in the form of European Christendom, which itself would continue to ultimate completion the task of bringing all peoples of the earth under the Kingdom of Heaven as inaugurated through the acts of Christ and His Apostles in the Gospels and the New Testament.

Indeed, the earthly life of Jesus can be demonstrated as having five phases, each with their exact later parallels in the 2,000-year history of His body, the church:

1. Conception to Birth
2. Infancy
3. Childhood
4. Adulthood
5. Public Ministry

This first of a multi-part series will treat of the first three phases - Christ's conception through His infancy and childhood, which ended with His debate with the Jewish teachers of the Law in the Temple at the age of twelve; future parts will treat of His subsequent adulthood (including young adulthood, i.e. adolescence) and public ministry - and the parallel roles played by Joseph and Mary in His more mature years.

1. Conception to Birth

Jesus - Conception to birth:

Conceived in the womb of Mary in Nazareth of Galilee, Christ's very existence was hidden from the world for the first three months, as His mother kept it secret from Joseph, to whom she was already espoused but not yet consummated with. This initial period was spent at the home of Mary's cousin Elizabeth, to prepare for the birth of the latter's son, John the Baptist - the prophet who was to herald the arrival of the Messiah. Upon return to Nazareth, Joseph and Mary settled to prepare for her child's own birth, but just prior to her expected delivery they were forced to migrate to Bethlehem, near Jerusalem, in order to register properly for a Roman census (as Joseph was a member of the House of David from Bethlehem). When the moment came, Jesus entered the world in a manger next to a nomadic shepherd's field - far from the gaze of the high and mighty of the kingdom whose eternal throne He had come to claim.

Church - 30-33 AD:

Conceived on the shores of the Sea of Galilee with Christ's calling of the Twelve Apostles, the church was also very much hidden from the world in its first gestation, during which time it also toiled in proximity with John the Baptist, given that he was the template of the future ordained priesthood of the church (beginning with the Apostles themselves) - that is, the commissioned heralds of Christ in what would be a renewed people of God (Israel). As the hour approached for Christ's Passion and death, so too did the hour approach for the birth of His church into the world: the Paschal mystery of His Passion, death, and resurrection was promptly followed by the final labor pangs of His body, which was finally delivered of His mother Mary's watchful intercession on Pentecost day - the birthday of the church. Just as Christ Himself was born among lowly nomadic herders, so His church got its start among the scattered Jews from all over the ancient world who had gathered in Jerusalem for the preceding Passover observances.

2. Infancy

Jesus - Birth to 2-3 years old:

Shortly after being presented at the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents according to the Mosaic Law, the infant Jesus was targeted for execution by the fearful and jealous King Herod of the Jews, and the Holy Family had to flee into exile in Egypt - already the traditional destination for fugitives in the history of Israel. Thus was Simeon's prophecy to Mary begun: the Christ would cause a great reversal in Israel, whereby those of power and status among God's chosen race would reject him, whilst the lowliest of commoners and even those not part of Israel would accept him. Only after Herod's death two to three years later did Joseph see fit to take Mary and a still very young Jesus back to Israel, and even then they returned to Nazareth in order to be as far from Jerusalem as possible.

Church - 33-313 AD:

Upon establishing a foothold in the Greco-Roman world of the mid-first century AD, the fledgling church was targeted for systematic persecution by the Jews, who first drove the followers of their own Messiah out of Jerusalem and Israel and subsequently secured a Roman crackdown on Christians as an unlawful sect of Judaism throughout their empire - even after Jerusalem was itself destroyed along with the Second Temple in 70 AD. In the following two and a half centuries, the church grew and flourished as an underground society and institution throughout the Mediterranean world with ever less linkage to the hereditary Jews of Israel - to such an extent that the Emperor Constantine saw fit to legalize Christianity in the Roman empire in 313 AD. By then, the remaining Jews had also completely migrated out of the Holy Land, and thus for the first time the church was able to lay claim to the physical territory of Israel as a special place of pilgrimage; with this, the young body of Christ had truly become the new Israel, as the Gentiles had truly supplanted the Jews as foretold by Simeon.

Notably, although Constantine had been emperor of the Western Roman empire when he legitimized the church, he soon realized that the church was more mature both in terms of governance and also in doctrine not in the Latin-speaking Western empire, but in the Greek-speaking Eastern empire, based in the fast-growing city of Byzantium at the junction of Europe and Asia, to which he then moved the capital of his unified empire - hence it being renamed Constantinople later in the 4th century. Thus, Christendom was born in the West through the Western, Latin-rite Catholic Church, but its political center of gravity was in the East with its Eastern, Greek-rite Orthodox Church. The Pope in Rome, being the acknowledged successor to Peter, was titular head of the whole universal church - which at this time also included the other Eastern Apostolic Sees of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria - but in practice the Eastern churches were very autonomous, and over time the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople was seen to supplant not merely the other Eastern Sees but even the Pope himself in overall spiritual and temporal influence in the empire. Over the course of the remainder of the first millennium, this East-West duality came to effectively embody the disparate roles of the Virgin Mary (the West) and her husband Joseph (the East) in raising Christ (i.e. His body, the church): whilst the former continued to nurture the young Christ in the freer and more open sociopolitical climate of the West, the latter shouldered responsibility for protecting both Mary and Jesus with a strong centralized imperial authority - including military power - in the East.

3. Childhood

Jesus - 3 to 12 years old:

In Nazareth, the child Jesus was reared by Joseph and Mary to obey both the Law of God and the authority of man (starting with themselves); despite the standard strict Hebrew upbringing in the commandments of Moses and the lineage of the Prophets, the child Jesus, being Grace and Truth Himself, inevitably introduced an entirely new dimension of divine life into the word and liturgy of the Second Temple Judaism that His family practiced, and this pointed to His future mission of likewise introducing the unprecedented fulfillment of all the promises of the Law and the Prophets of old. As would have been customary for a Jewish family of ancient Palestine, Jesus' father Joseph was responsible for his pedagogical training and instruction in the Torah and in learning and following the rites and customs of both the local synagogue and the Temple in Jerusalem - to which the family would have gone with extended relatives on an annual Passover pilgrimage - whereas His mother Mary was primarily responsible for nurturing His life of private prayer and devotion in the home and the finer instincts of tenderness, compassion, and mercy associated with such piety.

Christ's childhood effectively came to an end in his thirteenth year - that which would have been His bar-mitzvah as a boy coming of age in the Hebrew tradition. During the spring Passover pilgrimage that year, twelve-year-old Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem to debate with the teachers of the Law in the Temple - without His parents' knowledge. Other than the revolutionary nature of an adolescent talking on equal terms with learned scholars multiple times His age, there was a deeper and more substantive tension in play: this brush with the Temple hierarchy was the opening skirmish between the Old Law of Moses which the Pharisees and other sects of late Second Temple Judaism were twisting to ever greater degrees of complexity and rigidity on the one hand, and the radical New Law of Grace which Jesus was bringing to Israel and the world at large in His own Person.

Church - 313 to circa 1100 AD:

After its legalization by Rome in the fourth century, the church grew in doctrinal and organizational stature for most of the remainder of the first millennium - through a constant stream of internal struggles that typically took the form of theological errors mushrooming into widespread heresies which then had to be stamped out. Over time, an ossification developed between the Latin-rite Western Catholic Church led by the Roman Pope and the Greek-rite Eastern Orthodox Church led by the Patriarch of Constantinople: the latter still recognized the universal ecclesial headship of the former on the throne of Peter, but the fact that its own spiritual authority was still merged with the temporal power of the Roman empire - which survived in the East in the form of the Byzantine empire for centuries after it fell in the West in 476 AD - meant that in practical terms it could often be taken as the more senior body. More significantly, the decentralized state structure of feudal Western Europe gave the Catholic Church more leeway for liturgical and devotional flexibility in its evolving practices and traditions - notably in the highly dynamic monastic realm - as compared to the Orthodox Church alongside the centralized structure of imperial Byzantium. By the ninth and tenth centuries, this dichotomy became increasingly untenable for East-West unity, as the relatively rigidly conformist East found itself less and less willing to acknowledge the titular primacy of the more loosely disciplined West: the two churches finally officially split in the Great Schism of 1054, by which point both had reached essential maturity in their integration with the sociopolitical domains under their purview.

Thus, whereas the Eastern Orthodox Church came to embody the conservatism and discipline of the Law, be it though the Law of Christ through the sacraments, the Roman Catholic Church came to embody the evangelical fluidity of Christian grace and humanism - anchored though it still was in the same aforementioned governance of the sacraments. In cultural and linguistic terms, this meant that the great classics of Hellenic philosophy of classic antiquity, despite being of Greek origin, would ultimately be augmented and modernized by the great Latin writers of the middle ages. By the eleventh century, Christendom as a whole had truly become thus bifurcated: its Western Catholic wing corresponding to the Virgin Mary, nurturing as it did the Mystical Body of Christ the Child in Western Europe into an adolescent that would grow eventually into the adulthood of modern Western civilization; and its Eastern Orthodox wing to St. Joseph, protecting as it did its Western kin from the threat of Islamic and other Asiatic invaders from deeper within the Orient.

At this juncture, however, the religion of the God of Israel had once more reverted to the rigidity of legalism in its original home territory of the Holy Land: the Muslims had occupied it from the receding Byzantine empire and had banned Christian pilgrims from entering; they were also at this point in history relatively tolerant towards the Jews, who themselves had emerged with a deeper identity rooted in the Mosaic covenant based on the Diaspora-inspired Talmud, and found themselves more at home in Islamic lands in the Mediterranean rim than in Christendom. As such, the latter took deep affront in the closure of Jerusalem to its pilgrims by peoples who were perceived to belong to a retrograde, graceless version of the revealed Truth. And so, with the swagger and excitement that the young Jesus had taken on the scholars of the Law in the Temple, the increasingly confident, even brash Mystical Body of Christ - the Western church - set out at the close of the 11th century to retake the Holy Land and the Holy City from the reactionary infidels who would not acknowledge the Grace and Truth which superseded the Law.

Why we should pray all 15 decades of the Rosary, not just five

The Holy Rosary, that favorite Marian devotion of meditations on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, has traditionally been prayed by reciting all three sets of mysteries - five Joyful, five Sorrowful, and five Glorious - all at once, for a total of 15 decades in one sitting, or a seemingly whopping 15 Our Fathers, 150 Hail Marys, and 15 Glory Be's. Needless to say, this is quite a chore: beginners and even somewhat more experienced devotees of the Rosary may typically find themselves struggling to stay awake even through just one set of five mysteries - for some, the mere thought of saying all 15 together could be a daunting prospect.

So unsurprisingly, in more recent times it has been quite customary to refer to "the Rosary" as only one of the sets of mysteries - i.e. one of the "chaplets" - to be recited depending on what day of the week it is: Joyful on Mondays and Saturdays, Sorrowful on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Glorious on Wednesdays and Sundays; the new Luminous Mysteries (or "mysteries of light") which were introduced by Pope St. John Paul II in 2002 are ascribed to Thursdays.

Ideally, however, we should still think of "the Rosary" as the 15 original mysteries as a single unit, with the five new Luminous Mysteries optionally tacked on (preferably preceding or following the Sorrowful). The reason for this is self-explanatory to anyone who's delved deeper into the devotion over a period of time, irrespective of the well-established fact that the saints throughout church history have practically universally said the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries in single succession as at least their first preference - and more typically as sheer necessity.

For starters, as one of the concluding prayers recounts, it is God's only-begotten Son Who "by His life, death, and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life"; the unmistakable emphasis here is on the three successive elements of Christ's saving work, namely that 1) He came to the world in human flesh as none other than the Eternal God incarnate; 2) that He did so in order to suffer and die in His Passion to save sinners and restore humanity's relationship with the Father; and 3) that He was rewarded for this Sacrifice by rising again into eternal glory. So there you have it - the Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious mysteries of the Holy Rosary as a coherent whole sequence.

The Rosary, then, is nothing less - or more, really - than the entirety of the salvation story of our Lord Jesus Christ, seen, of course, through the lens of the person closest to Him, that is His most holy Virgin Mother. For those of us who realize - even in fits and starts - that the whole purpose of our faith is ultimately the imitation of this entire human experience of the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, nothing should click more to us than the notion that, yes, we too must undergo the entire sequence of content packed into the 15 original mysteries as a coherent whole.

Such has been my own experience in the nearly eight years since I converted to Catholicism: the Rosary has accompanied me in all my most critical and intensive periods of spiritual growth or personal crisis - the two often being intermingled, as they tend to be - and I have noticed the distinct advantage of saying all 15 decades, not just five, on a daily basis or even more than once daily.

The plain fact is, every day we are called to the following succession of willful acts, which correspond to the traditional three sets of mysteries of the Rosary:

1. Invite Jesus into our hearts just as the Blessed Mother invited Him into her womb, nurture Him within our souls, and offer sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Father through that presence of Him within (Joyful Mysteries)
2. Completely immolate the life of Jesus within our souls as a (figurative) holocaust (e.g. totally consumed burnt offering, with no leftovers) such that we partake of His Passion and death (Sorrowful Mysteries)
3. Freely receive the grace of the Risen Christ, Who takes hold of and elevates our cruciform souls with Him such that even now, in the flesh, we have a foretaste of eternal life before the Father in the unity of the Spirit (Glorious Mysteries)

If there's something else that's fishily familiar here in this threefold movement, it should quite obviously be the holy Sacrifice of the Mass: it is only through the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic sacrifice and sacrament, after all, that the three-prong activity of welcoming and receiving Jesus, offering Him up to the Father, and being raised to new life in communion with Him is actualized in one fell swoop of adoration of His most precious Body and Blood.

As a related aside, consider the concluding prayer of the Angelus, which since medieval times has customarily been said at the opening of Mass (even if not noon): Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ Thy Son was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross, be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

Life. Death. Resurrection. Again - the three elements in succession one after the other. Again - through the lens of Our Lady who personally saw it all in the flesh while her Divine Son was Himself in the flesh.

What makes the Rosary such a singularly powerful prayer, then - especially all 15 traditional mysteries said together - is that it truly is Our Lady's blessed meditative and contemplative complement to the Mass and Eucharist itself. In a very real sense, the five Joyful, five Sorrowful, and five Glorious mysteries contain within them the hidden spiritual realities of both the Eucharistic sacrifice and the Eucharistic sacrament.

So next time you find yourself at adoration, why not make an effort to say all 15 decades of the Rosary and not just the five prescribed for the day? Do this often enough, and you'll easily see why Catholics pre-Vatican II didn't even need the priest to face them during Mass: their own Rosary beads were enough to attune them to what was going on in the sanctuary and altar - on top of being the very best liturgy of the Word (i.e. the Scriptures) that one could ever come up with.

In fact, as an ex-evangelical, I'd dare say that by learning and truly understanding the Rosary, a Catholic is more deeply immersed in Sacred Scripture - that is to say, in the fundamental stuff that truly counts for the salvation of one's soul - than even the most well-versed Reformed Christian can ever become. For as John so clearly reiterates the words of our Savior Himself in the Bread of Life discourse of the sixth chapter of his Gospel: Without me you can do nothing. The "me" in the "without me" being, of course, His True Body and Blood. And just what is it that makes that True Body and Blood truly true (i.e. not just a wafer as it is to your average Sunday Catholic)? Only the faith of Mary, whose fiat two millennia ago was alone found worthy to bring that Body and Blood into actual being in space and time...and whose intercession in the epoch since has alone been found effective to sustain a Real Presence of Christ in the Catholic and Apostolic Church through every possible assault of error, heresy, persecution, and even indifference.

May the Immaculate Heart of Mary - the only perfect adorer of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, being after all the very source and origin of Its Eucharistic graces - truly triumph in this turn of the third millennium. Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

Exorcising the demon of claptrap

It's not often that one discovers what one's demons are actually named - and yes, they do have names, as the Bible itself attests.

My particular demon seems to be named "claptrap", and the two definitions that Dictionary.com provides are as follows:

1.

pretentious but insincere or empty language:

His speeches seem erudite but analysis reveals them to be mere claptrap.

2.

any artifice or expedient for winning applause or impressing the public.

The Google dictionary is far more blunt:

absurd or nonsensical talk or ideas.

Indeed, "nonsense" or "bunk" are common synonyms.

So, what to make of these in my own case?

Well, upon analysis it would appear that the two-point definition from Dictionary.com hits the mark - if both are taken together. My language tends to be pretentious but insincere or empty because it's typically merely an artifice or expedient for winning applause or impressing the public.

It is precisely because I care so much about looking good in front of others - i.e. admired for my superior knowledge and intellect - that even my accurate (or at least mostly accurate) statements carry little if any real substance.

In the first place, I tend to overly concern myself with topics - like nuclear superpower politics - which generate a good buzz and commotion, yet which ultimately matter little to the everyday life of your average Joe or Jane.

And when I do so, both the topic itself and the way I present it is for the express purpose of making myself seem to be obviously so much on top of matters which, even were it true that I were indeed on top of them (i.e. their outcome), wouldn't really be relevant in most cases anyway, either to my own life or to my audience's. The bottom line being that I puff up things for the sake of appearing important to have a grasp of them - and further beyond that puff up my grasp of them as well.

The only antidote to this is to stick to the time-honored adage: "Knowledge puffs up; love builds."

The world has always preferred knowledge to love - that is, God's unconditional love or agape - because the former is a lot flashier and showier about purporting to have the answers to the most vexing questions of human existence. On an individual level, we as creatures in God's all-knowing image are also naturally wired to have the answers right at our fingertips - it gives us a sense of power and control that we feel entitled to (or at least entitled to wholeheartedly seek) as bearers of a divine or quasi-divine imprint. Mostly though, it boils down to one thing in the end: impatience. And funnily enough, this itself is precisely what betrays just how pitifully limited we really are - no matter how hard or instinctively we try to pretend otherwise.

For it is only the unfathomable scope of eternity - the exclusive domain of God Himself which He has imparted to us in a relative and contingent manner - that can finally and ultimately disclose the full breadth and depth of Knowledge. Until that endpoint both in the history of the universe and also individually in our own lives, what we know must remain a mere minuscule shadow of what we are eventually meant to know.

This is why it is so essential in this brief earthly life to simply store what knowledge we gain from partaking of the Love that is the Most Blessed Trinity within our hearts - as the Virgin Mary so astutely did in her earthly pilgrimage with her Son. Rather than show it off or trumpet it before the world to demonstrate our own importance, it should be quietly employed to serve our neighbor and humanity at large without being uncovered to them - or even, to be honest, to ourselves (that is, once we've stored them away in the recesses of our soul, provided we attain the grace to do so even if it takes a while).

After all, for us creatures, it is revealed love that is the source of true knowledge, not the other way around. Only for God Himself are Love and Knowledge in perfect unity - for only He is God. This infinite Love that is the triune Godhead is an inexhaustible fount of treasures that we must always behold with such an awe that flushes away what little wisdom we do have of our own accord (even God-given as it may be) as an ocean wave does a few specks of sand; it is only in this genuine apprehension of God as being God alone - with no rival even worth giving a fleeting thought - that we become authentic bearers of His all-knowing image. For the creature, to know the Creator as the Creator indeed is the only final sum of all goodness, beauty, and truth.

And apart from rendering this service to our fellow man - pointing them not to the knowledge we have gained but rather to the Source of it, so that they can discover it for themselves in their own unique way - what else is there to do on this earth?

Holy Mary, Mother of God - you who alone among mortals were found worthy to receive the Divine Wisdom and Essence in its pure fullness, thus making you the bearer of Wisdom Himself - pray for us sinners, now and at the our of our death, that we may like yourself subject our indescribably minute knowledge of the Trinity to the Love that is the Trinity.

What falling for a drug addict was like

Back to blogging for the first time since early this year, having just witnessed the half-anniversary mark of the Trump presidency and also undergoing a major personal crisis of faith, it is time to turn to my deep Eastern roots for a security and stability that is no longer available to the citizens of the West who continue to live by Western values.

I fell in love with a beautiful Mexican-Salvadorean girl, Kasandra Martinez, back in June and July. She was very much an incarnation of everything that's both seductively attractive yet ultimately completely self-destructive about the so-called "free world", i.e. the Western Hemisphere.

Fashioning herself as a "free spirit", this 24-year-old marijuana addict was in fact a total slave to her own vanity - a vanity so huge that it blinded her to even realizing its existence. In the short time I got to know this very troubled Latina - a confused bisexual on top of being a substance junkie (not just pot but also smoke, drink, and other drugs) - I saw the utterly horrible nature of addiction of any kind: the addict herself would never even admit it was a problem.

And that's the state of Western, led by American, culture nowadays: we are nothing less than a whole society of junkies - a race of stupefied idiots whose only priority in life is to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. We're so absolutely incapable of dealing with the rough storm that is life that we'd rather withdraw into a delusion of our own making that ends up cutting our bonds with the very reality of the world itself - even as it convinces us that we're making the moral and correct choice both for ourselves and for those around us.

So that's Kasandra for you, in a nutshell: a tragic beauty, fooled ultimately by nothing other than her own self-inflated ego and complete self-centeredness that, as I mentioned, is so absolute that she couldn't possibly even see it.

Now of course, because I had fallen in love with her, it was personally very difficult for me to overcome the sense of guilt that I'd passed such severe judgment on her right to her face: it was nothing less than a verbal spanking that parents and teachers traditionally have the obligation to impose on their unruly children (though sometimes rightly accompanied with the physical one as well), only tainted by my own fleshly desire for the girl. And true, behind every addict is a deep suffering and pain - quite possibly even long-buried traumas - that renders any thought of life without the object(s) of addiction literally unbearable; in this I have regretted not conveying to Kasandra a deeper understanding of the roots of her destructive behavior and why it's so hard for her to stop.

Yet in the end, for every single one of us, we are what we are - "how" we got to be what we are is of little practical relevance in terms of actually changing what we are into something better, both for ourselves and those we love.

I may have suffered greatly at the hands of a neurotic and eventually schizophrenic mother who basically left home for the madhouse when I was 8, and this may have been the origin of my 14-year addiction to masturbation; but when the time came to own that particular grave habitual sin and cut with its destructive effects on my real life (especially how it reduced women and girls to sexual objects to be manipulated for me), that could never have been in the least an excuse to go somewhat easier or slower on myself.

I still love Kasandra, in fact. Perhaps I saw much of myself in her, notwithstanding the big age gap (12 years older); there was something more than just the physical attraction, but in the spiritual dimension I sensed a special kindred independence of character bordering on eccentric arrogance that I've grudgingly come to acknowledge is my personal hallmark, and a longing there in her for discovering what is true amidst a life and a world of such confusion. She wouldn't have been responsive to the point of being so open and vulnerable with me about her problems if she hadn't herself sensed I could be of some genuine help in her life - and no matter how much an addict might act or say otherwise, deep down they simply can't ultimately deny that their addiction is a source of tremendous suffering that they'd rather do away with. It's just that the pain of deliberately denying oneself one's longstanding source of consolation - the only coping mechanism against going crazy outright - is just too much at first.

So Kasandra, if you're out there somewhere, I'll say again unequivocally that I love you; more deeply and purely now than ever. You will probably be in my prayers for a good while; if only my prayers and penances could actually help it, you'll eventually be clean no matter how long and tortuous a process that is. That is the hope of my life, if even a secret and hidden one. In your healing and renewal as a woman bearing the image of God in its full truth and beauty, I hope and long for the broader restoration of an entire world - the West - in the opening decades of this third millennium.

2016's parting lesson: Elites aren't the problem - elitism is

I argued when 2016 began that this would be the year that democracy either triumphs or collapses. Now as 2016 draws to a close, it's time to hazard an initial verdict: democracy has indeed triumphed, but in such a way that betrays both its promise and its peril as opposing faces of the same coin.

We have witnessed over the course of this past year just how difficult the democratic experiment of governance really is, as the fundamental reason for this inherent difficulty has finally been laid shockingly bare: human beings can have very strong differences with each other.

We now live in an openly acknowledged "post-truth" world, where the very facts of life themselves are no longer universally agreed upon. Some would argue that this situation is hardly new: it's always been the case that opposing values, worldviews, and belief systems tend to produce contrasting understandings of particular events or circumstances which impact the common human family. What 2016 has demonstrated, however, is that objectively observed or reported facts are so superseded by the subjective interpretations that establish their context for any particular individual in question, that even the most irrefutable factual contradictions of one's preferred narrative can become so irrelevant as to be practically no better than blatant falsehoods.

In this toxic environment of self-polarization and self-isolation into echo chambers or "safe spaces", it's easy to see why one side is winning and the other is losing - badly. The global right-wing populist insurgency is toppling the international liberal establishment because it enjoys a massive asymmetry of intimate knowledge and understanding: it knows the ways and goals of the Establishment far more than the Establishment reciprocally knows and understands the ways and goals of the surging rebellion against it - even at this relatively mature stage of the gathering coup.

Both ends of the political spectrum live in massive bubbles, but it's now obvious whose bubble has been bigger and more artificially inflated for a longer time - because its bursting has been so dramatically and traumatically disconcerting for those who've sheltered in it so habitually that they didn't even recognize it.

As the year ticks down, the revolt of 2016 can now be seen as having been an uprising not so much against "the elites" as a socioeconomic class, but as one of rejection and repudiation of elitism as a philosophical lens for understanding societal reality.

The respective euphoria and angst over Donald Trump's election among his supporters and opponents says it all: while the latter are appalled that an individual with no conventional or "mainstream" qualifications for the post he ran for somehow managed to win it, the former are cheering precisely this overthrow of a perceived rigid caste of merit.

Those that have since decried Trump's betrayal of his common-man campaign through his appointment of a veritable clique of plutocrats to run his incoming administration miss the point: Trump loyalists never really had much beef with the wealthy and well-connected for being wealthy and well-connected; their hostility was always reserved instead for the perceived alien values and interests that have come to be associated with those privileges - whether real or imagined.

As a whole, both progressives and the cosmopolitan "mainstream" still haven't fully grasped the deep socio-cultural character of Trumpism, with the economic factor mostly a secondary and subsidiary element: the "elites" that this movement purports to throw out aren't measured by the size of their pocketbooks, but by the size of their intellectual and ideological egos. Billionaire Exxon-Mobil oilman Rex Tillerson is thus a "man of the people" as a provider of well-paying blue-collar jobs to ordinary working folk; yet (probable) millionaire bleeding-heart pundit David Remnick of The New Yorker is a haughty, condescending snob who's completely out of touch with "real Americans", who actually still exert their bodies for a living.

That's not to say that socioeconomic redistributionism of some sort isn't the core of Trump's mission - providing measurable criteria that he'll be judged by over his coming four-year term. But the way that this crazy 2016 has turned out to be - with conservative and liberal "experts" alike having their proverbial ivory tower windows smashed and eggs tossed in their faces - the only survivable way forward for anyone still taking their cues from a badly discredited, bi-coastal globalist, socio-cultural elite is to start looking for the forest beyond the trees.

Elites aren't the problem - elitism is. Rather than fixate on individual figures and their statements or actions, one must look to the ideas and ideologies driving them - and quite possibly find that precisely because they're actually quite open and even a tad progressive, after all, the means to achieve such ends could look anything but conventionally enlightened.

Obama seals positive legacy embracing Trump's rise: Donald take note

Yesterday, for the first time ever, Barack Obama formally met face-to-face with the leader of a counterinsurgency that has placed his legacy squarely in its cross-hairs for much of its stunning ascension to the doorstep of power.

The way the nation's first black president treated the arch-peddler of the not-so-subtly racist "birther" conspiracy theory against him is far more indicative of the likely trajectory of the monumental White House transition between now and January 20 than whatever the partisan punditry of either side has had to say in their celebratory or grieving commentary since the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Above all, it was an expression of a mature humility which goes a long way to explaining Mr. Obama's persistently high approval ratings - something which a popularity-conscious Donald Trump was sure to take note of.

Trump was impressed enough by Obama's affable professionalism to even call him "a very good man" - not quite what you'd expect of someone who's spent months and months excoriating the president as essentially the worst America's ever had (though the two polar opposite assessments aren't necessarily mutually exclusive).

Beneath all the bluff and bluster, in fact, there's good reason for Obama to believe that the better aspects of his eight-year administration won't be reversed - not so much because it'd be too difficult even for a united GOP government to do so, but because Trump of all people has no desire to swim against the tide of history.

Obama has now accepted - if merely by necessity - that his opposition to Trump and Trumpism on behalf of Hillary was, in his own words, "on the wrong side of history." Or better yet, that history itself hasn't "ended" - i.e. its final course hasn't been irrevocably fixed for one last time - as it supposedly did back in 1989. He's doubtless reassessing both his own legacy and also the broader context of where the world stands as a whole, and it must comfort him to remember that even the unstoppable long-term currents guiding the human community's common destiny don't obviate any twist or turn along the way: such detours are simply part of the journey, because they expose and thereby release underappreciated tensions or contradictions that block the way to eventual Nirvana.

His ultimate decision to stay out of the Syrian civil war was a reflection of this fundamental judgment. On this particular issue, which is widely branded as his single greatest foreign policy failure, it's interesting to note that his dovish stance actually falls short of Trump's - even if you cynically note that the latter's perception of the whole issue is colored by an apparent infatuation with Vladimir Putin.

As he takes the reins of power, The Donald may yet find that a number of Obama's "failures" were actually primarily failures of messaging and spin (ironic for an administration that has been lambasted by its opponents as running a propaganda mill in cahoots with the liberal mainstream media). In the end, however much better (or worse) he actually fares than his predecessor in tackling the republic's most vexing problems - not to mention the most pressing crises in the world at large - Trump can at least take one cue from the community organizer whose social re-engineering agenda he's ambitiously attempting to replace with a massive reconstruction project: even if you don't get your way, you can still be a gracious loser without having to overcompensate with even bigger "wins", if even primarily for your image and your own ego. Potentially very valuable insight for someone who's gaudily steamrolled over obstacles his whole life, seizing even the most mind-blowing setbacks as occasions for bragging.

It's really so simple: Obama failed to deliver, period

In its most unadulterated and undiluted essence, the Trump tidal wave was fundamentally an uprising against the prevailing ideological and policy hegemony of the post-Cold War era. And you sure didn't have to be a Republican or conservative (let alone a Trump supporter) to notice that something was afoot.

Let's just focus on Barack Obama - the hope and change candidate of eight years ago who has long since become a proxy for "the way things have become" with "the establishment" - as a bellwether for that establishment's continuity and stability, as against the swelling anti-establishment revolt which culminated in last night's historic upset.

It didn't matter, in the end, that the outgoing first black president still enjoyed 50-plus approval ratings for virtually the entire homestretch of the campaign; of far more consequence was the fact - undeniable in hindsight - that his whole agenda had already been effectively frozen dead in its tracks by the onset of the Trump campaign in mid-2015. He downplayed this by trying to keep such fiascos as Syria out of the news as much as possible, and it saved his job polls, but apparently ultimately at the cost of cementing a widespread perception among those voters looking for decisive leadership from whichever party or candidate that he'd simply checked out of a presidency he just couldn't handle anymore.

Consider that just since Trump launched his raucous run for the White House last June 16 by essentially labeling Mexicans rapists and gang-bangers, Obama has suffered the following setbacks:

1. His signature amnesty for undocumented immigrants was blocked by an uncompliant court
2. His late push for the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal was stalled by a gridlocked Congress
3. His pick for Antonin Scalia's replacement as Supreme Court Justice - a moderate specifically tailored to suit enough Republican Senators - was unceremoniously stonewalled
4. His policy of replacing brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with a transitional authority that would end that country's catastrophic five-year civil war - and usher in a liberal democracy that would buffer it against ISIS and Al Qaeda - has been systematically eviscerated by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin
5. His signature domestic achievement - the Affordable Care Act - has fallen so far short of its original promises that his administration has quite conspicuously shelved the very term "Obamacare" from its public discourse

There are other failures and reverses Obama has suffered beside these, and some date back well before Trump bombastically stole the whole show less than 18 months ago. But in the world of politics, such a string of defeats finally comes back to bite you at the end of the day - no matter how much you manage the surface perception that you're still effective as a popularly mandated leader.

Politics is ultimately not about popularity - it's about the actual exercise and execution of power. Obama has failed to deliver, period. Long before Trump blew away the extension of Obama's legacy, the brash reality TV trash-talker had already emasculated the Oval Office - by simply capitalizing on the incumbent's existing longstanding weaknesses and inflexibilities.

What we have now is regime change - in Washington, of all places. But in fact Obama had lost much of the country long before November 8, 2016 - he'd already been a rump like Assad in Syria (in the American context of course) for a while.

If you blame it on his enemies, you miss the whole point: a US president, no less than other leaders and statesmen the world over, is primarily evaluated on the actual efficacy of his rule; on that, he's underwhelmed and so has finally been overwhelmed by his antithesis.

Downed by a big Weiner? If this is politics 2016, who needs reality TV?

Even the most outlandish political satire would have a tough time rivaling the surreal developments now unfolding in the final week of the presidential race.

Who could have thought that the long-running Anthony Weiner freak show would not only keep going on and on with one lurid exposé after another for months and years on end, but that it would finally have actual fallout in the realm of power and influence?

And to think that this is all because of a 15-year-old girl he allegedly sexted last winter, knowing it was a stomp on legal thin ice? If this is American politics in 2016, who still needs reality TV?

You gotta feel for Hillary and her now disgraced aide, Weiner's ex Huma Abedin: perhaps their hubbies' private-part escapades have finally caught up with them.

Granted, there's almost certainly still no evidence of malicious wrongdoing here, and criminal prosecution remains a stretch. But the negligence of what now looks to be a deliberate habit of intentionally forwarding sensitive emails to a political ally's unsecured account reeks to high heaven. If this were anyone else, you're talking a ban from any significant public service position for a probationary period plausibly at least five years - never mind the White House and nuclear football come January 20.

So has Hillary been shot by a big fat Weiner, so close to her lifelong prize? Having survived Bill's shenanigans with women for so long, how brutal a twist of fate it would be to suffer such a late-minute meltdown on account of a far more appropriately named philanderer who just so happened to be far too close to you to not spray your own name with his juicy dissipations.

No, the Philippines isn't kicking America out for China

Brash and swashbuckling new Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte has boldly pronounced a "pivot to China" by the longtime US ally in his just concluded summit meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing, going so far as to declare that "America has lost" in its military and economic competition with the People's Republic.

But what's really going on here? Is the US really going to get kicked out by Manila? Will the latter really revoke its official mutual defense treaty with Washington dating back to the aftermath of World War II? Will this really be replaced by some kind of new security pact with China and/or Russia (to whom Duterte has also just reiterated his intent to deal with Putin)?

There's little doubt that Duterte feels far more at home with fellow strongmen Xi and Putin than with Obama - let alone his likely successor, the first woman president of the US. He's clearly impressed by their trappings of authoritarian imperial power exemplified by the grand squares of Beijing and Moscow, tailored as they are for unabashed displays of vast and intimidating formations of military troops and hardware. One can only imagine how his ego was stroked - quite consciously by his Chinese hosts - at being given special red-carpet treatment in the very visible nerve center of the middle kingdom; it must feel great for the sheriff of a comparatively puny tropical archipelago to be treated as a fellow resolved and responsible leader of men.

But Duterte knows better than to write off the US just yet. He relishes the chance to play off the superpowers against one another - magnifying the Philippines' and his own personal importance well beyond what it would be were it still firmly in the American camp. This is his way of not only hedging his bets, but making him doubly important to please or at least mollify in Washington.

In the end, it's precisely because he wants the unprecedented moral legitimacy that only the US can confer on his controversial leadership so much that Duterte is going so far as to entreat a rival suitor. He knows just how fickle is political popularity - he may have plenty of it in this "honeymoon phase" with the Filipino people, but if he somehow wins American approbation both of his policies and his underlying governance philosophy, that gives his administration a far bigger boost to its ambitious program, greatly weakening any opposition to it.

That being said, perhaps an even bigger reason the US-Filipino alliance isn't about to be terminated is a counterintuitive one: China itself doesn't want Manila to give Washington the boot - at least not for a while. In the first place, doing so would give too strong a message of of Chinese hostility to the US that would hurt Beijing's interests. No less than Duterte, Xi is also seeking American acceptance of his nation's and specifically his own personal indispensability to any Asia-Pacific policy or initiative. In large measure he already has it; but a public pivot towards China by a close US ally, however largely symbolic, serves the purpose of lightening up the dark view long peddled by some corners of official Washington that Beijing's become all about bullying its way to regional hegemony and demonstrating American decline.

It also serves China better for the Philippines to remain in the regional US alliance network than leave it because this now potentially gives Beijing a sympathetic voice at the table of America's Asian security coalition - a welcome dissenter from the confrontational faction led by Japan. Duterte is now to Xi what president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is to Putin: a key US partner holding a pivotal link in Washington's chain of strategic influence that has acquired a mind of its own. Over time, this could even encourage other American allies to behave more autonomously of Washington, as well.

There's little doubt that supplanting the US as the linchpin of the security order in Asia is China's long-term goal; but with the wind already blowing so favorably in its direction, Beijing needn't push the envelope now and jeopardize its recent gains. Conceding Filipino rights in Manila's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) - as long as it's done gradually and quietly, without publicly acknowledging the Filipino victory at The Hague's South China Sea ruling in July - will be a small price to pay for getting a foot in the door of one of the mainstays of America's presence in the Western Pacific. And eventually, if and when the US does actually cede regional hegemony to China, Chinese leaders would much prefer that it do so of its own accord - recognizing the obsolescence of its old alliances in a new Sinocentric environment, anyway - rather than feel it's being shoved out. In more ways than one, Duterte's reciprocated outreach to China is setting the tone for the coming realignment of maritime Asia.

How America's becoming polarized like Syria

One can't help but notice how life often imitates art, or even more tellingly these days, how an advanced society supposedly at the forefront of universal human harmony is beginning to uncannily resemble a very traditional one torn apart by primeval sectarianism.

What we clearly have nowadays in America - for those bold enough to call it out for what it really is - is the polarization between the cosmopolitan city and the parochial country; between progressive universal values and conservative exclusivist ones; between gender fluidity and rigid patriarchy.

Sound familiar? It's the exact kind of polarization which has violently cut a knife across the heart of Syria since the Arab spring erupted in 2011, killing up to nearly half a million in that country's subsequent civil war which has also displaced over 10 million others.

The notable difference, of course, is that our own sharpening identity-driven partisan divide is highly unlikely to turn physically bloody: our laws and institutions are far too entrenched and stable to allow that. But in the absence of a sober acknowledgement of the nature of the problem now making a mockery of our democratic process, even the most trusted and enduring features of the American system risk becoming weapons of increasingly destructive culture warfare.

Our democracy - and every society, in fact, whether democratic or undemocratic - can only properly function and attain its potential when its conflicting poles complement rather than repel each other. America surely doesn't have to descend into another civil war or anything even close to it to suffer the consequences of its deepening and ossifying division - and the entire world will be worse off for it, too.

The election lost, Trump pivots to making country ungovernable

It's obvious that Donald Trump has lost the election. Even his diehard supporters know it - in fact, his diehard supporters in particular should be aware of what's truly happening. They've consciously essentially given up winning the race, because their goal is radically shifting to something far more negative but carrying potentially far greater long-term impact: making the country ungovernable from status-quo Washington.

If the political establishment still manages to hang on with Hillary becoming president, so they reason, it's time to punish the whole rotten lot of them by permanently burning the bridges of trust between the heartland and the ruling apparatus, thus rendering the latter so paralyzed and impotent that it will eventually crumble of its own atrophy into uselessness.

Trump's role now is to personify in one body the pent-up rage felt by anywhere from one to two-fifths of the American populace: the predominantly lower middle-class and working class whites of the geographically vast but largely socioeconomically stagnant interior of the lower forty-eight. In fact, as a number of surveys have demonstrated, this hostility isn't primarily economic but cultural, even borderline racial: poverty and income levels may indeed improve in the coming years to mitigate the deepening polarization, but the overwhelming structural character of a permanent shift to a diverse and multicultural coastal elite as against a still largely homogeneous middle America (literally) could well defy any quick or resounding healing of an alarmingly ossified national division.

The silver lining of this descent into partisan, even sectarian darkness in American politics is that it leaves a victorious Hillary Clinton little room to maneuver on wedge issues that she is known for lightning-rod views on, like immigration, gun control, or religious restrictions or prerogatives. Once in office, she will be confronted with a Republican electorate seething from the prospect of a third Obama term; even with a narrowly regained Democratic majority in the Senate, she will still almost certainly face a residual if reduced GOP majority in the House - to mention nothing of the Republican advantage in state governorships. That potentially forces her into key concessions lest her presidency be hobbled by even worse gridlock than Washington has already grown semi-accustomed to. If she wants to actually govern, she may well have to slow down at least somewhat the left flank of her party from carrying on its ambitious social engineering agenda.

But neither will it be easy to run the country in the old manner of the political elite and its wealthy patrons, who one way or another are widely perceived - on both ends of the electoral spectrum - as having looked out too exclusively for their own interests by shafting everyone else. Now that the microscope will be turned on her and her family's every move, Hillary can no longer sell favors and access as she so blithely did at State, and this could have a ripple effect across the entire establishment. And if nothing else, the fact that she's been so cozy with the big bankers on Wall Street could severely constrain the financial industry lobby in Washington merely by association with the White House.

Thus, even assuming a Hillary win, the country probably isn't governable anymore in the way it's been for a while, anyway. That at least is probably something Americans of all backgrounds and persuasions shouldn't be too disappointed by.

Uh-oh: Is Obama finally blundering into a suicidal confrontation with Russia?

Tomorrow, president Obama will once more get grilled by his national security team to finally order an utterly insane strike against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, despite the clear warning that a nuke-brandishing Vladimir Putin has now given him that this would certainly draw Russia into direct military conflict with the US.

In some sense, this isn't at all surprising. With the Syrian regime - aided by stepped-up Russian airstrikes - closing steadily on liquidating the last rebel urban stronghold of Aleppo, it's becoming obvious that Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus want to deal Mr. Obama the devastating defeat of the virtual final eradication of the Syrian revolution by the time American voters choose their 45th president on November 8.

Where he had earlier hoped that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would be left to deal with the Syrian mess come January 20 - or at the very least he himself wouldn't have to until after Hillary secured the White House with her probable win next month - now Obama is staring down the very real prospect of a catastrophic strategic defeat that could reverberate thousands of miles beyond the ruins of a shattered historic Levantine city.

What makes his choice doubly more nerve-racking is the growing (day by day) ugliness of the US presidential election, as the deepest darkest dirt of both candidates is systematically unearthed by the two sides to further feed the flames of partisan polarization and acrimony. Perhaps for the first time ever, Obama is feeling a small bug nagging existential threat to his very psyche: a fear that a Trump victory now means nothing less than the utter evisceration of his legacy.

Defeat in Syria could give the election a considerable eleventh-hour jolt in that appalling direction. It would end US hopes of fostering a democratic alternative to the authoritarian brutality of Assad and his ruthless sponsors, Putin and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. By default, that's a huge victory for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other violent jihadist extremists across the entire Middle East and potentially the wider Islamic world, as well.

So will Obama finally risk it all? On balance, it's highly unlikely - at least tomorrow. Hillary's lead over Trump seems big enough to not lose sleep. A new round of Syrian ceasefire talks this weekend (in a new regional-multilateral as opposed to US-Russia bilateral format) can buy some more time. With just 26 days to go until decision '16, Obama and Hillary alike will now try to run down the clock.

But the Syrian vise may be closing on the Democrats even faster. Given the intensified Russo-Iranian-Syrian assault on Aleppo as we speak, it's difficult to avoid the impression that the West and its Sunni Muslim regional allies will simply be asked to effectively capitulate Aleppo in order to save civilians this weekend. Leaked pro-Russian and pro-Syrian reports are claiming that on-the-ground talks are already underway between the regime and less fanatical militants to evacuate the latter and their families out of the city's besieged eastern sector; if true, the weekend truce discussions will likely involve Russian pressure on the US and its Western allies to throw their weight behind the proposal. The problem? Even if Washington finally surrenders - a big if in itself - its Saudi and other Gulf Sunni allies who with arch-nemesis Iran form the Syrian conflict's most intractably partisan foreign fomenters will probably scuttle it.

That's where the latest developments in the third front of the Sunni-Shia regional sectarian war (the first two being Syria and Iraq) - Yemen - are particularly alarming and potentially a destructive powder keg.

As of yesterday, the US has officially entered the civil war in Yemen on top of the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, throwing its firepower behind the Gulf Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia against the Shia Iranian-backed Houthi rebels by launching cruise missiles against coastal Houthi radar installations that had earlier directed anti-ship attacks on US destroyers. Iran's response? The enraged ayatollahs have dispatched two warships to patrol the neighboring Gulf of Aden.

Even as the prospects of US-Iranian hostile engagement remains low - both sides have too much riding on the 2015 nuclear deal - it's now obvious that the Saudis have recently intensified their own brutal air campaign against heavily civilian Houthi targets in Yemen in revenge for the humiliations that Sunni Arab civilians have suffered in Syria at the hands of Russian and Syrian regime air power. So obvious a rat race to kill noncombatants has this become - you bomb my friends' hospitals, and I'll bomb your buddies' funeral processions - that the US is now torn between standing by its Saudi allies and trying to avoid the appearance of double standards that would taint the whole Western coalition.

So even though a US-Iran blowup in Yemen is unlikely, not only does this escalation to the far south give Secretary John Kerry that much less maneuvering room as he tries to restrain Saudi vindictiveness over Syria this weekend, but quite dangerously it opens the door to a hitherto much muted Western assertiveness against Tehran. And that's where all hell could break loose.

As the lack of Western mainstream media coverage of Iran's regional role has made clear, the Western policy and ruling elite have become so preoccupied with Russian actions and something of a negative obsession with Putin specifically that they've badly neglected the ayatollahs' calculus. Few in Washington or Western European capitals seem aware that Tehran may now be driving Moscow's regional policy more than the other way around. And all along it has actually been Iran - not Russia - which has most dramatically restricted American freedom of action in the region along with that of its allies. A tipping point may finally be approaching: having delayed (by no means truly eliminated) the Iranian bomb, the West and Western-aligned Sunni powers are now finding the price of this extra time possibly intolerably high to pay - as it gives the ayatollahs far too much leverage to escalate their sectarian agenda throughout the Middle East with only ineffective pushback.

The mere fact that the very possibility of military confrontation with Damascus and thus Moscow is back on the table in the White House betrays how dangerously the whole regional situation could be reaching the threshold of just boiling over. Barack Obama himself - the community organizer whose whole presidency has been premised on the principle that there are no military solutions in geopolitics - is perhaps finally being confronted with a stark choice. If he doesn't act decisively now - for peace or for war - then whatever peace or war comes to the Middle East will not be determined by liberal democrats or reformers, but by sectarian extremists and cutthroat Machiavellian strongmen who alternately bargain with and war with them. Either way, democracy and human rights suffer and regress; either way, the danger of a newly retrograde world existentially threatens his legacy.

If you're an optimist, you could say that the newest war talk is just that - talk. And better yet, prudent contingency planning: no good leader waits until military action is actually absolutely necessary to plot it. But with Obama, this must be weighed against something more troubling: an apparent indecisiveness that has come to define his entire foreign policy record.

In the past, great American statesmen on the world stage - think Kennedy or Reagan - staved off destructive war and achieved great victories for global stability and cooperation precisely because they did not shy away from armed confrontation, even nuclear confrontation. That's because they effectively convinced their counterparts in the Kremlin that whatever terrible price America would pay for an actual direct military conflict, Moscow's empire would suffer even more and likely far more. Without this leverage, they simply could not have dialed down the standoffs they navigated in a way that secured, let alone promoted, vital American interests.

Obama, however, projects the image of an American and general Western society that to many cynics has fundamentally lost any sense of higher ideals or values worth shedding even a single drop of blood for, let alone buckets or rivers of it. Reduced to minimalist "extend and pretend" tactics without any grand strategy of peace through strength, this ironically makes it more likely - however improbable still - that the streak of luck will finally run out; namely, that at long last a halfhearted response to crisis is judged as preferable to continuing to do nothing at all. If and when such a devastating miscalculation occurs with the outgoing 44th president, he will have nudged the free world he leads over onto a slippery slope that can only end in judgement by fire.