It is Sunday and I shall blog on Sundays. I also will write on Sundays things which will be posted during the week. That is how things will appear during the week. If anything is horribly important, I may share, but Sunday is blog day.
However, today I am so sad, I can hardly speak or write.
The sounds of the seagulls, even past one in the morning remind me of a day I was walking in the Michigan Dunes National Park before it was built up. I was grieving about someone and the seagulls mirrored my distress. Their plaintiff calls and the odd, almost unnatural dunes made me feel a lack of ease and yet, a oneness with the landscape. Love had disappeared from my life rather suddenly and I wanted the wind, waves and gulls to comfort me. I also visited the Dunes at Michigan City, Indiana, and the Indiana Dunes State Park. Only two of us walked over the white sands, which would probably be impossible to experience today. We were both wrapped in silence, for reasons of our own. Love was disappearing from our lives.
Love is disappearing from the world quickly, because lust is taking over the hearts and souls of men and women. Lust for power, lust for money, lust for sexual pleasure and lust for death have taken hold of so many young people that I can hardly understand myself how evil has flourished in so short a time.
But, we have two generations of people raised without a moral framework. We have two generations of people raised in households where life centred around their needs and desires. These two generations have no way to judge their own actions.
I live near a mosque and have been listening through my window to the prayers of Ramadan. It is so strange to live in Ireland and daily meet people from Asian countries, Middle Eastern countries and EU countries. None of my friends here in Dublin are Irish. Why?
For several reasons, one being that those my age are missing from Church. Most of the people are either my parents' ages or my son's age. It is weird to be almost the only person in a congregation who is a baby boomer.
It is also weird to be a pro-life woman surrounded by hateful, anti-life women and men. The gentility of the Irish is gone, replaced by a harshness, a cold heartedness which only see profit or status as important.
I am living among the dead, as the Irish have lost their identity, and when one loses one's identity, something dies.
There are no song birds where I am staying only seagulls and other sea birds. The night of the vote, because the city was alive with lights and traffic, and I was up watching the vote on the telly, these strange birds screeched and complained until the wee hours of the morning. It was almost as if Nature herself was grieved at the vote for abortion. It was as if the birds were calling out to their Maker for understanding. One small island had given itself over to the greatest sin of our times.
I pass the cafes and shops. I see thousands of young people and middle-aged people shopping, buying in the stores which are having huge sales as the economy is so bad. But, I am shocked. There is nothing worth having here-no class, no beauty. No one is upset.
The Prince of Darkness has a temporary victory. This fallen angel will bring down as many people as he can with him as he hates God and goodness and himself.
He does not care how people choose to go to hell, just that they do.
Only fourteen people voted against the bill because they were against abortion. Another 17 or so were either seeing the bill as not going far enough, and some, possibly pro-life without stating that openly. I do not know the numbers.
The rudeness of the Dail during the debates and votes for the amendments was shocking.
Gentility is dead.
The Irish can no longer say that they have a spiritual superiority over the English, whom they hate so much. They have sold their own country "down river", as we say in Iowa.
One can try and divert one's attention for a short while, but the reality of evil is so palpable that one cannot escape it. As Yeats wrote,
Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.
I wanted to go to Malta, but could not arrange things there at this time. Time before last, two times ago, I had to stay in a bed and breakfast, as my rooms in a flat were not ready. It turned out to be a B and B for homosexual men, orgies included. That was the same week as the uprising of anarchists in Rome, and the following week. These things were brought to my attention for a reason. I talked with the homosexuals and had Masses said for two of them, one who is famous on the island, By accident, because God wanted me to know this, I stumbled across homosexual porn sites in Malta on the net. I shall not describe these. They are legal. In my first two weeks on the island, God showed me the depth of the evil which had taken over His sacred spaces. Where St. Paul had healed and preached, subcultures of death were rising out of the deep pits of selfishness and sin.
Our world is not the outer world any more, but the interior world. I, and you, must strengthen our souls for this coming onslaught of evil which will try and wipe the Church off the face of the Earth. This will not happen.
We have the promise of Christ that the Church will endure until His Coming. But, I, for one, despite years of knowledge and experience of personal persecutions, am still not holy enough for the final battles. But, Our Good Lord also told us these things would happen. I have had no doubt for a long time we shall be marginalized, fined, hated, simply because Satan hates the one, true, holy and Catholic Church-the Bride of Christ.
I pray for final perseverance. I am not so prideful as to think I can withstand certain pains. However, one learns to be patience and accept what Christ Himself freely accepted-the hatred of those who hate the Truth.
I encountered three young men who, after some discussion, revealed a great hatred for Revelation, objective truth, and even goodness. Two became rude to me, simply because I could not agree with their utilitarian view of life. Utilitarianism is the straw which those who rely on science and technology for meaning cling to in the face of desperation. However, I did have to endure great rudeness, which I pointed out to them, was a result of their lack of a love of religion, philosophy and what I called the liberal arts, which makes men free.
I was criticized for being religious. I was criticized for thinking that beauty and gentility were greater than technological advances.
They hated me and showed it. Why? Simply because I did not agree with them. Hatred of the truth cannot abide the confidence of Reason and Faith.
It hurts to be hated and being treated rudely, but this is nothing compared with the hatred which while try and destroy all light.
As I write in the dark in the wee hours of the morning, the sounds of the city are slowly dying to a low rumble. Dublin is tired for the night. And the new day has not yet dawned. Young people are having a party next door and the girls are very loud. It is going on two. The sound of champagne corks challenges the dying sounds of the city. Celebration seems out of place tonight.
Will there ever be real light, the Light of Christ, here again in the hearts and minds of most of the people? Will the birds, now after midnight, stop crying to God for order? Will we ever find a home here?
Thankfully, I know from experience and my Faith, that this is not my home. And, like that day on the dunes, I shall have to endure suffering in order to find that spark in the heart which surrounds love, and that is hope, not for what is seen, but for what is unseen. This is our Faith, which leads to hope and love.