Orthodox Christian, America Firster, former US Senate candidate for Delaware, and current babe Lauren Witzke posted a meme to her Telegram page a few days ago featuring a rainbow with the Cross emblazoned in front of it, with the captions “June is Christianity Month” and “Reclaim the Rainbow.”
It’s a clever meme, of course, because June has become Pride Month, a month dedicated to forced corporate celebrations of abiological and immoral lifestyles.
In the spirit of yesterday’s post, which also dealt with a passage from Ecclesiastes, I thought I’d dust off an old post from my The Desperate Search for Meaning Series, which I completed back in 2019. A double-shot of Ecclesiastes, and the long-winded (but condensed here) wisdom of Pastor Monday is always a nice treat.
With that very brief introduction, here is October 2019’s “The Desperate Search for Meaning IV: Vanity“:
My pastor delivered an interesting sermon this past Sunday (23 May 2021) entitled “Recognizing the Passing Seasons of Life.” The sermon pulled from the famous passage from Ecclesiastes 3, explaining that “To everything there is a season” and there is “a time for every purpose under heaven.”
I’ve always loved Ecclesiastes and its central insight that without God, everything is meaningless. The perpetual turning of the seasons—the cycle of birth, preparation, harvest, and death—is similarly meaningless—an endless cycle—without God.
Pastor Monday took a slightly different approach, one that is still very important: we so often abuse, misuse, or waste the time we have. The season of preparation—planning ahead, planting our seeds, tending to them, etc.—is frequently squandered; as a result, the harvest is lacking. We all want the harvest without the preparation, but a harvest that lacks preparation is no harvest at all—or a harvest of dust.
I stumbled upon the psychotherapist and author Adam Lane Smith when Mogadishu Matt wrote a “Sunny Side Up” book review of Smith’s action-comedy novel Maxwell Cain: Burrito Avenger (readers will forgive me for noting that my own book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot was featured in the inaugural “Sunny Side Up” review). I have yet to purchase any of Smith’s works yet, though I intend to pick up copies of Maxwell Cain and books from his Deus Vult Wastelanders series.
I have, however, signed up for Smith’s e-mail list—the least any potential supporter can do—and have enjoyed his e-mail blasts. One recent message caught my eye: a blog post entitled “Time to Fix a Problem.”
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It’s Easter Weekend 2021! Unlike last Easter, which was “decidedly un-Eastery” in The Age of The Virus, this Easter is starting to go back to normal. By the time you read this post, I will have had my second shot of the Pfizer vaccine, so I’m either fully medically acceptable to our cosmopolitan elites—or dead. Gulp! I’m not sure which is worse.
Regardless, more and more folks are vaccinated, and churches have been reopened for many months now here in the South (they never should have been shuttered in the first place). I fully expect that tomorrow will see a return, albeit a perhaps socially-distanced, diminished return, to the jam-packed Easter services of The Before Times, in the Long, Long Ago.
Easter is the most important holiday in the Christian calendar, probably in a dead-heat with Christmas. Just as Christmas celebrates Christ’s Birth, Easter commemorates His Resurrection—the ultimate testament to Christ’s Victory over Death, the Devil, and the Grave.
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Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day last Friday caught my attention: according to Rasmussen, 49% of voters say their highest loyalty is to their families. Another 22% identified their faith as their highest loyalty.
That’s certainly encouraging. In theory, my faith to Christ is my highest priority, although like many Christians, that’s not always the case in practice. In practice—and in a practical, day-to-day sense—my family is my top priority, even if they’re an hour or two away.
The two, however, seem inextricably tied. Some years ago I heard someone (probably Dennis Prager) say that the three keys to happiness are faith, family, and work (most likely in that order). Faith in God gives us purpose (indeed, God gives us our Creation—our very existence). Family gives us people who love us, those we support and those who support us in turn. Work gives us a sense of accomplishment—the satisfaction of a job well done.
South Carolina has a reputation for orneriness—we were the first State to secede from the Union in 1860, after all, and threatened to do it nearly thirty years earlier, during the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33—and it seems our Catholic priests are particularly prone to use their pulpits to prescribe some red-pills. Priest Jeffrey Kirby delivered a fiery homily warning that with Biden’s election, the Church faces real persecution in the days ahead, and scolded parishioners who cast their votes for Biden as betraying their Catholic faith:
Priests and preachers usually shy away from overtly political sermons, but we’re overdue for some Truth. We’re not discussing Democrats versus Republicans anymore; we’re talking about electing Evil—those that flaunt their desire to slay the unborn—and even the recently born!—and celebrate every opportunity they can force us to accept another progressive indignity. Trannies reading storybooks to four-year olds isn’t a “blessing of liberty,” per wincing, politically-correct, noodle-wristed, mainstream Evangelical David French—it’s an assault on our values and our culture. If they can make us accept something so ridiculous and patently unnatural—wicked!—then it puts that wedge in the door to pry it open to all manner of government-sanctioned evil.
Father Kirby’s bold sermon reminded me of another great warrior for Christ—and for Life: Father Robert “Bob” Morey. Father Bob is less bombastic in his denunciation of evil, but he is nonetheless a true warrior for his Faith. In October 2019, Father Bob declined to give Joe Biden Holy Communion due to Biden’s pro-abortion—pro-infanticide, I should write—stance.
As such, I thought it would be a good time to look at Father Bob’s bold stance for life in this week’s TBT. Here is October 2019’s “Warrior for Life“:
It’s the last Sunday of 2020, so in keeping with last year’s tradition, today’s Lazy Sunday is dedicated to reviewing the Top Five posts (in terms of views) for 2020.
The posts below are not the top five in terms of views all-time. Instead, I’m featuring the top five published in 2020. Indeed, there were several posts from 2019 that blew these out of the water (all view totals are at the time of writing, 22 December 2020): “Tom Steyer’s Belt” (2864 views), “Napoleonic Christmas” (295 views), “Christmas and its Symbols” (212 views), and others.
So, again, these are the Top Five Posts of 2020, published in 2020. All numbers are as of 22 December 2020, so there could be some shifts:
1.) “The Cultural Consequences of the American Civil War” (254 views) – This post was adapted from a lengthy comment I made on a post at Nebraska Energy Observer, “What Do You Think?” by Audre Myers. The comment sparked some good feedback, so I made it into a post. Rachel Fulton Brown shared the post on her Telegram chat and her personal Facebook page, which really boosted the numbers. The post discusses the oft-forgotten cultural and spiritual consequences of the Confederate loss to Yankee materialist imperialism. I’m no closeted Neo-Confederate, but I tried to offer up a nuanced take on the downside to Union victory, and what was lost when the South fell.
2.) “Thalassocracy” (201 views) – This post really surprised me with its success. I wrote it mostly as an after-thought—the situation with many posts when I’m churning out daily material—but the topic interested me. Based on the limited search term information WordPress gives me, it turns out that many people were searching the unusual term for the same reason I was: the video game Stellaris. In searching for the meaning of “thalassocracy,” I stumbled upon a lengthy essay on the fragility of thalassocracies—nations and empires that build their fortunes on naval prowess, rather than substantial ground forces. It’s an interesting (and long) essay, but hopefully my humble post sums it up well enough.
3.) “You Can’t Cuck the Tuck III: Liberty in The Age of The Virus” (87 views) – As you can see from the numbers, the posts begin dropping off a bit in views from here on out, though I consider anything over fifty views pretty solid for this humble blog. This piece explored the destruction of liberties in The Age of The Virus, something that I find has occurred with shocking ease, and which continues to ever more ludicrous extremes.
4.) “Big Deal” (78 views) – This post was about Joe Rogan’s move to Spotify, and his own implicit sell-out to social justice cuckery. I can’t account for its mild popularity, other than it was a timely post that touched on a widespread sentiment on the Right.
5.) “The God Pill, Part II” (76 views) – This piece reviewed former pick-up artist Roosh V’s dramatic conversion to Orthodox Christianity (covered in “The God Pill“; read the whole series here), and his decision to unpublish his bestseller, Game. That decision has really cost him financially—he recently took a gig doing construction work in Alabama for a few weeks, and is apparently back living with his parents in Maryland—but it was the right move spiritually. Many thought Roosh was converting as a way to reinvent himself to make an extra buck, but he really seems to be putting his faith first. Kudos to him.
That’s it! It’s hard to believe another year is in the books. Thanks to everyone for reading, and for your ongoing support. It can be difficult to maintain the pace of posting at times, but your feedback and comments really keep me going.
God Bless—and Happy New Year!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
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Here we are—another Christmas Eve. It’s a night full of magic, mysticism, and wonder—the Light and holy version of Halloween, when the tenuous division between our corporeal existence and the supernatural world is thin.
Last year I wrote of my family’s Christmas Eve traditions, which are changing up a bit again this year. In lieu of the usual evening candlelight service, we’re going to an afternoon service at a church in my younger brother’s neck of the woods. Afterwards, we’ll be enjoying Chinese food—a newer tradition for us—and some fondue, a tradition from my sister-in-law’s side of the family. We’re beginning to sound like 1970s Jews on Christmas.
Here’s wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas tomorrow—and some Christmas Eve merriment tonight! With that, here is 24 December 2019’s “Christmas Eve“:
