Handwritings on the Wall

“Aloha” means both hello and goodbye …and love, of course. Tulsi Gabbard, native daughter of our fair state of Hawai’i, has said Aloha! to the Democrat Party. But, love was the furthest thing from her mind when she bid the party goodbye. It came as no surprise to us who have been watching her appear in public, but now that it’s official, it’s a major development. With that in mind, check out the front page of our local newspaper, the Star-Advertiser.

As a matter of conviction, I won’t buy that liberal rag, nor will I subscribe to the digital version to get through the paywall. So, I took this picture at the coin-operated dispenser in the lobby of my condo. Look at today’s front page. The message that I get from that is, “Yeah, maybe Tulsi has quit the Democrats, but lookey here! Outgoing Gov. Ige has written an executive order that provides state legal protections to people in the baby-killing market!” Hooray for one of the most unpopular governors in the United States. This is the governor who, by executive fiat, imposed THE most restrictive measures during the Wuhan Flu pandemic – longer and harder than any other governor in the United States. We’ll say aloha to him in December. Don’t let the door hit you in the okole on the way out, Dave.

The Democrat who is running for governor of the state, lieutenant governor Dr. Josh Green, is an emergency room physician. One of his appeals to the voters is his promise to maintain access to abortions in Hawai’i. I guess that’s pretty important to the voters here in the most liberal (read “progressive”) state in the Union. We certainly wouldn’t want too many children to crowd our little islands now, would we? Green is also pledging to “follow the science” when it comes to pandemics and “climate change”. You know what that means. He’ll shut out the rest of the world if he thinks another lockdown will protect our public health. Green’s a shoe-in for our new guv. and he may just turn out to be worse than Ige. Let’s hope not, though.

Running against Green is repeat candidate Republican Duke Aiona, a native Hawaiian and evangelical Christian. Pray God Duke has an outside chance of pulling an upset in this year of the expected Republican wave.

Naive old me, I thought this calamity was due to Biden’s senility and the incompetence of his administration, but I don’t subscribe to that way of thinking anymore. I now think that it’s all intentional, what we are seeing with our own eyes before us. There are some nefarious actors in high places who are intent on bringing our nation to an end.

It’s been said that republics last only 250 years or so. Ours is already 246 years old. What are the odds that we can stick together much longer? The failure of Pres. James Buchanan to sort out the differences between the slave states and the free states led our republic into civil war a century and a half ago. Will the historians of the future find Joe Biden responsible for our nation’s imminent demise? Time will tell.

Consider our current condition:

• The national debt has just surpassed $31 trillion. Joe Biden and his Democrats have been giving away funny money created ex nihilo like madmen, ostensibly to alleviate the pain from a “pandemic” that was highly overrated. And, look at all the treasure we have been squandering on the defense of Ukraine.
• Biden has allowed 5 million poor illegal aliens to flood across the Mexican border. Those people are being transferred to locations throughout the country only to increase the burden on social services putting ever more pressure on our government finances.
• Inflation hasn’t risen this steeply in four decades. Gasoline and groceries are becoming precious commodities since the dollar has suddenly lost so much of its purchasing power. The stock market is in a tailspin as aging baby boomers are watching in horror as their pension funds back off from highs experienced during the recent Trump years.
• The deadly drug fentanyl and other illicit drugs are killing our youth. Mexican cartels are rejoicing at the burgeoning business for their merchandise. Speaking of drugs, Tony Fauci, the god of the Covidians, has made a cool $5 million in royalties from the worthless vaccines that his bureaucracy helped to develop to combat what wasn’t much more than a bad strain of influenza that our tax money helped to engineer.
• Corrupt district attorneys swept into office by George Soros’ ill-gotten gains have allowed felons to commit murder and theft only to be released on no-cash bail so that they can go right back out and menace to our society. Some parts of Democrat-run cities are no longer safe places to go for their own populations.
• The mentally ill youngsters who can’t figure out which sex they are are being groomed by the minuscule but vocal transsexual lobby. They’re coming for our children and grandchildren, don’t you doubt it. Having abandoned God, people have gone after the demigod of the sexual revolution. Next it will be pedophilia, perhaps then bestiality. Gavin Newsom’s California has already enshrined child sacrifice into law and has become a sanctuary state for abortionists.
• Obama’s administration in the person of Victoria Nuland orchestrated a coup d’etat in Kiev in 2014, deposing the incumbent president and installing a pro-Western puppet. Victor Poroshenko’s regime and other bad actors waged civil war against the Russian speakers in the Ukrainian Donbass. This year, Vladimir Putin decided to put a stop to it, having seen how badly Biden botched the exit from Afghanistan. Now four oblasts representing a large part of Ukraine’s population and economic strength have become Russian states. Putin threatens the use of nuclear weapons if Biden and the West don’t back off from supporting Volodymyr Zelensky and his doomed attempt to bring Putin down.
• Here’s a recent question: Did Biden blow up the two Nordsteam pipelines? Will we ever know? In either case, Europe faces a cold and bitter winter, but it’s their leaders’ fault for backing the NATO and the U.S.’ misguided adventure antagonizing Russia.

So much has gone wrong under this senile old fool of a president, it can’t get much worse…or can it? One month from now, we just have to create a red tsunami at the polls to put the Republicans back in the seat of opposition to a corrupt madman and his team of spiteful nihilists. God save us from mutual destruction if they don’t apply the brakes to an administration that is driving us headlong over the rails!

O God, save thy people and bless thine inheritance. Save Ukraine. Save Russia. Save Europe. And, God save these united States.

This isn’t a time of year when confession is at the forefront of Orthodox’ thinking, so I thought I would speak from my own experience of confession in the hope that it will be of some little help to my readers.

I grew up in the Northeast in the days before Vatican II. I was young so I wasn’t paying much attention then, but if the national statistics are accurate, then I would say that half of the population of my village were practicing Christians. Most were mainline Protestants, but we had a good representation of Roman Catholics, too. We Protestants used to make fun of the Catholics because they had to go to Confession on Saturday nights in order to prepare themselves for communion at the Sunday morning mass.

It was often said that their confession was a perfunctory operation where you ducked into the confessional booth and whispered to the priest behind the grille the sins that you could remember committing in the past week. He then gave you a quick absolution and assigned x number of Hail Marys and x number of Our Fathers for your penance. It became a societal joke that this was a cheap ticket to communion for Catholics who would undoubtedly go right back out and commit the same sins the following week.

The Catholic way of thinking is highly rational and therefore legalistic. Sin is considered to be an offense against God’s law, for which the believer must apply the merits of the salvific death of Christ stored in the Church in order to escape divine retribution. Of course, in the Protestant mindset, Christ’s death once and for all obliterated sin and since the sacramental priesthood had been done away with, there was no need for confession before a priest.

In my Anglican experience, I once had a lady parishioner, a former Catholic, who asked the rhetorical question, “Why should I have to confess my sins to a man?” She was true to her word; she never confessed to me. Nor did any of my other parishioners. It was not done except rarely, even in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of my memory. The saying about sacramental confession was, “All may, some should, none must.” Now that I’m a member of a traditional Russian Orthodox parish, the wording might be changed to: “All must… and frequently.” Confession is a prerequisite to receiving communion at the Divine Liturgy.

Until the end of 2021, I was a steward of a Greek Orthodox parish. Oh, how different it was there! The culture was more liberal. The parish priest never preached about confession. No wonder he once admitted in conversation that it was likely that some people in the parish had never been to confession before in their lives. Would I be sarcastic to say that one could tell by their behavior?

The dearth of confessions in the Greek tradition, at least as far as I have seen in my limited American experience, may be the underlying cause of the diminution of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. No wonder they have a heretical scoundrel for an archbishop. No wonder they swallowed the lure of religious covidianism. No wonder they’re missing money from the St. Nicholas finances. Sin abounds and is not dealt with.

A rediscovered emphasis on frequent confession might not save GOARCH, but it certainly would help. Conversely, strict adherence to this Orthodox praxis does not render ROCOR without fault, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

I am a sinner, and I am still apt to sin, but I can say that I am more cognizant of my sins than I was until last year. I keep shorter accounts of my sins, and when it comes time for Saturday night confessions, I find myself creating a verbal list of sins before I step up before the Gospel book and tell them to God before the priest.

Pardon me if this sounds like boasting, but by the grace of God rendered through the mystery of confession, I have been able to put two besetting, lifelong sins into remission. I can’t yet say that I have conquered them, lest my pride open me up to stronger temptations. My priest has been helpful with his advice, sometimes by dispensing a dosage of penance. I now feel more at peace with God and the Church, with my family and with myself. My latest struggle is with the great question as to how I should respond to the world. I’m not young. I’ve witnessed a lot, but I must say that I find the current state of national and international affairs to be, frankly, utterly frightening. There is little that I can do about it, but I can’t be at peace with it. How should I engage with a world that seems to be spinning out of control? I’ll save that topic for a later post.

We've never known a time when she was not -
Even elder brothers and sisters were tots
When she ascended to the throne
In a time gone by so far from home.

After poverty and war did she take over
From her torn father who succeeded his brother.
She vowed that she would not be the one
To doom the British crown which she had won.

Stability and grace were watchwords then
And always did she keep them to the end,
But now three score and ten years hence
She's gone.

Surely the inevitable 
Cannot be so incredible,
But even so we whisper, "How can it be
That she who reigned for an eternity
Is gone?"

She has gone the way all flesh must go
And by now, the whole world must know
A queen has died, an age has passed
Though forever indeed it seemed to last.

Let us now pause and mourn
The passing of our Lady, born
So long ago and far away
Yet over each heart held sway.

Pray her soul will meet and she will seal
A place at table for the sacred Meal
To feast on Him
Who saves from sin.

So, what about us? Will we have done
As she did, second to none
In royal servitude? What is our attitude,
We dwellers of these estates so crude?

Learn from her and emulate
The royal bearer of such grace.
And constancy in a time of change
From good to worse, so bitter is the age.

Remember her grace and stability
And emulate her ability 
To see it through both thick and thin
Until we, too, will enter in
To the reward
for servants of the Lord.

On Thursday, September first, Joe Biden went to Independence Hall in Philadelphia to deliver a speech. A gigantic American flag was draped against a wall lighted up in blood red, and two Marines in dress blues stood ramrod straight as sentinels. Jill escorted the faltering Joe out to the podium. Biden is too feeble to look like a fascist, but anyone sprier than he giving such a divisive speech against such a sinister backdrop would have.

The words that were emitted from the president’s mouth were the not the sort of demagoguery that one would expect from the former candidate who promised to bring civility and normalcy back to the presidency. He would be the uniter, he said in 2020, but that speech on September 1 put the lie to that pledge.

All of twelve times in twice as many minutes, Biden denounced the MAGA Republicans as a threat to the very foundation of our American democracy. He accused them as election deniers who subvert the constitution and the rule of law while they attempt to take America backwards. Of course Biden didn’t mention the past objections of his own Democrats to certifying the elections of George W. Bush in 2000, whom they say was elected by the Supreme Court. The sword cuts both ways.

Joe Biden is no more than a ghost of a man, so it’s important to look behind the stuffed shirt to espy his handlers who actually pull the strings. Who is it who wrote that ghastly tirade about defending the “soul of America”? And, what was his purpose? Was it to drum up the support of those who oppose Donald Trump and the MAGA movement ahead of midterms? Or, did he intend to goad the MAGA people whom he accused of being “violent extremists” into committing such acts before the election so that they could be discredited and defeated? Or was this a speech tantamount to a declaration of civil war on the political battlefield? The country is so bitterly divided now that that sort of demagoguery serves no constructive purpose. The cynical people behind Biden are the ones who will ultimately be held responsible for the catastrophic policies of this administration. They will have to answer for endangering the populace from the Mexican border to the inner cities, and for the crash of the stock market and the impoverishing of the middle class by record inflation and recession.

Lucky only leftwing propaganda outlets CNN and MSNBC carried the primetime speech last Thursday. Let’s just pray that God will hasten the day when that old crackpot Biden has been yanked off the stage like the lowlife Vaudeville actor he is. And let the historians in years to come write the dark chapter about this nadir in the American epic.

When you vote in November, vote as though the outcomes of all the races depends upon your ballot.