While it isn't Christmas Day anymore (no longer December 25), it is still the Christmas season. As noted in the carol, there are Twelve Days of Christmas, lasting until Epiphany (January 6)--the anniversary of the Magi coming to worship the baby Jesus and to give their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
I went to the Vigil Liturgy on Christmas Eve, and while I was there I came to imagine a certain image in my mind that I've been pondering ever since: God the Father, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, were handing the Christ Child to me, and I received Him in my hands.
(Please note that this was NOT a supernatural apparition, any more than any image that comes to the imagination is. I have never had a private revelation, and I don't know if I ever will.)
What prompted this image? The birth of the Christ Child is the revelation that God is with us, that we may see His face and live, that God and sinners are to be reconciled. Advent, the season before Christmas, is a time for anticipating not only the birth of Christ over 2000 years ago, but also His Second Coming on the Last Day, and the coming of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist at every Mass. And the first Christmas Day was the first time that God became visible in a vulnerable form, as He does in the Eucharist. And the Eucharist is Jesus Christ as much as the Babe born in Bethlehem.
So I imagined receiving the Christ Child in my hands, similarly to how one might receive the Eucharist. I don't receive in my hands--even when possible I think it's inappropriate except for clergy, and I'm not ordained yet--but clergy do, and I believe God calls me to the priesthood.
But then the image became more full, because I realized that (especially assuming this is my calling) God, our heavenly Father and Creator of heaven and earth, is entrusting His Son, in a small, vulnerable, precious form, to me, one of His mere creatures. And of course, Jesus is the Son of Mary as well--and the image called to mind the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple on Candlemas (February 2), the Fourth Joyful Mystery of the Holy Rosary, which is written of in the Gospel of Luke. The only thing is that, while the image included God the Father, and not only Joseph and Mary, I myself was in the role of Simeon, the old man (I presume a Jewish priest) who received the baby Jesus and knew that the Holy Spirit had promised that he would not die before he saw the Christ.
That's definitely something I want to reflect on as much as possible as the year 2018 ends, and the year 2019 begins.
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Given that Christmas Day has past, I am happy to report that none of my predictions of 2016 have come true. While I no longer have those blog entries up, for fear that someone might take them seriously (or think that I still believe them), I predicted the following:
1) I predicted that, under Donald Trump's presidency, the economy would collapse in October of 2017, worse than in the Great Depression, and that it would not be limited to the United States of America but spread over the whole world, in the worst economic crisis in all history;
2) I predicted that, after this (probably in 2018, but before Christmas), we would see false apparitions in the sky purporting to be heavenly revelations telling us what we supposedly need to know, what we supposedly have to do, and what we supposedly could expect in the near future;
3) I predicted that, after this (but still before Christmas of 2018), an Israeli named Joshua would go public, claiming to be the true Messiah, and gain a large following of people mistakenly thinking he was the Messiah (or mistakenly thinking he was the final Anti-Christ), and either way mistakenly thinking that we are now in the Last Days.
Obviously, none of that has happened. And thanks to Father Christopher Zugger setting me straight shortly before Christmas of 2016, I have no intention of merely tweaking the above predictions in order to take into account the fact that none of those things have happened (as by simply shifting them to a later year, or feeling vindicated simply because the economy has been going down lately instead of up, or because Pope Francis has become less popular even among Catholics in the last four months). I have no intention of making specific predictions of what will happen anymore, not unless I'm confident that a Church-accepted prophecy has said it, or that it's the only possible logical extrapolation of such a prophecy. Anything beyond that is worthless except possibly as fodder for a science fiction novel.
I did this out of a disordered desire to see the world whole, including in time (even in terms of the future, which I cannot see but God can), and out of fear of being caught unprepared for major disasters--which, two years ago, the Lord made me to realize was because my heart's desire was incompatible with the First Commandment, the same desire that leads people to commit the grave sins of divination (either personally or going to so-called "psychics"), even though I never had anything to do with such things as crystal balls, tea leaves, tarot cards, palmistry, horoscopes, etc. It didn't matter--I was guilty of breaking the First Commandment in my heart just as much as if I had done those things. Therefore I was very much blessed that (over the course of FOUR YEARS!) I didn't let in evil spirits, to the point to where I would have needed an exorcism.
Having said that, however, I suspect that the year 2020 (not the new year to come, but the year after it) will likely be a watershed year, and I have three reasons for suspecting this:
1) According to the "Predicted and Scheduled Events" on the wikipedia article for the year 2020, people have claimed (I am convinced falsely) that the year 2020 will be a "point of no return" where "climate change" is concerned--that is, that if "man-made climate change" is not reversed sufficiently before the year 2020 ends, it will be impossible to reverse it at all, and therefore it will supposedly only be a matter of time before life on earth as we know it becomes impossible and a mass extinction happens on earth (again, I'm convinced that none of this will actually happen, but the point is that the claim is being made that it will);
2) Also according to the "Predicted and Scheduled Events" on the same article, NASA plans to launch a "Mars 2020" mission, supposedly to study the habitability of Mars, presumably in preparation for future manned missions (supposedly if Mars proves habitable), including presumably human colonization of Mars, especially if the above doomsday scenario were to make it "necessary";
3) 2020 is the next scheduled United States presidential election, so (barring anything unforeseen) President Donald Trump will presumably run for reelection--and if the economy does well enough, presumably he will be the Republican candidate and might be likely to win--and while President Trump does not oppose the space program, he definitely rejects the "climate change" narrative.
Given all that, while I have no intention of predicting anything more specific, the following scenario would not surprise me one bit (though it's still possible that it won't happen):
The idea that, come 2020, the Democratic presidential campaign may exercise scaremongering along the lines that, if President Donald Trump were to win reelection, it would literally mean the end of the world as we know it--not immediately, but inevitably, such that the only possible hope the human race would have of avoiding mass extinction would be the space program, and colonizing other planets. And therefore, that the only way to "save the earth" from such a fate would be to vote against President Trump, presumably meaning to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, whoever that turns out to be--ignoring any and all real dangers that such a candidate may believe and intend to do as president, as supposedly a small price to pay and therefore worthwhile.
I don't want to predict anything more specific, but given the Democratic Party's attitude towards Catholic Christianity, as well as what the Democratic Party has done with its presidential campaigns of the last several years, I believe it's healthy to be concerned as to who they will nominate in 2020 (especially if they do use such scaremongering tactics), and I believe that I was right to leave the Democratic Party now, and that (while my intentions were good) I was wrong to rejoin the Democratic Party back in February of this year. The Democratic Party has become steadily more pro-abortion and pro-homosexuality, and therefore more anti-Catholic--and yet it has consistently nominated formal Catholics (yet Catholics who reject fundamental Catholic moral teaching), either for President or at least for Vice President, every presidential election since 2004: John Kerry in 2004, Joe Biden in 2008 and 2012, and Tim Kaine in 2016. Unless the next major schism in the Catholic Church were to happen before then, I see no reason to think that they will not do the same thing in 2020: that the Democratic candidate for President and/or for Vice President in 2020 will be formally Catholic, but who will fiercely put the Democratic Party's anti-Catholic platform before the actual Catholic faith.
Even if the above is right, though (and I'm going to stop there in terms of predictions), I don't want to go so far as to do any fearmongering myself. I don't want to claim that voting for Donald Trump (which I myself did NOT do in 2016) is somehow necessary in order to save the Church in the United States of America, especially given how far from saintly Donald Trump has consistently proven to be. The Church's fate is in God's hands, not the hands of any creature, angel or man. At best, I don't think that Donald Trump is as big of an immediate threat to the Church. While I believe it would be gravely sinful to vote Democratic in 2020 (assuming the above scenario is correct), and at best I would be violating my conscience if I did so, that is NOT the same thing as saying that the only moral choice is to vote Republican, to vote for Donald Trump. We need to get out of that false dichotomy thinking, and I still thank the Lord for showing me the many false dichotomy traps that the world has put us into.
And the only way we can have hope of that is to root ourselves in Jesus Christ.
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This brings me to another topic that I think it prudent to mention here, namely a realization that I came to about the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
Having already learned that these relate to entrusting our property, our bodies, and our wills to God, I was made to realize that these evangelical counsels point to a divinely ordained hierarchy that is the goal we should all be striving for:
1) obedience means God is above man;
2) chastity means the human soul is above the human body;
3) poverty means man is above his property.
If we do not believe that human beings are more important than their property, their wealth, we will become enslaved to non-persons, and to greed for more wealth and fear of losing what we have (and distrust that others might steal it from us, or be rivals to us in getting more)--and at worst, we will be willing to kill and die over trifling inanimate objects. We're not all called to sell all our possessions and donate it to the poor, but we are all called to give alms to the poor, what we can spare and what is needed.
If we do not believe that the soul is more important than the body, then we will become enslaved to our bodily appetites, such as for food and for sex, as well as for any and all bodily pleasures and comforts--and to our emotions and passions. At worst, we will be willing to hold others in our thrall solely in order to satisfy our own sexual appetites, and we will live in fear and distrust of all. We're not all called to be celibate, but we are all called to fast sometimes (when appropriate, and at least the minimum the Church requires), and to live chastely. If we are neither insane nor possessed by demons, we have no excuse for not being in control of our own bodies.
If we do not believe that God is more important than man, then we will have a yearning in our heart that can never be satisfied--and if we will not humble ourselves and turn to Him to satisfy it, then we will not only seek satisfaction in vain, but at worst we will seek scapegoats to blame for this fact, and so punish them unjustly. We're not all called to take vows of obedience, nor to pray the entirety of the Divine Office, but we are all called to pray some, and to go to Mass regularly, and to do at least the minimum that God and the Church require of us.
The specific relevance that this has given the above suspicions about the near future is that we need to let our reason govern our emotions if we're to avoid falling victim to fearmongering. And our reason can only properly do this if it willingly subjects itself to the God who made it.
This is another way of understanding the old adage that courage is not the absence of the anxious feeling of fear, but the refusal to let that anxiety paralyze us into inaction when something must be done and we must be the ones to do it. It's okay to feel fear: Our Lord Himself felt it in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is letting that fear override us, not merely feeling it, that makes cowards of us.
And I would be a hypocrite if I pretended that I wasn't a fearful person, even unto letting my fears prevent me from saying or doing things that I want to, even at this point in my life. But I recognize this as a flaw, and I want to rely on the Lord to help me to become braver, especially since I believe I'm going to need it in the near future.
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Merry Christmas to you all, and have a happy and blessed Christmas season.
Christ is born! Glorify Him!
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