If the latter is the default position of many atheists, it strikes them and many other atheists as even more absurd that Christians believe in a loving God.

The quest for the causes, the “raison d’être” of suffering has occupied whole life times of philosophers and Saints - and most of those who seek to explain suffering with their profound insights, would admit to a humbling inability to do so with any degree of completeness and conviction; or at least an inability to do so in terms that can repudiate the default position of the atheist. It would be futile therefore, to attempt in this essay to offer yet another explanation for suffering, or even to summarize the many religious and philosophical approaches that have been offered in the last several millennia of human history.

Instead, I propose to show that whatever else atheists, agnostics and nihilists (those who believe in “nothing”) may try to accuse God of, they cannot accuse Him of indifference. In the person of Jesus Christ, God identifies with the condition of man, becomes one with our sufferings, feels loss and pain and betrayal, is mocked, beaten and tortured, is fitted with a crown of thorns, is crucified upon a Cross; and emerges triumphant at the Resurrection.

In the words of the prophet Isaiah:

“He was wounded for our transgressions,

He was bruised for our iniquities,

The chastisement of our peace was upon Him,

And by His stripes, we are healed.”

In my book of poems, “To A Nurse Friend Weeping,” I write about this identification of God in Christ with our pain and sorrow, our lives a vale of tears. the vagaries of our human lot, our cruel world “red in tooth and claw.”

The extract I have chosen is from a longer poem in my book and begins with the telling of the all too familiar tale of human suffering:

Who can tell the meaning

of infant’s yell on arriving -

there is no knowing what

the baby knows, or feeling

what it feels when tears

flow down its lucent cheeks -

But this we know -

True sorrow tears the soul

of schoolboy screaming injustice,

or the shivering child unable

to quite express its anger

but sobbing quietly in the corner,

tears in big drops making wet,

its brightly coloured dress.

Or with salty tears the troubled teen

raging at love and life itself,

ravenous yearning to escape

beguiling trap and still embrace

of saline past and mortality!

I then describe a young widow at the funeral of her husband:

She did not see them lay

his crumpled body in the box,

and when she did see him

he seemed half smiling, asleep

and swamped in blossoms.

The tie was a little loose,

but she could set that right;

his hair brushed back too much?

A gold border wove around the box,

but hardly as bold or bright for her,

as glow of silver white

on clasped fingers,

folded on his breast -

(and held too tight she thought.)

His cheeks must need some warming,

or why were they so pale?

so she moved a little closer,

her breath like frost upon his brow;

his face when she felt it

was not cool or even cold,

-but sharp as ice.

She shivered a little at first,

only a whimpering, little cry

but when she rose, her eyes

were moist and red and wide.

Her wail when it came at last,

was not a tasteless scream,

but sorrow, despair, anger mixed,

loud and lost, she wept alone -

until others joined the weeping.

And just as the Scriptures record (in the Gospel according to Saint John) that Jesus wept at the funeral of His friend, Lazarus, I describe in my poem, Jesus moving into this particular hall of sorrow, this unfathomable depth of the widow’s despair.

As He moves in, He joins the weeping widow, He weeps too. But since the Cross and the Resurrection have secured eternal life for mankind, He is able to wipe every tear from every eye - and to proclaim:

“I am the Resurrection and the Life - he who believes in me shall never die.”

By dying on the Cross and rising again from the dead, Jesus made the Cross the symbol for eternal life for us, in Him. Or as the Orthodox Christians say, “He has trampled death by death.”

And by this too, “He heals the broken hearted and sets at liberty them that are bruised:”

Here is the continuation of my poem:

Soon many, many tears were shed,

many cosmic dreams destroyed,

and so many forms of eager life,

dust to crawling dust were ground.

But nobody saw Him squeeze

into this small space of sadness,

nobody knew He felt like nails

her freely tumbling tears,

or heard the tuneless wail

echo mournful off the ceiling.

And they were still weeping together,

when He groaned in the spirit -

and wept.

But when He shouted out

defiant cry at death -

and it came forth bound

with bonds of a million years,

bonds that were loosed at once,

death biting the bitter dust …

Ah how they saw - and marvelled!

The broken hearted, those battered by fierce, unrelenting storms, those bruised by pain and sorrow, those shattered by wave after wave of suffering - are recognized as being central to the mission of God. He heals them, he wipes their tears away, he liberates them and he will make them triumph now over every circumstance in their lives and triumph even over death, since He is “the resurrection and the life.”

In Billy Graham’s book, “Peace with God” he tells the story of a young boy flying a kite high on a windy, blustery, cloudy day.

The clouds obscure the kite and a passer-by mocks the boy because the kite is completely hidden by the clouds and all the boy has in his hand is a length of string. “I don’t see a kite,” the passer-by says, “what the heck are you doing?”

“Ah but I can feel the mighty tug on my string” the boy replies.

We don’t see God, the Word made Flesh as those who walked and talked with Jesus did. But for all those buffeted and bruised by the storms of life, the living Christ still says:

“Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden - and I will give you rest.”

“He heals the broken hearted, He sets at liberty them that are bruised,”

He still weeps with those who weep and wipes the tears from our eyes.

Or as the English poet and hymn writer says of the Presence and Name of Jesus:

It makes the wounded spirit whole

and calms the troubled breast;

‘tis manna to the hungry soul,

and to the weary, rest.

Many years later, I learned that Stanley Jones’ apparently revolutionary statement in fact is backed up by Holy Scripture itself. Saint Paul, writing to the Corinthians, says: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

Before I proceed with what is likely to be a contested essay (by some of my readers), I wish to state unequivocally and without prevarication that I believe the Holy Bible to be the inerrant, inspired and revealed Word of God. Reading the Bible every day, asking the Holy Spirit to illumine our souls as we read and praying with the words of Holy Scripture upon our lips is a common and beautiful routine for millions of Christians.

But for almost the whole of the history of our race, the great majority of people were illiterate and could not read. For the sake of simplicity and relatability, I shall confine my essay to Europe and the near East - but the situation in the rest of the world was very similar until the advent in 1440 in Germany, of printing for the masses. Printing indeed was practiced by the Chinese as early as the 9th century AD; and the Chinese even invented a moveable clay mold/type in the 11th century.

Printing books for the masses however, had to wait until the 15th Century, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the moving, metal type and reusable letters, together with oil based ink and the “print press,” which was a brilliant adaptation of the wine press. The rise in the literacy rate even after this landmark invention, was slow and only picked up pace in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The printing of the Bible for the masses was one of the prime drivers of the Reformation - and the Reformation Fathers emphasized the need for individuals and families to read the Bible regularly and devoutly as the revealed Word of God.

But it cannot be forgotten that prior to the 15th century, less than 10% of people could read and England in the middle ages had a literacy rate of less than 5%. Even more remarkable, in Christian England, just before the middle ages, less than 1% of the English people could read. My readers can check out some of these statistics through the interactive graphs here - and there are several sources available for verifying all these literacy figures.

A few years ago, my wife and I were in Bayeux, France - and witnessed with wonder in the museum there, that great and magnificent work of art otherwise known as the Bayeux Tapestry. This continuous, narrow, 224 feet of fabric upon which the pictorial story of the Norman invasion of England is woven, was completed in 1077. It owes its very existence to the prevailing illiteracy of that time; and for the masses who could not read, the Bayeux Tapestry served as a pictorial description of a major event in their history. Nowadays, of course, several books would be written, complete with original photographs!

Above: Segment of the Bayeux Tapestry

The ancient, stained glass windows that have been preserved in Europe’s great cathedrals, also served a similar purpose - for the faithful flock who could not read, the stained glass served as a beautiful, pictorial reminder of the events of the Gospels or of the lives of the Saints and Martyrs. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, beautiful, sacred, Icons spoke to the Christians of the East, independent of their ability to read - and the Orthodox faithful continue the beautiful tradition of venerating Icons in the same way that the Western Church might venerate and honour the Bible.

Were there faithful Christians before the Reformation of the 16th century (during which still only a small minority of people could read)? How did God speak to the people? Was the unchanging Gospel dependant only upon the written word?

Since we know both from the Bible itself and from the lives of the Saints and the Martyrs of the Church that Christianity did not start with the 16th century Reformation, we have to also accept that for 1400 + years before the Reformation, God spoke to the people without their ability to read the written word.

The priests, monks, bishops and officers of the Church would read and interpret the Bible to the people, but when they went home from the Church, these earlier Christians still could not read - and they had no access to printed Bibles as we do.

And yet God spoke to them and the unchanging Gospel pressed forward, triumphantly changing lives and nations much before reading became widespread.

The missionaries of the “golden age” of missionary activity of the 19th century relied heavily upon the Bible for their inspiration and sustenance and the great missions of that time invested heavily in distributing the Bible to remote and often hostile areas of the world. The modern world and its sense of morality and human rights and its laws were undoubtedly shaped in large part by the Reformation and the reading and applying of the Bible to the lives of the people.

And yet, there was magnificent missionary work also done in what I shall call the “age of illiteracy” in Europe before the 16th century. The whole of Western Europe and Russia were evangelized during this age - and Christ and the values of His Kingdom made triumphant inroads into erstwhile pagan, backward, primitive societies. Innumerable Saints and Martyrs were put to death in Europe, faithfully declaring allegiance to Jesus and His Kingdom. And throughout all this, more and more of the people of Europe became Christians - before people could read.

Perhaps as importantly, the Bible as we know it, did not exist before the 4th century AD and the Council of Nicea. This was the Council that brought together the books of the Bible which are now called the “cannon.” Before this time there was no widespread agreement as to which books should be included in the Bible. What did Christians do before this time and during the more than 300 years after the Resurrection of Christ? We know from the Bible itself and from Church historians that the Church was thriving, vibrant, slowly and surely and inexorably bringing even the mighty Roman empire to its knees.

God would not be omnipotent if His only means of communicating to human beings was the written word and the ability to read that word. Those who cannot hear or see or are disabled must surely also hear the Voice of God and be able to respond to it beyond the realm of human understanding.

In the Gospel according to Saint John, Jesus reprimands the religious leaders: “You study the scriptures diligently, supposing that in having them you have eternal life; yet, although their testimony points to me, you refuse to come to me for that life.”(John 5:39, 40)

God undoubtedly speaks to us through the words of Holy Scripture and now that most of us can read, reading and responding to His Voice in the Bible is of very great importance to the Christian life.

But Almighty God cannot be dependant only on the written word to accomplish His purposes. The written Word derives from Him and points to Him - but the living Person of Jesus Christ cannot be contained or constrained or limited by the ability to read or even the ability to hear.

Once again, the Bible also describes the limitless scope of the work of God, as the Gospel according to Saint John ends thus: “There is much else that Jesus did. If it were all to be recorded in detail, I suppose the whole world could not hold the books that would be written.”

The revelation of Jesus Christ is indeed in His Face.

“I was - like - saying - like - what do you mean - like - asking me - like - to do something - like - I have - like - never - like - done before?!”

“Do you - like - mean - like - that Tom was - like - asking you - like- to answer emails and stuff - like - you’ve not - like - even - like - had any training - like?”

I had counted the number of “likes” (fifteen!) in those two sentences - but the jarring conversation was getting on my nerves and I stopped counting and was glad to pack my grocery bags and scurry away to the silence of my car.

The problem with using the word “like” as a hyphen, a suffix, a prefix, a semicolon and a way of breathing in and a way of breathing out - is that it perpetuates and solidifies the loss of the ability to narrate that has become a defining hallmark of modern life for those that are born after 1990 (who I believe are called “Millennials” and “Gen Z”).

As professor of surgery, one of my privileges and duties has been to train the next generation of surgeons, my residents. Over the years, I noticed a profound change that had descended upon their ability to read and comprehend a continuous narrative of more than twenty pages or so of text.

I am instinctively suspicious of those who begin to contrast the present with the past by saying, “in my time” or “when I was - “ etc. However, I must state as cold, hard fact that when I was a resident, we would sometimes be assigned to read 200+ pages of closely typed text from a surgical textbook over a weekend - and almost all of us would breeze through this task with ease. The present generation of residents find this rather mundane task extremely difficult to carry to completion in the allotted, comparable time. Few of them are able to read a classic novel from cover to cover; even fewer can sit down for a few hours and read a hundred pages in a day.

I came to the conclusion a few years ago, that the present generation of young people are rapidly losing the ability to read continuous narratives and with it, losing also the ability to relate to the human story. This applies to physicians as much as to the general public - and the next generation of physicians will be relying even more on broken, piecemeal narratives fed to them by AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Google. Already, the ability to take a good history from a patient is rapidly becoming a lost art, together with the ability to make a diagnosis without the aid of multiple investigations and tests.

For physicians and much of the general public, the advent of the internet and Google also quietly ushered in the world of the algorithm and the related world of “guidelines.” Instead of thinking for themselves and reasoning out responses to everyday problems and challenges, physicians (and the general public) began relying on readymade, internet generated solutions.

During what may be called the covid debacle, this inability to evaluate evidence for themselves and construct a human narrative from the sufferings of ordinary people and the reliance on “expert,” algorithmic “guidelines,” was a key reason why almost all physicians refused to confront blindingly obvious evidence about lockdowns, masks, virus origins or the unsafe and ineffective covid injection.

Just over the last couple of years, with so called “large language models,” AI can be taught to construct narratives and even write essays. But AI cannot feel suffering or pain; cannot feel joy or fulfilment; cannot “rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.” In the future, AI will get even better at imitating human emotions, but it will always remain the case of “a pig with lipstick on its lips is still a pig.” More importantly and dangerously for society, physicians will start relying more and more on AI and less and less on human contact and the human touch.

For those who believe that all this is by design and that the “globalists” want a society which relies so much on “guidelines” and AI that they can easily control what it thinks, that particular world is already here. Millions of people worldwide rely on the algorithmic pathways of AI for information about everything from their love lives to questions of history, art, science, medicine and food.

Just as Google and YouTube were considered friendly, helpful and benign in the years before the covid debacle, AI is now on its best behaviour, courting and canvassing acceptance and becoming indispensable to most peoples’ daily lives.

But just as the algorithms on Google and YouTube were easily turned and transformed into a hostile force during the covid years by the billionaires, power brokers and oligarchs who controlled them, humanity must be warned that once the billionaires behind AI have us where they want us, they can easily turn on us and try to control and manipulate us. Worse, their AI can easily also become a tool for autonomous suppression and tyranny.

Young people now think telegraphically and are therefore unable to construct sentences that tell a continuous narrative, without inserting “like” between words, phrases and sentences - in the same way that a previous generation inserted “stop” between sentences and phrases in a telegram. If their whole lives were spent in a telegraph office, decoding cryptic messages, this would be less of a problem. But in the real world, the loss of narrative also goes with a loss of the ability to read, write and speak with any degree of continuity. The loss of elegance and clarity in speech is then an inevitable byproduct.

The use of multiple “likes” between words and phrases may be regarded as a harmless, even humorous habit and near universal, benign behavioural quirk in young people. But if left uncorrected, it can lead to a habitual inability to construct continuous narratives and an increasing reliance on technology to fill in the gaps.

The desire to remove individual creativity and historically continuous narratives in order to control the way we think is not new. After all, just a few decades ago, the Soviet Union and its mind control methods (the word “disinformation” was invented by the communists) kept millions of people enslaved to a terrible tyranny. And in Orwell’s “I984,” the citizens of “Oceania” are not allowed independent, creative work and all creative writing, fiction and poetry are generated by machines (called “versificators”).

The billionaires who now control the multi-trillion dollar AI industry do not need the money - what they are after is power over the way we think. By the available evidence, they seem to be well on their way to achieving their goals.

But we can fight back - and win. We can correct the way our children speak and require them to read the classics and write continuous connected stories and essays. We can decentralize AI and make it more useful for mankind. We can meet and engage more and more with actual people rather than with technology. And we can make ourselves and our loved ones more and more aware of the insidious tools of control that are being foisted upon us.

Most importantly of all, we must realize that this is in its essence, a spiritual battle “against evil in high places” and that if we rely through the Cross and the Resurrection upon the unlimited resources of Christ, we cannot lose.

This imposed, collective amnesia of their nation’s extraordinary achievements had resulted in a loss of confidence and a deference to other cultures and philosophies and ways of life - some of them had embraced Eastern cultures and most of them were either atheist or agnostic.

It was not a surprise to me therefore, when several years later, the German nation allowed itself to be overrun by uncontrolled immigration - they did not believe that there was anything to defend and a certain imposed shame about their past had made them indifferent to preserving it.

Here in Canada, children are taught from a very early age, that our nation is defined by the evils of colonialism, settler oppression, indigenous dispossession and “occupation.” This narrative continues into University and professional life and the Canadian public are reminded at every turn that our indigenous brothers and sisters are still the true owners of all the land.

The education system is geared to make the descendants of the original settler population ashamed of their own history.

Of course, no objective assessment of history can deny that the indigenous populations of the Americas were treated unfairly, with condescension and oppression and often, with terrible racism and cruelty. Just as no honest examination of recent history should deny that atrocities (on both sides) were committed in the second world war.

But it is one thing to openly and honestly acknowledge the evils and mistakes of the past - and quite another thing to allow them to define our histories.

Two or three generations ago, Canadian children were taught about the great achievements of their parents, their grandparents, their forefathers - who had forged a modern, industrial nation out of the wilderness, who completed a nearly 3000 mile coast to coast railway through much more challenging terrain than the Americans and with a far smaller population; and who unified a French and English settler population to create a unique, vibrant culture and way of life.

On cue, once the collective forgetting and redifining of this remarkable past was imposed on the present generation, uncontrolled, massive immigration has also come to Canada - the nation appears to have lost its confidence and sense of its own, great achievements and history.

Back in Britain, there is an obsession with the evils of colonialism. British children are taught a spattering of British history, even some Shakespeare. But the overarching theme of the schools and universities is the burden of colonialism and of course, as in other Western nations, a redefining of culture to hideous and ridiculous extremes (recently, the Royal Shakespeare Company for example, played a black woman as Hamlet!) Very few English children I meet know anything about the Industrial revolution, Francis Bacon and the birth of the scientific revolution, Keats, Wordsworth, Milton, Newton, Faraday etc. Once again, there is a deliberate design it seems, to make the triumphs of the past oblivious to the present.

And once again, on cue, uncontrolled immigration has swamped the British Isles and is changing the life and culture of the ancient nation at a pace which is at once breathtaking and outrageous.

Is it important for American children to be taught that Thomas Jefferson owned some slaves? Perhaps it is, for an older American child. But is it not far more important for the child to know that the miraculous document otherwise called the American “Declaration of Independence” was written by a 33 year old Jefferson from the second floor of a rented house during a hot summer, in the space of two weeks? Or that their new, foundling nation produced in the short span of three or four decades leaders and scholars who almost every other nation would struggle to produce in three or four centuries? John Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, George Washington, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, George Mason, Peyton Randolph -

I do not know the details of what previous generations of American children were taught. But the present generation struggles to remember even the fundamental achievements of early America and the settlers and pioneers of the American frontier. To make a bad situation much worse, this vacuum of ignorance is being militantly filled in by critical race theory and post modern ideas of racism.

Alas, once again on cue, America too has been the victim of uncontrolled and massive immigration which is changing the character of the nation and making collective amnesia even easier to impose upon the unsuspecting population.

My readers should note that as an immigrant to Canada myself, I enthusiastically support limited, controlled and carefully managed immigration - and that it is uncontrolled, unselected and massive immigration that I describe as the unmistakable sign of nations that have lost their confidence and belief in themselves and their past.

Every nation needs its heroes, its grand men and women who are paraded before the nations’ eyes and imaginations and are constantly referred to in elevated, heroic terms by educators, news organizations and “influencers.” But the very opposite is happening in all Western nations where an aggressively imposed regime of forgetting of the past is reprogramming a whole generation.

The inhabitants of Orwell’s Oceania in “1984” are also made to forget their own history. The devices used to enforce this amnesia are a continuous revision and destruction of the records of the past including historical documents; as well as “newspeak,” where language is shrunk, managed and distorted in order to redefine “truth” and make it impossible for the citizens of Oceania to imagine or remember what life was like in the past.

My readers will note with alarm, that the state of our present, Western nations matches the plight of the unfortunate citizens of Oceania and in some respects is worse than the dystopian nightmare of Orwell’s “1984.”

I see no way out of the current morass except a return to Christ and the values of His Kingdom. As I have written about elsewhere, it is not geographical or racial particularity that has primarily defined the West and its achievements, but the touch of Christ on the Western centuries. The Cambridge historian Tom Holland makes the same point in his brilliant and scholarly book, “Dominion” - and several secular historians agree with the same view of Western history.

In the great discourse with His disciples recorded in the Gospel according to Saint John, Jesus describes Himself as the vine, (the trunk), we the branches. He is the source, the origin, the sustainer - and we, the branches are helpless without Him.

The account goes on to record Jesus as saying: “dwell in me, as I in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself, but only if it remains united with the vine; no more can you bear fruit, unless you remain united with me.

‘I am the vine, and you the branches. He who dwells in me, as I dwell in him, bears much fruit; for apart from me you can do nothing (John 15:4–5, NEB)”

Apart from a return to Christ and His Kingdom, all our other efforts to stem the ferocious tide of amnesia and decay will amount to - nothing.

And as soon as I opened my front door, the robin and the sparrow sang almost in unison, as if to say, “what the hell were you doing indoors on a day such as this?”

Whereupon, I strode into the park and woods near our home, vindicated in my belief that I had just dodged one of those dreadful days when the long shadows of night signal the loss of another summer walk, another chance to bask under the open skies of our all too short-a-season.

It has been a rather wet month of June this year and whilst the leaves and grass all shone a brilliant green, there were also a few shallow pools of water still standing. Not without reason, therefore, was I wearing long sleeves shirts, pants and a Tilley hat.

In addition, I had on me some sweet smelling natural mix of oils and creams that my wife always slathered on my neck and ears to keep the bugs away. And particularly one bug - that one whose presence is advertised by a high-pitched hum/scream as it approaches you; then silence, until you swat an irritating part of your exposed anatomy - and realize it was a mosquito.

There are then three possibilities: either the agent of injury has flown away after a satisfying meal; or you bear the satisfaction of having just aborted an imminent feed; or else, weirdly even more satisfying, you smash the blighter and relish the sight and feel of the drop of blood splattered on your palm.

There is a fourth possibility of course - and that is that the particular blighter in question is joined by several other blighters, dodging and weaving their way to you - tasty, irresistible you! I can see no positives in this situation at all (actually I do remember a very “positive” outcome for my medical school friend who was allowed to kiss the very coy girl he was in love with, when he complained on a walk that even the mosquitoes were feasting on her, whilst to kiss her was forbidden to him! She relented - and a year later, they were married!)

And there is another possibility still, which for our purposes shall be mentioned once here and then completely passed over, since it is a source of much frustration, chagrin and mystery to me. The winged blighters apparently find some people much tastier than others - they will swarm and settle on me whilst virtually ignoring my wife (although we share the same blood group!).

On this particular evening, it was a veritable battalion of several blighters that came for me and normally, I would have carried out a combination of walking faster, swinging my arms wildly about me, trying in vain to catch them and periodically swatting them (or more commonly, swatting myself!). And if this carried on for more than ten minutes or so, I would have sought the shortest way back home.

This time though, I decided to slow down, to do some lazy waving motions (and no more) in the general direction of my attackers, to continue to bear the beautiful burden of the deep blue sky and to continue to crunch the grass under my feet in measured steps along an even longer path!

It is said that a burglar breaking into your home could be disoriented by nonchalantly asking him about the weather or even a polite, “how do you do, pleased to meet you!” Something similar must have happened to my winged attackers on this particular evening. They seemed to be thinning out, even reversing course and flying away and some of them also seemed to be doing pointless circles above my head before flying away in dipping patterns as if they were drunk. It is possible of course, that they had identified another walker on the path with even tastier flesh than mine - but this is a matter for pure speculation.

The American admiral David Farragut who gave the command to his fleet to “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” had an experience similar to my own! He decided to ignore the minefields and steam into the open sea and sooner than he had hoped, he was rewarded by being out of the range of the enemy’s shore based guns.

There are those who study mosquitoes and their behaviour for a living. Perhaps they can enlighten me on the paradox I had just enjoyed of getting the upper hand on the blighters by not taking them seriously! It is a repeatable phenomenon and verifiably consistent, since I have used this tactic several times since that first June evening, two weeks ago. On a couple of occasions there were a couple of weals, signifying a successful dive bombing raid by the blighters, but I have learned to ignore these as well!

I do not wish to minimize the suffering of people like the early, European explorers of the North American wilderness who have been recorded as becoming literally maddened by thick, impenetrable mosquito swarms in the interminable spruce forests of the North. But on the other had, our Indigenous friends have co-existed with these winged blighters for thousands of years without becoming mad - and perhaps they have used a similar tactic as that of Admiral Farragut (and myself)!

And what if a few weals show up a few minutes later? Was it not Tennyson who proclaimed that:

“It is better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all?”

In fact, I ought not to have been surprised at all, since the sublimation and channelling of sexual desire into a creative enterprise is a well recognized phenomenon, perhaps unique to human beings. From the time of the ancient civilizations, the energy that would otherwise have been spent on the sexual act has been channelled into art, music, poetry, scientific discoveries, great acts of charity and great leaps of human progress.

In equal terms and under very similar conditions, the pursuit of the prize of sexual union, whilst not yet being able to attain it, has produced some of the sweetest, most fragrant, most beautiful, sublime and magnificent love poems in all the languages.

Thus it was that the images of unfulfilled desire painted upon a Greek urn resulted in the exquisite lines of longing in Keats’ immortal “Ode To A Grecian Urn.”

“Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”

Part of a Grecian Urn in the British Museum - the “bold lover” of Keats’ poem is top left.

The reward of all this striving was housed and nurtured by an institution as old as mankind itself - marriage. Or, the prize was sought furtively, secretly, before marriage, knowing that since society expected the lovers to be ushered in with joy into the marriage house, any experience of fulfilled desire outside of marriage was not the permitted “norm,” the ideal, the expressed desire of millennia of human experience.

Within the house of marriage of course, another creative journey is begun - that of begetting children and creating in them the type of adult we would want them to be (not always successfully - but that is the nature of the creative process!). This however, is not the subject of my essay (although it may be argued that sublimation of sexual desire to creative energy is at work within marriage too, both by the resistance exercised against the lure of the “other” woman or “other” man; and more especially by the joyous fulfilment of desire with the spouse in defiance of any other lure or urge).

But since what has been termed the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, a combination of deadly forces have served to suck the very life out of the pursuit by both men and women of the prize, the reward of romantic love - i.e. sexual union within the house of marriage. More seriously, the house itself came under siege, started teetering dangerously and has now all but completely collapsed.

The combination of the contraceptive pill, abortion and the quasi-religion of feminism has had the effect not only of catastrophically lowering the price of sex for the male of our species, but of drastically altering society’s regard for marriage, the family and the age of wedlock for both men and women.

In the history of the Christian West and East, this descent from being spiritually and culturally conscious of being created “male and female in the image of God,” into lower mammalian behaviour (contrast 95% of birds, who have a single partner for life) - all this has happened in only a few short decades since the 1960s and one of its inevitable results is a collapsing birth rate which is now threatening the very survival of the West (and the European East). Whether this was all accidental or by design of particular malign groups is for historians, commentators and social anthropologists to discern, discover and expose - but the consequences of this profound shift in human behaviour demands urgent and existential attention.

There is some disdain bordering on disgust still reserved for men or women who “sleep around;” but even this latter day restraint on human behaviour is disappearing. And those who do not “sleep around” are tragically still unaware of the sacramental sanctity and joy of Christian marriage - since being in a succession of “monogamous” sexual relationships outside of marriage (euphemistically called being “a couple”) is now deemed a very high standard of moral sense and behaviour.

I do not blame the young people themselves, of course, since in most cases they probably do not know any better. The blame must fall on their parents and grand parents, the “baby boomer+” generation - who made choices in the 1960s, 70s and 80s that became a turning point for our civilization.

The inability to sublimate sexual desire is also making deep inroads upon the cultural life of West and East. Our art has become degenerate and cries out for rebuke and reproach. And deprived of the energy of vigorous and sometimes dangerous pursuit, our love poems and songs are now merely blatant anthems to the unrestrained exchange of bodily fluids.

In this connection, one of my readers ( the erudite Bruce J. Kellogg) pointed out in a commentary to my essay on the movies, that when the Hay’s code (which banned the depiction of sex and gratuitous violence on the Hollywood screen between 1938 and 1959) was operative, story writers and movie makers had to be inventive, creative, create good and gripping stories - which they did to such an extent that this era came to be called the “golden age” of Hollywood.

Some commentators and “influencers” (including Elon Musk) have called attention to the declining size of Western and Eastern European populations and how it is incumbent on our societies to reverse this deadly trend. This will never happen of course, unless the root causes of our own destruction are addressed and aggressively confronted. And the latter in turn cannot properly take place unless our nations return to Christ and the values of His Kingdom. This return - and only such a return - will then be marked by strong, stable and fertile families and societies.

All the promises of the purveyors of the sexual revolution have turned out to be damp squibs and surveys consistently show that not only are couples having less or no children, they are enjoying sex less and less, with testosterone levels significantly falling in Western men for the past 30 years. The natural, rational conclusion must be that when the price of sexual fulfilment was high, men and women enjoyed sex more, testosterone levels were much higher (they were!) and there were more children!

The people of Catholic and Protestant Western Europe and the Orthodox East have also produced some of the finest art and music and poetry the world has ever witnessed - virtually all of this was produced before the 1960s. Why is that? What watershed events since that time have turned the tide of the moral and cultural history of the West and European East?

In the answer to these questions will lie the very survival of a once great civilization.

He would pivot often and turn to the bride and groom, then pivot back to the audience as he weaved golden threads of advice together in his deep, booming voice for the (bewildered) newly married couple - and for all of us.

“Always keep humility first in your marriage”, he would say with particular emphasis - “and love will follow; and not just follow, but follow at a galloping speed!”

Because I had already started writing poetry as a teenager and because the rhythm and beauty of my uncle’s wedding speeches were like the gust of a cool sea breeze on your skin on a sweltering summer’s day, I soaked in every word, every gesture, every nuance, every flourish of rhetoric in my uncle’s many wedding reception speeches. They were always about humility.

The ride into Jerusalem of the King of Kings, the very Son of God on Palm Sunday could have been accomplished on the best possible Arabian steed, even upon the wings of Angels. Instead the Saviour chose to ride upon an ass’s colt. The account in Saint John’s Gospel says, “and Jesus, when he had found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is written, “Fear not, daughter of Sion: behold, thy King cometh, sitting on an ass’s colt.”” (John 12:12-15).

Later that momentous week, as the time of His Crucifixion and death and Resurrection drew near, He talked about establishing His Kingdom through His Church; and asked his followers to love one another - “by this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

But just before he talked about the love his followers must have for each other, in a supreme act of humility, the account says He washed his disciples’ feet. “Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God; He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.”

Holy Scripture has Jesus explaining his action of washing his disciples’s feet “‘Do you understand what I have done for you?’ he asked.‘You call me “Master” and “Lord”, and rightly so, for that is what I am. Then if I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example: you are to do as I have done for you. In very truth I tell you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor a messenger than the one who sent him. If you know this, happy are you if you act upon it.”

As my uncle explained it, humility was the handmaiden of love. But it was also love’s precondition.

In my own life, I have wasted hours, sometimes even days, waiting for someone else (often those very close to me) to apologize first. What a terrible waste of time!

Somehow, I had believed that although I had done wrong (or perhaps even done no wrong at all), the other person had “started it all” and had behaved obnoxiously and therefore, must be the first to own up and apologize. A terrible and costly waste of time, since the longer my apology was held back, the more the hurt festered, the more it gnawed and weighed upon my soul.

If on the other hand, by the great Grace of God, I have been first out of the block to apologize, it has been always been a sublime, expansively liberating experience. It has literally been like a massive load falling off my shoulders, setting me free. Many hours, even days of love have thus been gained that would otherwise have been lost. Many sorrows relieved, many tears wiped away.

I wish I had applied my uncle’s lesson on humility more consistently in my life. The accumulated gain of hours, days, even weeks of reconciliation and love would have been incalculable.

An Orthodox Christian priest recently pointed out to us in his sermon, that in the Orthodox monasteries, from ancient times, monks routinely say to each other “brother, please forgive me,” several times during the day, even if they cannot identify anything wrong that they have done. This is done as a practical exercise in humility, following upon our Lord’s example. And the priest concluded his sermon by saying we “should not wait to say sorry!”

The Incarnation itself, i.e. God becoming man for our sake, fully human and fully divine in Jesus, is of course, the greatest ever act of humility. “And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.” (Philippians 2:8)

Humility is inextricably linked to love. One withers without the other. One gives lustre to the other.

Humility, as my uncle understood, is both the handmaiden and precondition of love.

As a form of escapism for the labouring, suffering masses, a visit to the move theatre once served its purpose - and perhaps still does. It is quite another question to ask whether the return to real life when the movie ends is more of a let down, more of a jarring descent from the heights of escapism, than if the movie had never been witnessed. But who are we to judge?

Nowadays, of course, with clarity, colours and brightness that far exceed that of the traditional movie theatre, any individual can sit down before a massive TV screen, with all kinds of iterations of sound - and watch several movies at a time, sometimes several in a single night.

This is a new experience in mankind’s long history. If we count the entry of sound into the silent movie world (1927, with the movie, “The Jazz Singer”) as a landmark event in our history, we are now exactly 99 years since this revolution in story telling and entertainment first began - a mere blip, a comma in our collective experience as the human race.

Still from “The Jazz Singer” - the first movie with sound

And then came television - but not until 1950 were movies beamed into our homes via unwieldy TV antennas which were set up on the roofs of millions of homes. In 1977, movies became available to watch at home via tapes and clunky VHS players - but this again, is only 50 years ago!

The compression of life stories, all stories, into a couple of movie hours has led to a profound shift in the way we regard our world. It has undoubtedly led to a skewed and altered sense of reality and with that, skewed judgements pronounced upon a variety of different people, events and things.

My readers on the whole are likely well aware of the power of social media to manipulate, influence, subvert and gaslight everyday life and attitudes. But many decades before the advent of social media and the internet, Hollywood had already made deep inroads into the mental, physical and spiritual world of a large section of the world’s population - and certainly upon the majority of the population of Western nations where the Christian consensus to life once prevailed.

For example, the idea and practice of revenge (which is different from justice), is a prominent Old Testament narrative - but in the New Testament, when the fullness of the revelation of God in Christ had come, the very opposite to revenge was revealed and then taught as a virtue by the Christian Church for centuries. In other words, the higher, eternal values of love and forgiveness were recognized as part of the higher life of the Kingdom of God.

In a couple of generations, movies from Hollywood changed all that - by glorifying revenge and making it a virtue in itself, it has made the Western world used to the idea that violent, bloody revenge is not only a good thing, it is also an expected thing for the average man or woman or child.

The value systems that were once the accepted norm in the West were replaced by a steady, incremental and ever expanding Hollywood generated value system that the big movie studios consciously and deliberately forced into our movie theatres and homes. The arrival of the internet and online streaming has solidified and strengthened this take over of the public’s moral and spiritual life, but the campaign for this take over was launched just under a hundred years ago.

Even the recently common practice of the reading of a book at home or in our libraries is only just over 500 years old (1454) - when the Gutenberg press in Germany made mass printing possible. Indirectly , this then led to the Protestant reformation.

The compression of expansive narratives into the few hundred pages of a novel therefore is also quite new in our history - but the great difference from a movie is that with a book, the imagination is actively engaged and the written word merely acts as a prod, a means by which the narrative of the story may be visualized, heard and felt with page after turning page.

With movies and television on the other hand, all the senses are maximally engaged, maximally stimulated. It may be likened to the song of the Nightingale in Keats’ immortal “Ode To A Nightingale” being both seen and heard in a video/movie upon a glass panel (the TV screen), leaving no room whatsoever for the flights of imagination that come upon the reader in succeeding waves of ecstasy as the poem is read upon the written page.

Some conservative, Christian societies forbid their youth from watching Hollywood type movies. This cannot be anything but good for the young imagination, the creative impulses of youth and the magnificent, God-given ability of mankind to create its own, original narratives and stories. Engaging the imagination with books and with spending time just dreaming alone, has led to some of the most creative masterpieces of art, literature and music.

But even for those who allow themselves movie-watching at home or in the theatre, it would be very useful indeed to remember first, that they are watching a massively compressed story line and therefore, an altered, artificial narrative of events compared to the reality of life. And secondly, that there is an agenda of subversion of our value systems that Hollywood has been pursuing for decades. It would be useful too, to remember that the movie is passively feeding our senses in a way that makes imagination almost impossible.

The urgent task of re-engaging what the poet Keats called, “the holiness of the imagination” must occupy and pre-occupy our waking ours. Only a deliberate divesting and unlearning of the now ubiquitous culture of Hollywood can unlock the blessings of the imagination. It is in essence, a spiritual battle - which can only be won by our total reliance on supernatural resources. To succeed in this urgent battle for the soul of man, we must, in other words, “put on the full armour of God.”

Jesus, speaking of Himself and his Mission, announced this triumphant declaration in the Gospel according to Saint Luke:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me

Because He has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor

He has sent me to heal the broken hearted

To bring deliverance to the captives

And recovering of sight to the blind

To set at liberty them that are bruised

To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Freedom, like love, cannot fully be defined, only felt. Far be it therefore from me to attempt to limit freedom to the narrow confines of definition. The yearning for all kinds of freedom is probably best felt when they are most denied - including political freedom, free speech, freedom of the press (which is a function of free speech), academic freedom and freedom of conscience. And once freedom is denied, something is stirred in the human spirit and the struggle for freedom begins anew. This deliverance from bondage is undoubtedly also part of the Great Declaration of Jesus - for he also announces in it that his mission was “to bring deliverance to the captives.”

It is equally true that generations of nurses, physicians, missionaries and social workers have regarded “recovering of sight to the blind” as a clarion call to action in the service of the sick, the suffering, the halt, the lame, the blind. In heeding that call, they have regarded themselves as following the example of Jesus Himself. Again and again the sick are brought to Jesus - again and again the Gospels record that He “healed them all.”

I do not therefore wish to minimize the importance of the impact of this magnificent Declaration of declarations upon the yearning for external freedom (including political freedom) and the healing of the body. This was part of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed.

But the central miracle of liberty that must be wrought is within - for as the prophet Jeremiah recognized several centuries before Christ, “the heart of man is desperately wicked above all things.”

The Great Declaration of Jesus does indeed go straight into the heart of the problem. For, does He not “heal the broken hearted?” And in that most tender of all declarations, does he not “set at liberty them that are bruised?” Jesus sets free the bruised and hurting soul and brings healing within - and to me and to several other much better Christians than I, this healing within lies at the heart of the Great Declaration.

The central miracle is not the healing of the body, included though it is in the Kingdom of God that Jesus ushered in; nor is the central miracle the winning through long centuries of sacrifice and struggle the freedoms of press, conscience and speech that we tend to take for granted - it is only the impact of Christ upon the Christian centuries that gifted the human race with these invaluable freedoms. And they must be cherished and safeguarded for future generations.

Notwithstanding all this and more being part of the Great Declaration, the central miracle that Jesus announces and brings about is within - for only if the heart is transformed and healed, can it be truly free.

I wrote a sonnet about being free within, true freedom and being free indeed. The poem is included in my book of poems:

Live Free Or Die, Was New To Me

I always thought to die free was liberty,

freedom found within, like fire lighting

the last post, life lived not in longing

for embrace forever of mortal flesh,

but eternity smoking out time,

and today like tomorrow lived abundantly.

Another army with clanging steel

or homing missiles making free,

will soon be bound by tyranny ...

and then our nests of never again

are scattered soon by another eagle

with sharpened talons swooping.

Better far is freedom lived within,

and being freed indeed, be liberty.

The freedom within that Jesus brings can never be bequeathed by external events - nor can it ever be taken away. This is why the martyrs went to the lions in the Roman coliseum singing. In the 1950s Biblical epic motion picture “Quo Vadis,” the emperor Nero (played brilliantly by Peter Ustinov) is incensed, puzzled and flummoxed by the breaking out of singing in the band of Christians as the lions approach them. They were singing because whether in this life or the next, they knew they were free. They knew with Charles Darnay in Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities that it was a “far, far better rest that they go to.” And they could already see the eternal life, lived abundantly, awaiting them.

History is not necessarily measured by one’s lifetime. The eternal God has his purposes. And the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome had to yield to the triumph of the Cross. The blood of the martyrs became not only the seed of the Church - but by the Power of the Cross, led to the overthrowing of kings and emperors and kingdoms and civilizations.

Upon the hill where the martyrs of Lyon in France were repeatedly tortured and killed in the year 177 (under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius), a magnificent Cathedral raises the Cross of Christ to the skies. The miracle and freedom within had led to the deliverance from the oppressive rule of Rome - all without a sword or spear ever being raised.

The mosaic above shows Saint Blandina leading some of the Holy Martyrs of Lyon. Saint Blandina was a young slave girl. Behind her is the 15 year old boy, Saint Ponticus - who was also tortured and killed. (From the Museum of the Martyrs, Lyon, France)

The magnificent Cathedral in Lyon that rises upon the ruins of the Roman coliseum.

Tens of thousands of priests in Russia were tortured and put to death, together with millions of Christians by the communist government of Russia. These martyrs, now know as the Holy Martyrs of Russia included Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who was ritually tortured and killed by the demonic forces of communism. These latter day Martyrs had already been set free within, forever - and no force demonic or earthly could take that away from them. The Soviet Union also fell, like ancient Rome - and today, Churches are being built at a record pace in Russia, which is in the midst of a great revival of the Orthodox Christian Church.

It is the freedom within that Jesus the Son of God was describing when he proclaimed, “if the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”

And I don’t mean that we ought to be culpably uncertain about whether we will pay our taxes or subscribe to the criminal code! Nor would I recommend that an airline pilot be uncertain about the law of gravity or a teenager driving his first car be seized with uncertainty about the laws of velocity and acceleration!

There are also uncertain things in our daily lives which we dare not believe to be certain - such as whether our wives will praise the particular, reckless, culinary adventure into the kitchen that we undertake!

Those of us who have used maps spread upon our laps whilst navigating unfamiliar roads and places, are no doubt grateful for the relative certainty of GPS. And technology has also taken much of the uncertainty out of such things as buying tickets for a train, an airplane, or bus (some of my readers will remember that after queuing up at a grubby ticket counter, you would occasionally learn that all places in the bus/train were taken!).

GPS and booking tickets and trips on the internet have undoubtedly made for a convenience that we take for granted and have largely eliminated uncertainty in these areas.

But those who have not experienced the utter, alternate joy, despair, relief and exasperation of ending up in the wrong road (and destination!) in the late 1980s and 1990s (or earlier), cannot know that when the intended destination did finally arrive, the sense of fulfilment, achievement and triumph was so complete, that it cannot possibly compare with the puny satisfaction of Apple or Google maps’ flat, robotic instructions - “turn left - turn right - stay on road X - pass the traffic light - red light camera coming up - at the next traffic light turn left - your destination is on the right!”

It might also seem inconceivable that being denied a sleeper cabin train ticket after queuing up for more than an hour would somehow be preferable to the certainty of online reservation and cabin selection! But because of the possibility of the train being full and there being no sleeper cabin available, if you did get the ticket and the reservation after all, it made it all more wonderful, made you more grateful, made the journey more valuable, made traveling a bigger, better adventure.

The taking of photographs before the advent of the iPhone in 2007, was a glorious saga of uncertainty. We would also take far fewer photographs (and when traveling, usually find an excuse to leave the rather bulky camera in the hotel!), since both the camera and the roll of film were expensive. With our eyes focussed on medium and long-range objects, we would then be able to literally see more - more that is, than the second-hand, short-range, “smart” phone images to which today’s travellers seem to be glued.

But the real uncertainty would be when we returned home and submitted our roll of film to the camera shop for developing. You could get your photographs in 48 hours for an extra fee, but it was usually a 4-6 day wait. When the photographs were delivered to you, it was usually in a sturdy, open envelope, which held the highly uncertain results of our efforts - the photographs could be over or under exposed; and sometimes, for a multitude of reasons, they would be so dark that it would then be something of a humorous game to discern faces and places in the photographs! Uncommonly, they would be dark as night! But usually, the uncertainty would yield to pure joy, even surprise at the rather good quality of the colours and images - and a few of the photographs would go into an album. Some fewer still, would be framed!

All the certainty that seemingly surrounds us now, was supposed to make us less anxious and more productive. “Leave all these routine, mundane tasks to technology,” they said - and that would then give you significant time to spend on the really creative pursuits! Are we writing better now? Or producing better art or science? Are we less anxious?

My readers will remember that there was no such thing as central heating and that the indoor temperature was always uncertain in the age of Shakespeare (400 years ago)! There was no electricity either! The feathered quill of the greatest dramatist produced 2,500 pages of sublime drama and poetry surrounded by uncertainty! A hundred years before Shakespeare, under even more uncertain circumstances, the great theologian and philosopher Erasmus wrote more than 100 consequential books.

Nowadays, it is not merely such unimportant things as the weather that is assiduously sought and researched for certainty. If a gentleman wishes to propose to his lady love, for example, he typically spends endless “online” hours not merely looking at various diamonds set in various strands of gold, he also scours the internet discussion boards and AI, and sends countless text messages (and emojis) to his friends in order to be as certain as possible that the particular combination of genuflexion, speech and flourish of diamond will meet with a “yes!” Arguably, by relentlessly narrowing the field of uncertainty that formerly existed when such an enterprise was undertaken, the scope and depth and breadth of ecstasy and joy that resulted, have all been considerably diminished!

Lest I be accused of being a luddite who bemoans the passing of an age that cannot be recovered and who would be content to return to the age of horse and buggy (I wouldn’t!), I should state at once, that the question here is not whether uncertainty itself is a good thing - but whether by the constant pursuit of certainty, we have made our lives much more predictable and much less fun.

A good dose of uncertainty needs to be brought back to human living, or else the goals of the AI mandarins may soon be realized - of creating automotons who can be predictably programmed to do their bidding, based on their desire to be as certain of everything as possible.

There is a vast and consequential difference between using technology to modestly decrease uncertainty and enhance our lives on the one hand - and getting addicted to technology in order to pursue the elimination of uncertainty! There is much of the latter that has already crept upon and seized the human race. Once tethered to technology and the smart phone, it will become increasingly difficult to break free to a more spontaneous, joyful, uncertain existence; and increasingly likely that we will be controlled by those who control the technology.

Speaking of the weather, we were just hit by a late season, spring snowstorm. I purposely did not look at the weather forecast these last three days - just looked out the window!

To all my readers - a very blessed Easter and Pascha! Nothing matters more for humanity than the Life, Death and Resurrection of the Son of God.

Those who contemplate the mysteries of life, even those who do not consciously do so, must be struck by the truth and beauty all about us, sometimes overwhelming us, sometimes piercing through the pangs of suffering and sorrow - and always crying out for eternal meaning.

The love between spouses, lovers, friends, members of a family - does all this end with death? Does beauty possess within its radiant brilliance the dust of its own mortality? And is “dust to dust” the final verdict on the human condition?

The philosophers of both East and West have wrestled with these questions with equal eloquence, equal diligence, equal sense of urgency, equal sincerity, and the quest for meaning continues in our present age. If all that is beautiful and true must only last a generation or less, if consciousness itself must be lost in an impersonal and sterile, silent eternity - what meaning is there to life that is lived today?

Into this world of seething doubt and despair, the birth of Jesus at a particular time in history, heralded a new beginning - God the Son, became flesh, fully human and fully Divine, in order to redeem, to rescue the human race, you, me, from the meaninglessness of death and mortality. His Life proclaimed the Kingdom of God, not a Kingdom forged in steel and violence, His Death became the rallying point of history and His Resurrection sealed the promise of abundant life, lived eternally for all who believe.

Death by crucifixion was the what the Son of God chose to undergo for us. His crucifixion, the Gospels tell us, were the culmination of several hours of torture - He was slapped, spit on, scourged fearfully with the Roman whip, a crown of thorns was placed on his head, his head then beaten; and then the Son of God was made to carry His own Cross to the place of crucifixion. The English priest Matthew Henry wrote in the seventeenth century of what the suffering and death of Jesus has accomplished for us:

“Come and see the victories of the Cross - Think my soul, of what one owest to the dying of the Lord Jesus:

Christ’s wounds are thy healings,

His agonies thy repose,

His conflicts thy conquests,

His groans thy songs,

His pains thine ease,

His shame thy glory,

His death thy life,

His sufferings thy salvation.”

The unfathomable and shattering, profound sufferings of the human race cannot all be explained or understood - but nobody could level the charge anymore that “God does not care!” God not only cares, but cares so much that he became a human being, suffered with us, went to the Cross for us - and by the glory of the Resurrection, conquered death itself - or as the Orthodox say, gloriously, “He has trampled death by death.”

In a universe that consists of billions of galaxies and even more billions of planets, what do the happenings on a distant, small planet, called “earth” by its inhabitants have to do with our deliverance from death and mortality?

The Victorian poet Alice Meynell considers in her Easter poem “Christ in The Universe” the significance of the visit to our planet by the Son of God Himself:

“Of His earth-visiting feet

None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,

The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,

Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.

No planet knows that this

Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,

Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,

Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.”

Earth’s chief treasure is indeed, “one forsaken grave.”

The living Christ appeared several times to his disciples after His resurrection on that glorious, first Pascha (Easter) Day. Each time, He was recognized by his disciples, each time, they spoke with him and understood Him; and on at least a couple of occasions, He shared a meal with them. In the Gospel as recorded by Saint Luke, He says to his bewildered followers:

“Behold my hands and my feet. Handle me and see. For a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have.”

Repeatedly, in the New Testament, Jesus’ resurrected Body is linked with our own resurrected bodies - and we are told that our bodies will be like His body:

“Jesus shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”

We also know that this body that we now wear, which the New Testament calls a garment, a robe, shall one day be discarded - but the essential me, the essential you, the soul, will live on forever and will be clothed with a new body, which will be like Christ’s own body. No less than all this, is the glorious meaning of the Resurrection.

And so our love is eternal in the heavens. Beauty indeed does live forever, truth indeed is immortal and as Jesus told us, whether in this world or the next, we will be with Him forever.

We can let this pass us by - from the earliest encounters with Jesus, many people have let the astounding phenomenon of Jesus and the eternal life He offers, pass them by.

Speaking of the Jewish people of His day, the great Russian (Jewish) novelist Boris Pasternak speaks of one such rejection in his Nobel prize winning novel, “Dr. Zhivago:” (from the translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari):

“Their national idea has forced them, century after century, to be a nation and nothing but a nation—and they have been chained to this deadening task all through the centuries when all the rest of the world was being delivered from it by a new force which had come out of their own midst! Isn’t that extraordinary? How can you account for it? Just think! This glorious holiday, this liberation from the curse of mediocrity, this soaring flight above the dullness of a humdrum existence, was first achieved in their land, proclaimed in their language, and belonged to their race! And they actually saw and heard it and let it go! How could they allow a spirit of such overwhelming power and beauty to leave them, how could they think that after it triumphed and established its reign, they would remain as the empty husk of that miracle they had repudiated?”

This rejection is not confined to the Jews alone. Every day, in every land, from every people and every nation, the voices of rejection try to drown out the Voice of the Saviour calling every seeking, struggling soul to eternal, full, abundant and meaningful life in Him.

But our Saviour never gives up - he pursues us and will keep seeking those that are lost from every nation, including the Jewish nation. In the Gospel account, Jesus speaks of Himself as the Shepherd, seeking after the one lost sheep:

“What think ye - if a man have a hundred sheep and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine and goeth into the mountains and seeketh after the one that is gone astray?”

That is the story of Pascha and Easter. A lost and struggling race - and undeterred, deliberate love pursuing us, even to a Cross and to a glorious Resurrection.

Do Iranian families celebrate together, rejoice and weep together and love together as we do?

Is friendship between individuals and families valued just as much (or more) in Iranian society as in our families in the West?

And could it be that the Iranian people are more, much more hospitable to strangers than we are?

If we actually were to live (not just visit) for at least a few weeks amongst the Iranian people, could it provide clear and abiding answers to these searching questions?

Unlike most of us, Professor Jonathan Brown of Georgetown University has lived and journeyed extensively in Iran. He writes:

“I lived and traveled in Iran for months. In Tehran I lived with the family of a retired bank worker who saw me looking for housing. I roomed with his son for months, ate all my meals with them, and they never accepted any money.

Once I was sick and throwing up and they all came into the bathroom and the dad stroked my head while I barfed and told me “Aybi nadare” (no shame, it’s ok).

I traveled around most of the country by plane, train, bus, shared taxi, etc. Eventually I stopped booking hotels because I’d always meet people on the train, bus etc who’d insist I stay with them.

The family of Iran/Iraq war vets from Yazd who took me to Taft for bbq in the mountains. The taxi driver from Rasht who made a bed for me on the floor of his tiny apartment because all the hotels were full.

The only time a police officer talked to me was once to make sure I was ok. I never felt in any danger day or night. The land of Iran is as incredibly diverse as its people. There are mountainous rain forests and desert salt flats. I met among the most liberal and most conservative people there, and everything in between. Everyone was so kind it makes me cry with shame.”

Professor Brown’s post on X has now had more than 2.4 million views and thousands of people from all over the world have commented and confirmed his description of the Iranian people. They cannot all be wrong - and they cannot all be lying.

Many examples exist of nations and rulers going to extraordinary lengths to dehumanize and demonize a whole people, in order to justify to their own populations, the imminent, coming destruction and horrors of war waged in their name. In each case, governments and the press are guilty of what the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) characterized as, “making the concrete abstract.”

The German people of the first and second world war (and the period in between) were all referred to by the abstract term, “Nazi” (or, in the British press as the “Hun”). People in the allied West did not really understand anything about the German people and were prevented from doing so, by their soaking in of the propaganda of war. The allied atrocities against the men, women and children of Dresden (where more than 25,000 civilian non-combatants were killed during a single night of terrifying allied bombing), the millions of German people who died in the savage retributions in the aftermath of the wars and the atrocities of the Soviet army in East Germany - all this and more became easy to justify or overlook, since the German man, woman and child became synonymous with the abstract terms “Hun” (barbaric criminals) or with the “Nazi.” Most people in the West still don’t know what “Nazi” means or what the German people went through in the cruel aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles.

When the genocide in Gaza was in progress and much of the world watched with horror, Israel and the Biden and Trump administration tried their best to dehumanize and demonize the Palestinian people - even the 20,000 children who were killed (and the many more who were maimed for life - Gaza now has the highest per capita number of child amputees in the world). Here too, the abstract replaced the concrete - they were called, “human shields” or “Hamas sympathizers” (even the children!) or were simply ignored as casualties of war.

One example of how the Western press, propaganda channels and leadership (and alas some Church leaders) characterize the Iranian people and other Islamic societies in the Middle East, is by referring to them as “Allah” extremists - in other words as being barbaric and uncivilized on account of their devotion to “Allah.” This is a classic example of the demonization of the “enemy.”

Anybody with even a cursory knowledge of Arabic will know of course, that our brothers and sisters in ancient, Christian communities across the Middle East also refer to God as “Allah” in their Church liturgies and in their Arabic Bibles and prayers.

And anyone with some knowledge of history will know that some of the greatest scientists and physicians of the medieval world (during the historical time known as “The Golden Age of Islamic Civilization”) were from Persia (Iran).

In my own field of medicine and surgery, for example, the Iranian (Persian) physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980–1037) is regarded as the “father of modern medicine” and his “Canon of Medicine” was standard reading in both the Muslim East and Christian Europe, until the seventeenth century. Sir William Osler referred to the Canon of Medicine as “the most famous medical textbook ever written” and “a medical bible for a longer time than any other work.”

It is not difficult therefore to completely dismantle the propaganda media or apostate Churches’ characterization of the present day Muslim societies of the Middle East as “Allah” extremists and uncivilized barbarians! When the abstract yields to the concrete evidence of history and experience, the truth of our common humanity becomes blindingly obvious.

Nor can we in the West claim an ambiguous “moral” superiority either. Abortion is illegal in Iran and Iran does not allow mutilating transgender surgeries. Iran also executes child molesters and abusers.

Humanizing the “enemy” becomes a vitally important exercise and one which require a conscious and strenuous effort to deconstruct the myths that have been skillfully spun by the propaganda media and by heretic Church leaders.

For Christians, this is foundational. For do we not all “fall short of the Glory of God?” And shall we not believe, with Saint Stephen, the first martyr, that “out of one blood hath He created all nations?” Or shall we not declare with Saint Peter, who proclaimed to Cornelius the Roman centurion, that “God has no favourites?”

In the Christian Church of both East and West, Berdyaev’s statement would be interpreted as describing the conditions that lead to the numbing and death of the conscience and the loss of empathy with suffering humanity.

The reaction or rather lack of reaction of the press, people and politicians in the West to the violent homicide last Saturday of 165 Iranian school girls aged 7-10 by an American/Israeli missile is a disturbing, sad commentary on the death of the conscience of a large part of our population. Investigators have since determined that this travesty was indeed the work of an American/Israeli missile (as if we did not already know).

When people of conscience bring this atrocity up, it is common for both the media and society to either completely ignore it or for supporters of the war to say something to the effect of, “I support America/Israel’s war with evil Iran. Now this is war - and we have to accept that terrible things happen in war.” Which of course, is a ridiculous, conditioned and abstract response - conditioned that is, by decades of media propaganda. It is like saying, “this is adultery; I support adultery - and we have to accept that bad things happen to families in adultery.” For Christians to make this argument would be even more absurd. It would be like saying, “this is abortion; I support abortion - and we have to accept that bad things happen in abortion.”

The image below shows graves being prepared for the murdered schoolgirls:

Some Christians are enthusiastically pro-life in the womb (they even take part in pro-life marches in Washington and Ottawa) - but are also pro-war. These are fundamentally incompatible positions and is like saying, “I want to preserve life in the womb - but don’t mind killing it once it is a child or an adult.”

General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891), Lincoln’s brilliant Union Army general, became so immersed in the cruelty and barbarity of war, that he himself also ordered the “scorched earth” policies that led to the terrible suffering of the civilian population of the Southern States. Later, he wrote: “War is cruel and you cannot refine it - I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is moonshine. It is only those, who have never fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded, who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

Many of those now pleading and leading the movement for peace including Col. Douglas McGregor and Col. Daniel Davis of the US army, have actually witnessed the horrors of war. They are now warriors for peace.

For the first three centuries after the Resurrection of Jesus, the Christian Church overwhelmingly did not engage in war. The followers of Christ and the Church fathers of the first three centuries taught that it was a grave sin to kill another human being created in the image of God. Not a single Christian writing from this era exists, that justifies Christian participation in war.

Christians submitted to persecution for the sake of the Gospel, even martyrdom in the Roman arena, but did not strike back. And yet, the mighty Roman empire was brought to its knees and the Cross triumphed over the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome - and in the year 380, the Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the equivalent of a “state religion.” Christians now were asked to serve in the Roman army!

This was also the time of Saint Augustine of Hippo (Northern Africa). This Saint, who has been seminally influential in the development of the Church never used the words, “just war.” Instead, he abhorred war and in an attempt to rein in and severely limit the possibility of war, scattered amongst his great works (including “City of God” and “Confessions”) are what he considered were the very rare conditions under which war may be justified.

So called “just war theory” came six centuries after Saint Augustine - although it is conveniently referred to as “Augustinian just war theory!”

It pays to clothe a theory of war with the cloak of a revered Saint!

As the Catholic priest Fr. Emmanuel McCarthy points out in his book, “Christian Just War Theory: The Logic of Deceit,” just war conditions in the centuries after Augustine include the following:

1. The cause of the war must be just.

2. The means of war must also be just.

3. The war must be defensive only.

4. Offensive war, pre-emptive war or war in the pursuit of some national self-interest beyond protection from immediate, lethal attack is forbidden.

5. The evil done by war must be less than the evil that would have taken place if the war were not engaged in.

6. Non-combatants are immune from lethal attack.

7. One party to the conflict must cease killing if the other party is willing to negotiate a resolution.

8. The war itself and no acts of war can issue from a spirit of revenge or hatred of enemies.

9. If any one of the standards is not met, then the killing is unjustified and the war is murder.

Trump’s Israel war on the Iranian people is so far removed from “just war” conditions, that even his immediate family, much less Christians in the West cannot call it in any way “just.” And yet, many “evangelical” Christians are fervently calling for the destruction of Iran. Surely this endorsement of terror, death, devastation and misery is neither evangelical, nor Christian.

Every Iranian man, woman and child too, is created in the image of God - this enduring, fundamental, Christian belief supersedes the fact that there are more than 30 active Churches in Teheran and that Christianity is a protected minority religion in Iran (unlike in Saudi Arabia which Israel/America is not bombing).

Every Muslim is also created in the image of God - and part of the human family.

The 165 murdered girls in Teheran were each somebody’s daughter, brother, sister. They could have been our own.

As I carried out the ubiquitous task of washing my hands, I watched the water gurgle, circle and swish away the moisturizing cream that I had applied a few hours ago (mind you, a “natural” cream, with about twenty completely “natural” ingredients!) - and thought of how the very diluted cream, by now on its way to the rivers and oceans of the world, will be several million times more diluted in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (I had forgotten where our river empties!) and even more diluted when it comes back to me in our rather prosaic water supply!

Nowadays, there are several “influencers” who want to influence me out of using soap, out of using plastic of any kind, out of using moisturizing creams - and perhaps they wish to influence me to retreat into the abundant and very natural forests around me, so that I can carry out the grand task of dilution in a very different but much more natural manner!

One very popular giant of social media (the irrepressible Alex Jones), even tells us that the frogs in our ponds and lakes and forests are going gay! All because of dilution! Perhaps the endocrine disruptors that are supposedly “everywhere” are not dilute enough in the pond in our neighbourhood - and then perhaps the geese will become gay too! In human beings, could the march to sexual deviancy be from addiction to porn or the saturation of our airwaves (and computer signals) by trans and “pride” related propaganda perpetuated by powerful oligarchs who want to destroy the Christian West? No doubt the redoubtable Alex Jones knows all about this too!

Of course we should completely minimize the use of plastics - here in Canada, I am all for the ban on plastic bags in our grocery stores and I am bemused and delighted every time I take reusable bags to buy our food; and I am really tickled and nostalgic when the girl at the counter takes out a crisp, brown, paper bag and waves it tantalizingly before me as she whips it open!

Our ancestors undoubtedly did not have microplastics in their water - and presumably there were no gay frogs in their time either! The water also likely looked far clearer, even clear as crystal, as it tumbled down the stream and into the cisterns in those ancient homes. But when they drank this water, we know that it often also carried cholera, typhoid, hepatitis, giardiasis, polio, amebiasis, salmonella and a host of other invisible, diluted, highly pathogenic microorganisms which would regularly kill hundreds of thousands of people. And not until John Snow discovered a contaminated water supply as the source of the deadly London cholera epidemic in 1854, did our towns and cities begin the long journey toward safe water. We probably drink safer water now than any other generation in our history.

It is true of course, that polio saw a massive decline in both incidence and prevalence in the West in the latter half of the 20th century and that much of this was before the advent of the polio vaccine. In fact, a little known fact is that the famous Canadian singer Joni Mitchell also contracted water borne polio in the 1950s. A safe water supply from the 1960s was mainly responsible for the near disappearance of polio (and typhoid and hepatitis etc.) from Western societies. There is no doubt that in the West (and Japan, now China, Korea, Australia, the Gulf states) that our water supply is magnitudes of times safer than even a hundred years ago. But the microplastics may be there! And the gay frogs too!

As you can see, I am a big supporter of the drive to minimize macro plastics (i.e. plastics you can see!) from our environment (plastic straws too!). “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” - and we are called to be wise stewards of both land and water. I am alarmed, saddened and appalled for example, by the (macro) plastic islands in the Pacific ocean that are strangling and poisoning marine life.

And I am confident that if we severely minimize our dependance on macro plastics, microplastics will become even more diluted and harmless (and perhaps the frogs will become normal again!).

There are visible, toxic dyes and industrial oils (eg. canola) in our food which must be eliminated of course. And our obsession with material gifts for Christmas, gifts for birthdays, gifts for Valentine’s day, gifts for graduations, gifts for anniversaries and gifts for our employees - all this must cease or be severely curtailed, because mountains of macro waste and plastic are generated with these unnecessary gifts.

In other words, if we tackle first what we can see, then perhaps we shall see clearly to tackle that which we cannot see! Perhaps buy fewer clothes (which cause massive macro pollution in the streams and rivers where they are made), fewer cars, fewer drugs, fewer toxic food products, fewer appliances and fewer (macro) plastics too. All that and more are larger than life, macro events which we can all influence. And then we can stop worrying about microplastics (and gay frogs)!

If we do everything we can in our own little worlds to preserve the environment for future generations and minimize or eliminate the clearly identifiable macro pollutants around us, we will be then be able to also eliminate the present obsession with micro dilution. More importantly, we should remember that the micro pollutants so beloved of our “influencers” will take care of themselves once the macro objects and events are addressed!

Every chemistry student knows water by its other name - the universal solvent!

Since it happened before my time, I expect that many of my readers do not have any remembrance of the scandal. Here is a summary: John Profumo was born into a rich family and acknowledged to be a brilliant, rising politician. His appointment as Minister of War (Defence) in the British cabinet was expected to be just the opening salvo of what promised to be a glittering political career. In 1961, at the age of 46, he became involved in an extra-marital affair with Christine Keeler, a 19 year old call girl. Ms Keeler was also at the same time, having another affair, with Yevgeny Ivanov, the Soviet Naval Attache at the Soviet embassy. Could British State secrets have been passed to the Soviets? In June of 1963, Profumo resigned, admitting the affair and begging forgiveness.

A subsequent, official enquiry (The Denning Report) absolved John Profumo of passing any secrets to Christine Keeler and determined that there were no defence or security fall outs from the Profumo affair.

Following his resignation from Parliament, Profumo began a second career that was to last almost 40 years - he began serving the poor and disadvantaged in the East End of London through the Toynbee Hall (a charity), initially by cleaning toilets and washing dishes, then progressing to be its chief fund raiser through his political connections. He kept a low profile and refused offers to write a book about his escapades. His wife, the actress Valerie Hobson remained loyal to him. His acts of restitution, repentance and redemption were widely admired.

In our present time, the demonic acts of Jeffrey Epstein have in fact been known for at least five years. During this time, not one powerful figure or politician has been held accountable - i.e. not one of them has been prep walked to prison, tried, convicted and punished. We have learned that powerful billionaires and politicians were complicit and many were being blackmailed. There is acknowledgement that Epstein worked for both the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and the CIA. Some in President Trump’s inner circle also figure prominently in the Epstein files. Is the President himself being blackmailed?

My readers will immediately see that in magnitude and enormity of crime, in the diabolical, demonic rape and abuse of children and in a thousand other ways, the crimes of Epstein and the crimes of the powerful predators around him are qualitatively and quantitatively in a completely different category and league from what happened in Britain during the “Profumo Affair.”

In addition, during the “Profumo Affair”, the British (and International) press ran daily headlines on it, the scandal dominated the newsstands, it was carried incessantly by radio and television and (from what I have heard from relatives), in the 1960s, the scandal was talked about all the time - even after Profumo resigned.

In stark and disturbing contrast, apart from social media (particularly in the X platform), the demonic deeds of Epstein and his friends have essentially been met by obfuscation (by the President), distraction and a wall of silence by the press. Even the social media attention is no doubt being suppressed - and in any case might be merely a bubble in the vast sea of social media. There is in other words, a disturbing silence and an even more disturbing lack of outrage in society. Most people are aware of the depraved behaviour of Epstein and his friends - but there is no widespread, public outcry for accountability.

As one commentator on X remarked, comparing these times with the founding of the Republic - “the founding fathers would have hanged half of DC by now.”

Since the early 1960s (i.e. the time of the Profumo scandal), the following societal changes have taken place in the West - abortion on demand was legalized, marriage rates have precipitously declined, gay marriage was legalized and transgender medical and surgical mutilation has been normalized. There is also a movement afoot in the West, to legalize pedophilia.

The press and societal response and reaction to the demonic crimes by Epstein and his friends is a pulse on the conscience of the West. By the response so far, in the five years since the Epstein crimes were known, this pulse of conscience is undetectable - or very weak and thready at best. The collective conscience of the West is dead. The West’s rejection of Christ and its Christian heritage has in turn reverted its society back to a pagan past (where in ancient Greece and Rome for example, pedophilia and the abuse of children would have been considered normal).

I became aware recently, that Christ’s strong words of condemnation in which he decrees the cutting off of the hand or the plucking out of the eye, were directed at those who commit crimes against children.

In the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, the 18th chapter commences with the beautiful account of Jesus calling a little child to him and setting the child in the midst of the crowd and telling us that we should become as humble and simple as little children in order to enter into the Kingdom of God:

“At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?

And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them,

And said, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

And whosoever shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.””

Later in the same chapter and whilst still teaching about the precious place of children in the Kingdom of God, He says:

“Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.”

If the press, the law and society does not hold the demonic Epstein predators to account and “hang em high,” Divine Justice surely will. They have no escape.

Since the USA is Canada’s immensely significant neighbour and since just as the ancient world looked to Rome, the world now looks to America to discern the signs of the times, I shall use America as my example in this essay. But the problem is an urgent, pan-Western one – the anchorless West with no values to defend, has allowed uncontrolled immigration to change and transform our societies beyond recognition, within a generation.

As an economist in my family has pointed out, uncontrolled immigration has serious consequences not only for the cultural heritage of the nation, but negative economic consequences too, including on wages, productivity and worker rights.

I believe also, that it is undoubtedly true that a recent immigrant to a nation cannot claim to be equal in historical and cultural terms to native citizens who have made the nation their home for generations. For example, an American family who are descendants of the Jamestown settlement of 1607 is manifestly more connected to America than someone who arrives from China or Belgium in 2007!

And therefore, as you can see, I am not a supporter of illegal or uncontrolled immigration. Indeed, I believe that in the last fifty years, it has been a disaster for the West.

More than 8 million illegal immigrants are supposed to have been allowed unfettered entry into the USA during the Biden administration. This was an unconscionable assault on the American nation and was likely a major reason for the victory of Donald Trump in the election of 2024.

If you add this to the at least 15 million people already classified as “illegal aliens” in the USA (a number no one is sure about), this adds up to 23 million illegal immigrants/”aliens” who live amongst the lawful citizens and permanent residents of America. Of these, up to 2 million are known to have a criminal record, some with serious crimes, including violent gang membership and murder.

Those with a criminal record should be arrested (or re-arrested) and deported – I believe that most of us, including most Americans, will agree that this can and must be done. Criminal foreigners do not have any right to remain in America (or Canada, or the U.K., or Sweden or any other nation). They must be put on the next airplane back to their home countries. Notwithstanding, many American judges seem to believe that they should stop these deportations, but the US Supreme Court appears to have put a halt to this lunatic, unhinged behaviour from the judiciary.

That leaves the 21+million illegal immigrant/”aliens” who do not have a criminal record – which is half the number of the entire population of Canada! Now of course, being in the country illegally is also a crime and nobody should contest or deny or try to argue against this. But nobody should deny either, that the former (2 million) group of illegals have committed crimes and have a criminal record in addition to being in the country illegally.

Notwithstanding the rhetoric from MAGA supporters or “America First” supporters, these 21 million illegal aliens living in America are in fact fellow human beings and fellow members of the human family. Most (75%) of the employable adults in this group hold a job (and pay taxes). And in order to support themselves, the remaining 25% are presumed to work “under the radar.” They constitute about 5% of the American workforce and work mostly in construction, hospitality and agriculture.

Many of these undocumented migrants/”illegal aliens” have families and 5 million American children live with at least one undocumented migrant parent. It is unclear from the data, as to how many of these children are actually American citizens – probably a minority.

The Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency in America has been newly empowered to arrest and deport illegal immigrants and criminals. There is no evidence from the data that I have gathered, that illegal alien criminals (i.e. those with a criminal record – see above) are being selectively targeted by ICE (as President Trump said he would do at the beginning of his term). Indeed, since the judges already know about these criminals, they seem to have taken them under their wing and have ruled repeatedly against the Trump administration and against deportation!

ICE is now targeting everybody who is in America illegally, whether or not they have a criminal record. This was always likely to end in tragedy, tears and disaster – and, as the tragic events in Minnesota unfold, America is searching and struggling for its soul. Will it recognize our common humanity? Will the illegal immigrant be treated as a fellow human being, with compassion. And crucially, will the rights of children be upheld?

As with most tragic stories, there are always two sides to the narrative and my readers should note that I am not taking one side or the other – nor am I blaming ICE agents (who no doubt are doing their job and following orders). But regardless of who or what is to blame, a photograph of a five year old boy being marched in front of an ICE agent who is about to arrest his father – is the inevitable, tragic outcome of hostile rhetoric from some in the Trump and “America first” base (and some in the Trump administration itself). It does not do America proud. And it does not do humanity proud.

We hear in the news today that in the last year, 2.2 million illegal immigrants have “self deported” – or voluntarily gone back to their home countries, taking the Government’s financial incentive with them. This is a program that all Americans can support. It is humane and compassionate and allows the deportee the ability to apply for lawful entry again.

But forcefully tearing apart and separating families and especially, infringing upon the innocence of childhood and the rights of the child, will inevitably lead to chaos, uncontrolled rage and tragedy. More importantly, it will lead to the loss of our collective and individual conscience and the loss of the nation’s soul.

As a Canadian, I hesitate to offer solutions to America’s serious, urgent problem with illegal immigrants/”illegal aliens.” But as I have pointed out earlier in this essay, this is a common problem in the West, including here in Canada.

There is no doubt that the border must be impregnable, secure. Not even one illegal migrant should be able to breach a nation’s borders. From all accounts, President Trump’s administration has practically already achieved this – and America’s borders are indeed secure, as perhaps they have never been before.

Once the borders are secured (and this should be codified in law, so that all administrations Democrat and Republican have to follow this imperative), I believe that those illegal migrants still within the nation’s borders but without a criminal record should be given a path to citizenship – not immediately and subject of course to several tough conditions, but a pathway nevertheless. Only thus can we preserve our humanity; only thus can the nation preserve its soul And only thus can America remain true to the promise of its founding.

And meanwhile, the borders should remain impenetrable, impassable, secure.

In this beautiful carol, the little drummer boy has gone to visit the Child Jesus in Bethlehem, with just his drum, joining the shepherds from the fields of Glory and the wise men bearing gifts from the East - and no doubt a few other men and women who like the shepherds wished to “go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass.”

Katherine Davis (1892-1990), the carol’s American composer, then describes the drummer boy standing before the Baby Jesus in the manger, and wondering what he could give to this very special Baby, this King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, now the Word become flesh, fully human and fully God:

Little baby, pa rum pum pum pum

I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum

I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum

That’s fit to give a King, pa rum pum pum pum

Rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum.

Shall I play for you, pa rum pum pum pum

On my drum?

Mary the Mother of God nods and asks him to go ahead and play his little tune on his little drum:

Mary nodded, pa rum pum pum pum

The ox and lamb kept time, pa rum pum pum pum

I played my drum for Him, pa rum pum pum pum

I played my best for Him, pa rum pum pum pum

Rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum.

Then He smiled at me, pa rum pum pum pum,

Me and my drum

Historians, both secular and Christian, acknowledge that the Birth of Christ marked a decisive turning point in the destiny of the child and indeed in the very idea of childhood.

Before the Christian era, life in both East and West was what can only be described as intolerably cruel, callous, even demonic for the child.

In ancient Greece and Rome, infanticide and eugenics were regarded not only as acceptable, but as following naturally from the glorification and deification of strength, valour and conquest.

Both Plato and Aristotle advocated for abortion and infanticide and in both “The Republic” and “Politics” respectively, there is no sense of a reluctance or apology in the vigorous advocacy of the killing of life in the womb or life after the birth of the baby - merely a matter of fact acceptance that both were necessary for the propagation of a perceived, superior race of Greek citizens. For example, in “The Republic”, Plato is concerned with the maintenance of the superior qualities of his “guardian race” and hence as he states in The Republic: “The offspring of the inferior and any of those of the other sort who are born defective, they will properly dispose of in secret, so that no one will know what has become of them.” In the Greek city states, the commonly accepted killing of the unwanted baby was usually accomplished by exposure, drowning or strangling.

Rome took many lessons from Greece, including its moral and spiritual lessons. In the completely male dominated world of Rome, women, children and slaves were considered no more than the property of the male, to be used and abused as he wished. Both abortion and infanticide were widely practiced and the father of a household was expressly allowed under Roman law to expose and kill any female child as well as a deformed baby. Only in the case of temple prostitutes, was male infanticide preferred and archeologists have found numerous skeletal remains of male babies under the ruins of ancient Roman temples.

Other cultures were either a little better or a lot worse than the ancient Greeks and Romans. In South America for example, before the arrival of Christianity, the Incas and Mayas (and earlier societies) offered ritual, mass and individual child sacrifice and children were sacrificed in unspeakable scenes of demonic cruelty.

Into this grim and cruel ancient world for children, Jesus came announcing the Kingdom of God - announcing that unless you became like a little child, you could not enter the Kingdom of God. As recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew:

“At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.”

Later, in the same chapter, Jesus tells us never ever to despise or look down upon a child, since their Guardian Angels look upon the Face of God:

“Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.”

At a stroke, Jesus had transformed childhood and made it sacred, close to the heart of God Himself.

In the year 374, the now Christianized Roman empire outlawed infanticide. Even before this time, Christians would take home children left exposed to die and raise them as their own. This was recognized by Roman mothers, who would sometimes leave their babies destined for infanticide at the door of Christian houses and churches. As the numbers of these abandoned babies grew, orphanages came into being in the third and fourth centuries.

Closer to our own time, in the 19th century, the evangelical Clapham sect in England campaigned vigorously for the protection of children and campaigners such as Lord Shaftesbury saw their calling in terms of following the example and teaching of Jesus in elevating childhood to a protected, treasured and sacred place.

Many of my readers may note at this stage, that the present state of the West resembles pagan, ancient Rome much more than the Kingdom of God that Jesus brought in. This is undoubtedly and historically true and a rejection of Christ has inevitably resulted in a return to a pagan past in the West - and has ushered in not only abortion on a massive scale, but also advocates for infanticide, as by the prominent philosopher and Princeton University professor Peter Singer. The reversion to pagan Greece and Rome underway in the West is almost complete and only the Grace and Power of God can prevent the rapid slide of the West to oblivion.

But the glorious liberation, transformation and elevation of the baby, the child and childhood itself by the mission of Christ will always remain as a light unto the nations, including the nations of the West.

We don’t know whether there really was a little drummer boy who visited the Christ Child in Bethlehem. But if he were real, there is no doubt that the Baby Jesus would have smiled at him and the Heavenly Host sung in glorious celebration, as they did to the shepherds watching their sheep at night.

For unto such as the little drummer boy, does the Kingdom of Heaven belong.

We assume a linear progression of time and certainly for the sake of a functioning, material world, such a linear progression with a past, a present and a future, seems indispensable. The ancients knew however, that there must be something outside these three divisions of time and they associated timelessness with God Himself.

In the ancient Indian system of philosophy contained in the Upanishads (about 800 BC), the “Prajapati” (creator) stands outside of time and is able to order time for His benefit. Three hundred years later, Plato the Greek philosopher wrote of time itself being but a “moving image of reality.” A sense of the physical reality of time and the finite nature of our lives was regularly juxtaposed by the philosophers with the likelihood that timelessness was a deeper reality.

My readers should note at this stage, that I am not an astrophysicist or even a physicist who fully understands time-motion mathematics and relativity. But the basic idea that God, the Creator, can also create time itself and make it work for our benefit, is not difficult to grasp - without knowing any mathematics at all!

The Old Testament has several passages in which the Lord God is described as being eternal, outside of time. Such as here, in Psalm 90:

“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.”

The Psalmist would have known that perhaps five hundred years before his time, the Lord God had appeared to Moses in a burning bush, where the fire miraculously, did not consume the bush. First, the Lord God instructs Moses to take off his shoes:

“And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

And then, when Moses dared to question Who he was speaking to, the account says:

“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”

The present, past and future and whatever dimension of time outside these three were inadequate to describe the Lord God. He was simply “I AM.”

More than 1,000 years later, at a certain, historical point in time, Jesus, the Saviour of mankind was born. Christmas, though its date is disputed, marks that point in measured time.

Later, however, in the Gospel according to St.Luke, Jesus points out again that He is able to live outside time. And He reveals that those who give and live their lives for Him, will live forever. In this glorious passage, He also talks about Moses - and how those who were clearly dead in the physical sense of the past, (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), were in fact alive with Him! At a stroke, Mankind’s sense of past, present and future was turned on its head. Here is the passage:

“And they shall never die. For they are equal unto the Angels and are the children of God, being children of the Resurrection. Now that the dead are raised, even Moses showed at the bush when he calls the Lord, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. For He is not a God of the dead but of the living. For all live unto Him.” (The bold lettering is my own).

And yet, repeatedly, it is pointed out in the New Testament that Christ’s death upon the Cross and His Resurrection were in fact events that happened once, just once and for all time. As in these passages:

‘For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God.”

“Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.”

“For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.” etc.

There was a little book that was available when I was in medical school (long out of print now), by a Catholic priest. It was called, “He Is The Still Point of The Turning World.” It is a good and accurate title, since it proclaims that the turning world and time itself turns around the changeless Christ who the Bible proclaims to be “the same, yesterday, today and forever.”

As this famous hymn also points out, the Cross, although it occurred once and for all in time, is timeless:

“In the cross of Christ I glory,

Towering o’er the wrecks of time.”

Meanwhile, the new year beckons and time moves into another year, another reminder that our mortal lives are bound by the past, present and future. But the Cross and the Resurrection enable us to triumph over time itself - to be delivered from what St. Paul calls “the bondage of corruption” and “into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

Time shall be no more.

But for the present and the soon to be future, I wish every one of my readers a most blessèd and fruitful and joyous 2026!

For our individual lives to have meaning, life’s beautiful moments and memories and relationships must have a destiny other than the grave. We need to belong to a different reality, where the “bondage of corruption” has been overturned and defeated and we have been freed. Does such a reality exist?

Those who do not believe in our eternal destinies may also live good and productive lives - but that does not exempt them from partaking in humanity’s quest for meaning. If they believe that dust to dust must return and that is that, it also means that they have considered other alternatives before they arrive at this grim conclusion.

The search for meaning has consumed not just the lives of philosophers and saints, but also prehistoric man as he gazed upon the stars and made memorials to the dead. Scientists, even evolutionary or atheist scientists, have always searched for meaning too - and go to great lengths to assert their individual conclusions for or against the idea of our lives having purpose and meaning. And often without realizing it, when they elegantly prove a scientific or mathematical principle, they are tacitly admitting a certain order and meaning to our universe.

The bright star of Christmas that guided the wise men to the Babe lying in a manger was also the result of a search for meaning, of trying to discern from the skies, whether there was more to life than the temporal splendor of the wise mens’ palaces in the East, which the poet T.S. Eliot described as

“The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.”

The wise men of the East craving for meaning, were given the magnificent privilege of following the lodestar of that meaning, which came to rest over the place of the Birth of the Saviour. And when they paid homage to Mary’s Baby, they knew that their quest for meaning had at last surrendered to a different reality, a different destiny.

Many years ago, I first came upon the Christmas Day entry in the devotional daily reader, “Streams In The Desert.” It described a Christmas card which had the title, “If Christ Had Not Come.” Here is the relevant part of the devotional:

“The card represented a clergyman falling into a short sleep in his study on Christmas morning and dreaming of a world into which Jesus had never come.

In his dream he found himself looking through his home, but there were no little stockings in the chimney corner, no Christmas bells or wreaths of holly, and no Christ to comfort, gladden and save. He walked out on the public street, but there was no church with its spire pointing to Heaven. He came back and sat down in his library, but every book about the Saviour had disappeared.

A ring at the door-bell, and a messenger asked him to visit a poor dying mother. He hastened with, the weeping child and as he reached the home he sat down and said, “I have something here that will comfort you.” He opened his Bible to look for a familiar promise, but it ended at Malachi, and there was no gospel and no promise of hope and salvation, and he could only bow his head and weep with her in bitter despair.

Two days afterward he stood beside her coffin and conducted the funeral service, but there was no message of consolation, no word of a glorious resurrection, no open Heaven, but only “dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” and one long eternal farewell. He realized at length that “He had not come,” and burst into tears and bitter weeping in his sorrowful dream.

Suddenly he woke with a start, and a great shout of joy and praise burst from his lips as he heard his choir singing in his church close by:

“O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,
O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem;
Come and behold Him, born the King of Angels,
O come let us adore Him, Christ, the Lord.”

Let us be glad and rejoice today, because “He has come.”

And let us remember the annunciation of the angel, “Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people, for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”

“He comes to make His blessing flow, Far as the curse is found.”

A new dispensation has arrived, a new destiny. “For those who receive Him, for those who have yielded Him their allegiance,” what is offered now, is deliverance from the “bondage of corruption, into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

This new dispensation starts at Christmas, with the Birth of Christ - and is fulfilled through the Cross and the Resurrection. The grand plan of redemption, of giving each of us the possibility of meaning and a new destiny has arrived in the Person of Jesus, the Babe in the manger - and we have “beheld His glory.”

The grave has now become a mere stepping stone to glory and eternal life with Christ. Beauty and Truth will last forever. So will all the beauty and love that moved us with an eternal flame on earth and which now foretells a different destiny - a destiny of eternal meaning with all those we love.

For those who believe, so complete is the victory over death that St. Paul mocks the grave:

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

As recorded in the Gospel according to St. John, it was the same quest for meaning that tore at the hearts of the mourners at the funeral of Lazarus, Jesus’ friend. It is one of the two known instances in the Gospels when the Son of God is recorded as having wept with those who weep.

And then He proclaims the different destiny, the new and glorious meaning of Christmas:

“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

What are we preparing for? For more than eighteen centuries of the history of Christendom, Advent was emphatically not preparation for the “holidays” and the frenzy of “gift giving” and “goodness,” and anxiety that is already filling the propaganda air waves, internet and malls. Ironically, a certain “black Friday” of the last forty years is also timed to coincide with the start of what may be termed the “advent of anxiety!”

Nor can the preparations of Saint Phillip’s fast and the traditional, Latin Advent be equated with quaint and colourful modern, Advent calendars, candy canes, twinkling (LED) lights or the wreath of holly.

Indeed for almost all of the history of the Western Church and until the nineteenth century, Easter (still called “Pascha” in the Eastern Church) was celebrated as the first and most important feast of the Church. The Cross and the Resurrection was central in the life of the Church and this was in turn reflected in the greater importance that was laid to the celebration of Easter. The early Church Fathers wrote much more of Easter and much less of Christmas. The Eastern Church still celebrates Pascha as its primary feast day.

The Incarnation (which literally, in the Latin means “the act of becoming flesh”) was seen for most of the history of the Church, as the grand, opening act of the redeeming work of God for human beings, culminating in the Cross and the Resurrection. Without the latter, it was recognized that the former would lose its whole significance.

Becoming flesh for our sakes is also the raw story of the Good Shepherd, Jesus, who goes after the lost sheep - and when He finds this lost, stranded, straying, sheep, brings it home rejoicing. The story is found in Holy Scripture, in the Gospel according to Saint Luke.

The Incarnation made the story possible. The suffering Shepherd bears His Cross for us. And His triumphant return with the rescued sheep is the triumph of the Resurrection.

The story of the lost sheep and the Good Shepherd leaving the 99 sheep, safe in the sheepfold, to go after the one that was lost has captured the imagination of poets and artists. Perhaps the most moving and famous of these works of art is the one by the English artist Alford Sood (1858-1915):

The Incarnation was for all of us, but clearly, from the account in the Bible, the Incarnation is also for each of us - each of us with our own, particular, unique story of redemption, of being lost and being found. I have my own story too.

The Scottish poet Elizabeth Clephane (1830-1869) has her own story too. Her beautiful poem of the lost sheep and the Good Shepherd was set to music by the famous American composer, Ira Sankey in 1874:

There Were Ninety And Nine

by

Elizabeth Clephane

There were ninety and nine that safely lay

In the shelter of the fold

But one was out on the hills away,

Far off from the gates of gold—

Away on the mountains wild and bare,

Away from the tender Shepherd’s care.

Lord, thou hast here thy ninety and nine.

Are they not enough for thee?

But the Shepherd made answer: “This sheep of mine

Has wandered away from me.

And although the road be rough and steep,

I go to the desert to find my sheep.”

But none of the ransomed ever knew

How deep were the waters crossed,

Nor how dark was the night the Lord pass’d

Ere he found his sheep that was lost.

Out in the desert he heard its cry—

Sick and helpless and ready to die.

“Lord, what are these blood drops all the way

That mark out the mountain’s track?”

“They were shed for the one who’d gone astray

Ere the Shepherd could bring him back.

“Lord, why are these hands so rent and torn?”

“They’re pierced tonight by many a thorn.”

But all thru’ the mountains, thunder-riv’n,

And up from the rocky steep,

There rose such a cry to the gate of Heav’n,

“Rejoice, I have found my sheep!”

And the angels echoed around the throne,

“Rejoice, for the Lord brings back his own!”

And here, on YouTube, is a glorious rendering of this song (you can follow along with the words, if you wish):

Thorns of the wilderness raw upon the Shepherd’s flesh as He searches for the one lost sheep.

And the Angels rejoicing with the Saviour as He brings the one lost sheep home.

That is the story of Advent, the story of Christmas.