Dusk Scene of a Flooded River and Nearby Town, Henry Ossawa Tanner

A FRIEND told me the sad story last night of a couple who had had an on-and-off relationship for many years but never married or had children. They both ended up unhappy and alone.

What went wrong? They failed to follow the rules.

They had a sexual relationship outside marriage. They did it for pleasure but also decided they could not marry because the man’s career was not established. She waited and waited. He did what he wanted and liked to do — but it didn’t earn much. She got pregnant. They aborted the child. She waited and waited. Finally, she left him after ten years and they were both miserable. They were “meant to be together.”

Now what might have happened if the woman (or man) had refused a sexual relationship before marriage from the beginning? Maybe his lassitude would have vanished and they would have married. Maybe she would have found someone else. Maybe they would have still ended up alone, but their loneliness would not have been embittered by the terrible regrets and venomous, mutual recriminations that followed the killing of their child. When women generally withheld sex before marriage, men had more motivation to take on the unpleasant tasks of survival, and the incentive to kill one’s own child was less common.

This couple is definitely not entirely to blame for their tragedy. A river of tears runs through modern society. It was created by the Sexual Revolution, which brings limitation not liberation.

The rules are not based on prudery or a hatred of sex. They are based on profound knowledge of human nature.

The highest reason not to have sex outside marriage is love of God, who orders all things to His own glorious fecundity and our own ultimate happiness. But many a young person, now more than ever, is too shallow and self-centered to love God. The next best reason is based in wisdom, not prudery. Sex outside marriage is not conducive to human happiness and social order. Couples who go through similar experiences but then go on to marry and have children are merely creating misery for others by the standards they set. Like businesses that dump toxic waste into rivers, they pollute the lives of others. People in the past were not better than people today. They were fortunate enough to be given the rules. The sources of wisdom in our culture have dried up. Wisdom is nowhere to be found. God has left us in the waste land of human folly.

IT’S SUPPOSEDLY BAD to tell children about hell, which they can avoid by being good and loving God.

But it’s not bad to threaten them with mass extinction, which can only be avoided by political hysteria and totalitarian government.

Read about Greta Thunberg’s financial backers here.

St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Manhattan

IN May, 2000, the writer Lawrence Auster wrote a letter to the pastor of St. Thomas Church, the Anglo-Catholic parish on Fifth Avenue in New York where Mr. Auster was then a parishioner. Mr. Auster, who was raised Jewish, was baptized in 1998 and converted to Catholicism shortly before he  died in 2013, made some important observations in this letter. They apply not just to Episcopalianism but also to the Vatican II religion that has taken over Catholic churches. This is an excerpt from the letter:

Dear Fr. Mead:

If you were wondering what I was talking about with Bishop Sisk in the narthex after Sunday services, this is what I said to him: “Where in the Bible does it saw that we discover the meaning of Christ’s resurrection by ’embracing our particularity?'”

He replied, “That’s my interpretation.”

When I objected to his interpretation, he clarified that he did not mean that it’s about all of us just going off in our own direction (which had been my impression), but that we live “in Christ.”

I was glad he said this. Combined with his evident sincerity of manner, it mollified me somewhat. However, that’s not what he said in his sermon. In his sermon, he said nothing about living in Christ. In his sermon he threw out an endless series of rhetorical and sophomoric-sounding questions (there must have been about twenty of them), such as “How do we know what the meaning of the Resurrection is?,” “How can we tell that Christ is risen?” and so on and on. They were questions that led nowhere, questions that to my mind betokened a lack of genuine engagement with the Gospels. They were posed not in the spirit of a man who is looking for truth, but in the spirit of a man who is saying that there isn’t any truth. Read More »

A [white] Gentile in America, even a child, is raised to accept a very heavy sense of personal responsibility that far exceeds anyone else’s normal sense of personal responsibility. It creates a neurotic personality who is always feeling guilty and thus is too weak to stand up to Zionist criminal behavior and the comical, obviously non-factual Zionist ideology.

Jews in America are socially empowered to go way beyond the learned trauma of the Jewish experience that results in typical reactionary behavior. They actually participate in group behavior that is deliberately manipulative and abusive – aimed at punishing activists who stand up for human equality and justice. Over the years, US Jews have become increasingly nutty not only due to current events but due to the internet “alerts” coming to them from Jewish lobbyists, who solidify their brains in this self-righteous fantasy world where Hamas is a terrorist organization, where Israel has some kind of right to kill and rob non-Jews.

So we are dealing with not only dangerous reactions based on past trauma – actually learned trauma based on a glorified and fictionalized past – but American Jews are actually being trained since childhood to interact with non-Jews in a deceitful and arrogant manner, in coordination with each other, to emotionally destroy Gentiles and Israel critics, in addition to wrecking their careers and interfering with their social relationships. This is actually deliberate, wicked, planned behavior motivated by a narcissistic self-righteous fury.

— Karin Friedman, “The Emotional Violence of Jewish Advocacy”

ALL news stories, especially those broadcast instantly around the globe, should be approached with critical thinking skills. Think before you swallow.

This story about an American man, Stephen Weber, drowning while proposing to his girlfriend at a luxury resort in Zanzibar suggests scripting and orchestration. The story supposedly originated from a Facebook post by his girlfriend Kenesha Antoine, the allegedly bereaved bride-to-be. Agence France Presse reports:

An American man has drowned while proposing to his girlfriend underwater at an idyllic island off the coast of Tanzania, a luxury resort said in a statement Sunday.

His girlfriend Kenesha Antoine posted on her Facebook page footage of Steven Weber proposing to her through the window of their underwater hotel room at the luxury Manta Resort in Zanzibar.

“You never emerged from those depths so you never got to hear my answer, ‘Yes! Yes! A million times, yes, I will marry you!!’,” she wrote Friday in a post confirming his death.

It’s odd that this accidental death so quickly became international news and that so much is known about the deceased so soon after his death.  So much is known, that is, except any details about why or how he died. Read More »

St. Martin giving his coat to a beggar, French miniature, 1290

GOD has made the rich depend on the poor, and the poor on the rich. The rich should take care of the poor, in order that the poor may take care of the rich. The misery of the poor is corporal. The misery of the rich is generally spiritual. The rich, therefore, should give corporal relief to the poor, in order to receive from them spiritual aid in turn. Without the assistance of the rich, the poor would die corporally. Without the prayers and blessings of the poor, the rich would die spiritually. Graces and chastisements are in the hands of the poor. When they implore mercy for him who aids them, God grants their prayers. When they demand justice against those who send them away empty, God also grants their prayers. “Son, defraud not the poor of alms, and turn not away thy eyes from the poor. For the prayer of him that curseth thee in the bitterness of his soul shall be heard: for He that made him will hear him.” (Ecclus. iv., 1, 6.)

A rich man is in danger of losing his soul when he has not the prayers and blessings of the poor. In this world, the rich are the judges of the poor. In the world to come, the poor will be the judges of the rich. Those who have not the poor for their advocates, will not find grace with their judge. He who has the poor to plead for him, need not fear, but may rejoice.

— “The Corporal Works of Mercy,” Fr. Michael Mueller, 1881

ALAN writes:

I know exactly how Paul A. feels.  [“Hardships of the Single Life, cont.”, Sept. 2 ] He is only 50. I am 20 years older and intimately acquainted with the kind of life he describes.

“Everything is far away,” he wrote. And that is true. But I remember a time when it wasn’t true.  Cities once consisted of self-sufficient neighborhoods where everything was not far away.  Older men and women in St. Louis have written about how, during their childhood years, everything their family needed could be found within walking distance.  That was true for us in the 1950s.

Then came a variety of factors to explode that arrangement:  Motor vehicles, highways, the development of mass marketing, the invention of the teenager and then the youth subculture, the destruction of neighborhoods, and the surrender of local power and law to distant places, among others.  Alan Ehrenhalt discussed many of these factors in his 1995 book The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s, which I recommend.

I once knew an older man who lived alone for 50 years. He and his wife had separated and neither ever remarried.  In some ways, he told me, it was a terrible way to live, and it could be terribly lonely.  He was right.  I learned it, too, from long experience. Read More »

Illustration of the original 1835 Saugerties Lighthouse (lower right) from William Wade’s 1846 engraving Panorama of the Hudson River

LIGHTHOUSES are romantic vestiges of a less sophisticated time. Many historic American lighthouses have been destroyed, which is a shame, because the lonely vigilance of their resident lighthouse keepers and the stories of the lives they have protected make old lighthouses objects of fascination.

My husband and I visited the Saugerties Lighthouse on the Hudson River this summer. The Hudson is one of the most beautiful rivers in the world and here, 110 miles north of New York City, where it wends its way through the Catskill Mountains, the river is surrounded by charming, low hills and lush foliage. The lighthouse is not far from where Henry Hudson stopped in Turkey Point in 1609 during his explorations along the mighty river. The first Saugerties lighthouse was constructed in 1834 at the mouth of the Esopus Creek off a swampy shore on land donated by Robert Livingston. The much larger existing lighthouse, completed in 1869, sits on a stone pier on 65-foot pilings in the water. The lights were initially illuminated by whale oil, later replaced by mineral oil and eventually electricity in 1947. Its oil lens was visible from ten nautical miles away.

The Saugerties Lighthouse

It was one of nine lighthouses from Albany to New York when the Hudson was a main commercial artery in the nineteenth century, providing transportation for passengers and essential goods with its direct connection to the Atlantic Ocean. Sailboats owned by the great estates that sprang up along the river also passed by Saugerties.

The lighthouse was automated in 1954 by the Coast Guard, doing away with the need for a lighthouse keeper. Twenty-one keepers had maintained the light tower and lived in the lighthouse over the years. The last keeper died a month after it was closed, reportedly from grief. The house fell into disrepair and was slated for destruction until local residents saved it. It has been restored and now functions as a bed and breakfast, allowing people to stay there for a high fee ($250 a night for two) and taste the life of a lighthouse keeper.

We did not stay, but during our short visit I noticed an item in a small exhibit about a girl who had lived in the lighthouse for much of her childhood. Ilah Kauffman’s father, Conrad Hawk, was the lighthouse keeper for 26 years. Judging from her description, it was an ideal place to grow up.

“When fog started, we wound up the bell, All night it would ring with this beautiful bong sound,” she told The Sunday Record in an interview on August 25, 1974. “Sometimes we’d help people whose boats were in trouble. I remember a yacht that broke down. After we helped, the owner sent us 15 pounds of candy. My, that was a windfall. My brother and I were only given a penny to spend every Sunday, so this was like manna from heaven.”

The family had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. They played cards and listened to music by the light of oil lamps. They grew a garden and preserved their produce for the winter ahead. The father harvested ice in the winter. Ilah was an accomplished knitter and ice skater, being able to skate right outside their door.

She remembered one Christmas when her father bought a phonograph from Sears Roebuck.

“We sat around the tree father cut on shore, lit with candles, listening to Caruso sing. We sat up until 2 a.m., listening, watching the candles drip. It was beautiful.”

Lighthouse keeper Conrad Hawk and his wife Thyra

Reading her story and viewing this magnificent river from the simple, but stately house surrounded by water, with large windows and warm brick, I was reminded that often the very best life is one that is somewhat deprived.

A lighthouse family must stay put. “We never had much money,” Ilah said, “but I don’t ever remember the lack of essential things.”

To have nature all around and the time to play cards, to knit, read and sing together seems far better than life in the middle of a rushed civilization with the questionable privilege of constantly being able to get up and go.

Leon de Smet

WHEN I was growing up there was a television soap opera (I can’t remember the name) that I watched occasionally. One of its characters was a middle class housewife who always appeared in scenes in her kitchen.

Her kitchen was small and modest by today’s standards, especially by Hollywood’s standards, and she was not glamorous, like many soap opera characters today. I remember her wearing plaid blouses and skirts, and very little make-up. Everything in her kitchen was calm and orderly and she was never in a rush. During the course of the show, someone — a neighbor, friend or relative — would drop by to visit her. She always had the time to stop what she was doing and talk.

She would usually sit down at her table with the visitor and they would discuss some interpersonal drama, this being a soap opera. As they were talking, her face would register all the appropriate emotions, but mostly empathy and concern. I can’t recall who the actress was, but she was very good at it. This housewife was never angry or depressed or hysterical. Her tranquil empathy seemed a sort of filter through which the conflicts of this fictitious, television community beyond her kitchen passed. Nothing was truly solved in her kitchen, but worries and disappointments were cleansed by her attentive listening and wise suggestions.

The interesting thing about this character is that she was actually based in reality. There were middle class women like her. There were middle class women who, by today’s standards, had nothing to do. Of course, they had plenty to do running their homes and raising their children, but by the standards of today, they had nothing to do. And sometimes they did “nothing.”

I remember a neighbor’s mother who would sit down on a weekday afternoon at her kitchen table with a cigarette, a cup of tea, and a book. She would placidly read for an hour or so. In the middle of the day! Even though she and her husband had little in the way of possessions or money, she had for these few hours the leisure of an aristocrat. She was the mother who had the leisure to tell me at one point that I was not being nice to her daughter. She was right. I was not only not being nice, I was being cruel to her daughter by ganging up on her with another friend. I have often thought of the lesson she imparted so calmly and with wisdom, not accusing, but teaching. Only she had the time to participate in the morality tale of my life. Only she could see that this small soap opera that we were starring in was truly serious. She, after all, had nothing else to do.

On the day her daughter called me two years ago to tell me she had died, I could still see her calm and wise presence at the kitchen table and I remembered the lesson as if it were just yesterday. I remembered her wisdom and my own cruelty vividly. My life would have been different without her. She made it better. Her departure from this world caused me sadness that I knew would never entirely go away, partly because I saw in it the vanishing of not just a person but an entire way of life.

When feminists first attacked the worth of the housewife, it was the easiest thing to do. After all, almost everyone at that time knew imperfect, maybe deeply imperfect, housewives. Housewives were everywhere so that meant that there were, human nature being what it is, plenty of bad housewives everywhere too: housewives who were naggers or obsessive cleaners or messy or lazy or mean or hyper-critical or neurotic or vicious gossips. All these existed. Therapists offices were filled with people talking about how much their mothers had messed them up. And to some degree, they were perfectly right. Their mothers had messed them up. And then, of course, there were all the unhappy housewives. The press was filled with stories of former homemakers who found bliss by leaving their homes. How could anyone be a housewife day after day and not encounter unhappiness, periods of sadness or depression and feelings of a lack of fulfillment? That was never mentioned. Only the housewife’s work was held up to this impossible standard of personal satisfaction.

One could see everywhere the imperfect manifestations of a perfect institution: the institution of the homemaker.

Now if social revolutionaries had advised doing away with, say, soldiers because there are so many imperfect and unfulfilled soldiers, which is true, people would have resisted. Or if revolutionaries had said we should do away with doctors because there are so many overworked and unfulfilled doctors, people would have resisted. That’s because the need for soldiers and doctors lies in the material realm. They protect our physical existence. The housewife works not only in the most practical realm, filled with necessary survival tasks that to this day remain numerous and challenging, but in the immaterial universe. Materialists not only don’t value that, they positively can’t see it.

Our soap operas are so incredibly petty. And then again, they’re not. If the soul has no splendor, if the ‘Little Way’ to goodness doesn’t matter, if everyone gets to heaven no matter what the heck we do and God is just a jolly fellow or an impersonal force; if, in other words, the spiritual stakes are not high or are even non-existent, then the housewife’s work is not worth defending. She’s just a servant, a drudge, an inexpensive psychotherapist — and the institution should die.

The most significant thing about the woman in that television show, the woman at her kitchen table, was that she was not in a rush. It’s amazing when I think of it now, I truly marvel that those placid pools of domestic nothingness ever existed in the savagely competitive forest of modern capitalism. She was not in a rush, and because of that, she could participate in the soap operas of the people she knew with calm and wisdom. The very humility of her days was the secret to her wisdom.

Lamentation over the Dead Christ (detail); Sandro Botticelli; c. 1495

GOOD TIMES are good. Fun is very fun. Joy and happiness are necessary.

But so is sorrow. Sorrow is necessary too. He who can not shed tears is lacking in compassion. For sickness, disappointment, loneliness, enmity, and death are always nearby. Sorrow opens our hearts to the truth of the human condition and to the mystical importance of the soul.

Some are chosen to feel more sorrow. This is an undeniable fact. Equality in the department of suffering does not exist. (If you are hanging out with people who cannot give a plausible explanation for this disturbing inequality, you are hanging out with the superficial.)

In this increasingly impersonal, alienated and artificial world, some may feel such intense sorrow, such a heavy load of sadness, that physical heart disease seems minor in comparison to this spiritual heart disease.

Sorrow of this kind is a grace from God, who draws the sorrowful closer to Him. He appoints to them the office of grief for a reason.

At the Foot of the Cross the second Eve fulfilled her destiny. She who had lived in human intimacy with God experienced complete sorrow, greater than any other, sorrow being a counterpart of love. This sorrow is the source of her great compassion, which is why millions of people have found consolation in suffering with her and appealing to her compassion.

But why? Why this inner suffering?

“What is the reason of all this suffering that exists in the world around us?” wrote the Priests of the Congregation of St. Paul in 1893 in commemoration of today’s Feast of the Seven Dolors of Mary, “[It] is a question that has been asked day after day, and year after year, and century after century, since the first human tear fell upon the unconscious earth. And the attempt to solve this enigma of mankind has founded schools of philosophy and philanthropy, systems of religion, and methods of life, from the dawn of human history and before it to the present hour. Yet the reason of sorrow, though it has escaped the search of mankind, is not far to seek–it is sin, and sin is everywhere.”

Sorrow, embraced willingly, can bring the greatest happiness of all because sorrow can be a form of penance and reparation.

When sorrow comes, it is an opportunity. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. They can be comforted by knowing that sorrow embraced repairs this fallen world.

Can the human heart refrain
From partaking in her pain;
In that Mother’s pain untold?
 

FELIX Kjellberg, the Swedish Youtube sensation who goes by the name PewDiePie (I’ve never heard of him before today), is the subject of a major news story.

Under pressure from his fans, PewDiePie, who reportedly has the largest Youtube audience in the world, rescinded a $50,000 donation to the Anti-Defamation League, which many of his followers claim is the country’s leading instigator of thought control and censorship. This is a big story because no one in popular culture publicly stands up to the ADL. But Kjellberg not only canceled the gift, he also apologized to his followers for even considering it. According to E. Michael Jones, this decision represents a “revolution in consciousness.” That may be an overstatement but it is true more and more people know that the ADL is a vicious organization that spies on Americans and ruins people’s lives when they express opinions the ADL doesn’t like. The ADL is a defamation league (not an anti-defamation league) deceptively operating under the mask of respectability, militantly supportive of Jewish nationalism while condemning nationalism for Americans, connected with organized crime, supported by political leaders of both parties and reminiscent of the Bolshevik Cheka, the secret police that terrorized Russians. The ADL terrorizes not just its opponents, but ordinary Jews too with scenarios of “hate” that cause paranoia and hysteria. The ADL is a major force behind censorship on the Internet, which is, again, why so many of PewDiePie’s fans were angered by his planned donation. The Internet has been purged in the last year of, among other things the ADL considers unacceptable, thousands of videos that explain and provide evidence for recent false flag mass shootings.

How was the ADL started? An adjunct of the international Jewish fraternal order and secret society (non-Jews excluded), B’nai B’rith, the ADL was started for the express purpose of defending murderer Leo Frank, who in 1913 [was accused of having] molested and brutally killed a 13-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, who worked in his factory. Frank [actually it was Frank’s defense team] then blamed it on a poor black janitor and cried “anti-semitism.” Ever since that time, the ADL has been doing the same, protecting Jewish criminals and smearing innocent Americans. Good for PewDiePie. Unfortunately, he too can certainly expect retaliation. It may happen now or it may happen later. But Jewish supremacists never forget. And they never forgive. Read More »

A LONGTIME reader sends an alternative scenario to the tragic life of Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet. He wonders whether things would have worked out better if Hamlet had had a good therapist.  I’m not convinced, but it’s something for you to consider very seriously.

Cast: King Claudius, Queen Gertrude, Therapist, Hamlet (dual role with King)

Setting: Therapist’s office, three chairs, table. Therapist seated. Enter King Claudius and Queen Gertrude.

Therapist: The patient’s name?

Queen: Hamlet.

T: Please spell that.

Q: H-a-m-l-e-t.

T: First name?

Q: Prince.

T: Biological male?

Q: Oh, yes.

T: Health care provider?

Q: Denmark health-care system. Read More »

IN THIS interview from October, 2001, Patricia Ondrovic, an emergency medical technician with the New York City Fire Department,  describes what she saw after she arrived at the World Trade Center on 9/11. She describes numerous explosions in areas where there were no fires. Cars exploded in front of her. The lobbies of two buildings exploded.

FROM THE comments on this Brother Nathanael video:

“Lucky” Larry Silverstein, a strip club owner and indicted drug smuggler, “felt a compelling urge to own them” and so it was he came to obtain a 99 year lease on the entire world trade center [sic] complex on 24th July, 2001 for just $114 million, despite the WTC complex no longer being economically viable and in need of a cripplingly expensive demolition, being filled with asbestos, but the costs of doing this legally were prohibitive.

“Lucky” Larry admitted on camera that he began planning to build an entirely new World Trade Center 7 (WTC-7) building one year before the 9/11 attacks had occurred.

Despite “Lucky” Larry being a mere leaseholder of the buildings, he was the sole beneficiary of the insurance payouts. He increased the insurance policies, when he signed the lease two months before the attack happened. The insurance was for 3.6 billion dollars, but he found an obscure clause in the insurance policy which enabled him to claim twice, one for each “attack!” Larry Silverstein scored more than $4.5 Billion in insurance money as a result of the destruction of his complex.

“Lucky” Larry usually had breakfast in “Windows on the World” restaurant (107th Floor North Tower) every single morning – except for one – Larry was absent from this routine meeting on the morning of September the 11th. Read More »

ON THIS the 18th anniversary of 9/11, I join with all who remember that sad day, mourn those who died then and in its violent aftermath, and those who call attention to the discrepancies between the scientific evidence and the official story.

Good can come from catastrophe. God would not let it happen otherwise.

Start by learning more. Download an informative booklet on the science of 9/11 here.
 

S.K. ORR of Steeple Tea writes: