“Beloved: who is the liar? Whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Whoever denies the Father and the Son, this is the antichrist.”—1 John 2: 22-28
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Today is the Feast of Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors of the Church; and this was the beginning to today’s first reading.
Why does it matter? To what does it speak? Who were the two saints, and why do they matter?
Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen were fourth century Catholic bishops that countered the Arian heresy within the early church. What was the Arian heresy: an early movement within the church that sought to assert Jesus was not in fact the son of God but merely a prophet and instructor and that Jesus was never resurrected. A movement that sought to rob the religion, faith, of its fundamental wonder and glory.
Reading the description, a phrase jumped out loudly to me with a follow-on contemplation. Arian heresy: this is the second time in three days that the phrase and its explanation has appeared, and been explained, in something I have read. The first appeared in a book by Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust, speaking:
“In the pages of church history we find a luminous illustration of the devastating consequences wrought by an unbalanced attention to one or the other aspects of the Godhead (incomprehensible in the transcendent and engaging and present in the living immanent). It started with the greatest of all the ancient heresies, Arianism, which denied the divinity of Christ. The issue was momentous: if Jesus was not divine, he was just another batch of chemicals that decay in a tomb…and hope died on Calvary.”
Arian: the word and its explanation of heresy stuck with me then. Returned and repeated again this morning, combined with the words of Saint John in his letter, it embellished the thought.
In our recent twentieth-century history, we think of Arian with a “y” Aryan, and a master race of a madman. What, if by a trick of a letter, a greater intent was veiled. Was Hitler the, or an, antichrist? Would that explain his hate for all humanity—especially the Jews—his love for control, his false posture of strength that was empowered and enabled by human fear and concession to obvious evils masked with pretty words; and his final act of cowardice when his war against the kingdom—if not of God, then living humanity on earth—failed and capture neared in closing in?
Absurd? Maybe, but I believe there is enough there to give legitimacy to further time in contemplation and consideration not so that we might better understand then but better perceive repetition of patterns in our present day.
Evil changes faces. It doesn’t change in essence.
Maybe the antichrist returns and challenges man again and again in different ages, when evil discerns a weakness, complacency, or irrepressible swell of rage and contempt for the unworthiness of man as prime receiver of God’s infinite love and free will—to worship, or to not. In this rage, contempt, or perceiving of opportunity, evil returns incarnate—just as God will again, someday (or perhaps already has in like-repeating pattern)—to challenge and seek mankind’s destruction, most especially the Church and his chosen people.
Maybe that’s why, as long as there is an Israel, there will always be war in the Holy Land. The answer is not to surrender the space, the Holy, but to remain vigilant and combatant against what rises from tunnels dug for the purpose of Hell to conduct terror and violence against a far from perfect, but still believing people.
Arian’s sought to kill the Church in its nascence. Aryans sought to kill the Church and God’s chosen in our almost-present. Voices of the world raise cries against the chosen today for standing up to an evil that came out of the darkness to murder, kidnap, and rape on a holy day.
Evil is real. It doesn’t change its essence.
Evil hates God, which is something far different than a passive and uncertain absence of belief. Evil choses a side; and it is never the God, and Love, Jesus communed by life and message into this world. Evil cannot stand that God’s love is real, and—of all creatures—that man is Its greatest recipient. Unable to defeat God and Good: mankind is made the target, and even agent for evil’s prosecution (In the end, absent first word in a sentence, evil is always little in light to the Greater of Good).
Contemplating the letter trick and presentation of man in veiling of evil’s entrance into the fate and histories of man, are there any other lettered tricks (or simple imperfect translations through times, languages, and human hands)?
I believe it relevant to distinguish and call to light another. Maybe it is a crazy contemplation, or maybe there is a truth. Another quote from Ruthless Trust:
“Send in the artists, mystics, and clowns. Their fertile imagination pours the new wine of the gospel into fresh wineskins. With fresh language, poetic vision, and striking symbols, they express God’s inexpressible Word in artistic forms that are charged with the power of God, engaging our minds and stirring our hearts as they flare and flame.”
If I am clown to consider and speak, then a clown I shall be.
What is the word?
Maozism.
It is not a word that appears in any Protestant Bible. It was changed, or erased, in the first translation from the Catholic Latin Vulgate. It is removed in most modern Catholic versions as well, but it remains in the Douay-Rheims translation, and Vulgate, from which the Douay-Rheims is traced as the first and most direct translation of the original Latin Word.
It appears in the Book of Daniel (Daniel 11: 38), and it is the new idol in age of the apocalypse. Was Daniel’s vision witness of foreshadow to a fate in a nearing present-time?
Why not Maoism? The state-worship of human idol for rising geopolitical godless collective? As China postures for action against Taiwan; and America acts with confusion to what it is and believes (down to the very literal composition of our DNA and definition of who we are, truths as simple as sex presented as complex conundrums eradicated by the simple dismissal and non-entertainment of nonsense); why should not a dynamic change in the human condition change in a post-god, nuclear world where America is no longer the overseeing and controlling force (there is a symbol of beast in Daniel as well that speaks to American impotence if one cares to read and consider for one’s self).
What is happening to China’s nuclear commanders? Why are they being removed? Who oversees control? With a new world standard of war, just as with Japan and Pearl Harbor; how might the shock and awe announcement of WWIII, and by whom, appear?
Maybe it is written.
“Send in the artists, mystics, and clowns. Their fertile imagination pours the new wine of the gospel into fresh wineskins. With fresh language, poetic vision, and striking symbols, they express God’s inexpressible Word in artistic forms that are charged with the power of God, engaging our minds and stirring our hearts as they flare and flame.”
Enter the artists, mystics, and clowns again into the histories.
And another perspective: evil has never won out in its end and aim. Why should this time be different?
I don’t believe it will. Again and again, mankind is saved from whatever transient and passing hell appearing on this earth.
How?
Faith.
By one believer, a city is saved from judgement: mankind survives and, imperfect, is given further chance.
Keep the Faith. Always, keep the faith.