The Fourth Sunday of Advent

This past week the weather was so warm it felt like May. The spotted dogs and I had the opportunity to take many pleasant walks, and I felt as if my body and soul were being scrubbed by the clean air I drew deeply into my lungs. I spent much of the week pondering my gratitude for my health and that of Mrs. Orr and all of our family. More than ever, I believe it’s important to stay out of the hospital and far from health care facilities if at all possible. Once again, I will refer you to the indefatigable Anne Barnhardt. One of her recent podcasts featuring an experienced nurse was bracing, alarming, and eye-opening. I recommend my readers listen to it and think deeply about what Nurse Claire describes from her eyewitness perspective. The link is here. In the podcast, Nurse Claire recommends several items that you might want to consider purchasing in order to help care for yourself and your family away from a hospital setting. She did a followup podcast with an anonymous and very knowledgeable MD called “Dr. Beep” in which she provides a more exhaustive shopping list. That podcast can be found here.

It’s kinda funny to talk about efforts to stay out of the hospital, given something that happened yesterday. The warm spell was broken by a front that moved in and brought a day-long rain with it. I decided to take a couple of Mrs. Orr’s houseplants outside and let the good Lord do a bit of the watering. Just off of the back porch, there’s a slight downslope that leads to a concrete patio where we keep lots of plants and tomatoes during the warm months. I was headed to that patio when the mud beneath my feet betrayed me. My feet went almost straight up, my body turned into a beautiful gymnastic “V” and I plummeted down, smashing my bee-hind into the (thankfully) soft earth. Instinctively, I tried to keep my head from hitting the ground, and I felt my neck pop as I landed. Both elbows hit the mud as well, in a somewhat asymmetrical fashion. I managed to get up, took the plants over to the patio and plunked them down, then took a wide berth around the slope and returned to the back porch and went inside to strip off my muddy clothes.

I knew I would feel the effects of the fall later, but I was curious about what would hurt the worst. Well, Sunday has arrived and so has the answer to my curiosity. My neck, both front and back, is certainly sore. But my shoulders, especially the right one, are alive with bright pain. The rotator cuff area on the right one is preventing me from lifting that arm very high at all. My lower back and butt are sore, as are my elbows. My knees and hips seem to have been blessed with a sort of radiating pain, as if the rest of me is insistent on sharing the bounty. My feelings are also a little bit hurt because none of the dogs, whom I feed and upon whom I lavish affection and attention, bothered to rush over and throw themselves between their master and the unforgiving terra sloppa. I hope the guilt and not the gusty wind outside is the reason they seem somewhat restless today.

But I am deeply, deeply grateful that I didn’t strike my head or my spine on the laundry basket-sized rock that was about a foot to my right when I fell. I’m also grateful that I didn’t break anything. It could easily have gone the other way and I could be sitting right now, 36 hours after the fall, in an emergency room hallway. That’s no exaggeration. At least two friends have described their ER visits in the last couple of weeks, and they were horror shows. One spent 39 hours in the hallway on a hard gurney with a single sheet to cover him until he was finally admitted to a room. The other spent almost exactly 48 hours before getting a room. This is due to staffing shortages, and it’s NOT due just to the Chinese rabies situation. Apparently, hospitals have been sending nurses home when the hospital census drops below a certain level, even if they are slammed with incoming emergencies of a non-Covid nature. This is purely to save money. Medicine is a profitable business, as is big pharma, and if you allow yourself to live in the past and believe that doctors and their ilk are here to help you, heal you, and do no harm, you are deluded. Again, refer to the eyewitness, in-the-trenches accounts described by Nurse Claire in the Barnhardt podcasts. I don’t use this blog as a current events or news cycle aggregator, but sometimes I feel deeply in my soul that I must alert friends to certain realities. This is one of those times.

***

On Friday, we were able to meet half the kids and some of the grandkids at Dollywood, the theme park a couple of hours from here. The kids had free passes for us because they have season passes. Good thing, too, because they weren’t letting just any ol’ riff-raff in during the big Christmas season. And even with the free passes, we still had to pay to park.  Anything to help Dolly stay current with her Botox and her wigs and her petticoats of many colors.

It was an exhausting day but pretty fun. Our main function was to watch the two smallest grandbabies while mama and daddy got to ride the rides with the older children. That was fine with us. I’m a former Marine, I’ve jumped out of perfectly good airplanes on fifteen occasions, I’ve been shot at, and I’ve been bitten by venomous spiders and nonvenomous snakes, but just watching some of those torture-device contraptions they call rollercoasters gave me the willies. Full disclosure: about 21 years ago, Mrs. Orr and I visited Dollywood, and I rode some of the rollercoasters by myself, Mrs. Orr not being a fan of being turned upside down nor looping any loops while trying to keep ones internal organs internal. I’m not a fraidy-cat with rides (though I suspect the grandkids THINK I am). But some of the things I watched them climb on and scream their way through don’t look like roller coasters. They look like machines NASA uses to wash out weaker candidates for astronaut school. Corkscrews and 75 mph drops, almost completely vertical, along with g-force pulling direction changes and viscera-squishing sudden stops. That sort of thing. So Mrs. Orr and I sat with the tots and smiled at people who walked past and cooed about how beautiful they are. We also did some weapons-grade people watching and were astounded yet again at how some people dress in public. My grandmother used to say that the country had turned into a disgrace. That was before her death in 1980. She was a piker. I could teach Nanny a thing or three about disgraceful Americans. I simply will never understand how some of the lines get crossed.

But the park was beautifully decorated. I can’t recall how many millions of lights they used, but it was a bunch. Christmas trees everywhere, heavily lit and adorned. We wandered through one area where tens of thousands of blue lights were suspended straight down on wires from trees and supporting wires above. Dry ice fog provided an eerie but lovely atmosphere…this was just as darkness arrived. It was like walking through an elvish forest.

There were also carolers at the chapel, and they sounded nice, except for an excruciating “Go Tell It On the Mountain,” complete with funky moves from the singers (and unfortunately from some of the audience). Wandering musicians strolled through the park, playing bluegrass versions of Christmas favorites, including a fiddler and an elderly banjo player, both excellent. We parted company with the family when we learned that they were dead-set on standing on queue for at least 90 minutes to ride the steam-powered locomotive-pulled train through the park. I’m sure it was a lovely nighttime ride, but we played the age card and headed home.

We stopped enroute to home at a retro diner, a place that aspired to be a Jack Rabbit Slim’s sort of place, complete with tables-in-automobiles. The waitresses were all wearing what they believed to be Fifties-style dresses and outfits, but I don’t recall ever seeing huge, garish tattoos or platinum nose rings on the girls in photos from the 1950s. Some of them appeared truly mentally ill, the sort of girls who attract perverts and psychopaths. It made me sad. As did the prices on the menu. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen milkshakes starting at $8.95. We selected the cheapest things on the menu and we did not get milkshakes. I felt very pious while watching other people order desserts that cost as much as a steak does in most restaurants.

But it was a good day, and we made it home safely after driving in some unexpected fog, and we slept deeply. And then I got up the next day and did some mud-dancing, and here I sit with ibuprofen in my veins and Jinx sleeping at my left elbow while my beautiful wife reads in her chair and Dixee sleeps in her bed beside the chair and Bluebelle snores on the other end of the couch and the Christmas decorations on the hall table are glowing with mellow light and the icy wind scoops pine needles from the tree just outside the window and my feet, in their wool socks, are as warm as buttered toast.

***

Did you ever have toast as a child that was made under a broiler, in an oven or toaster oven? The kind where your mother would put two pats of butter per slice of bread and the bread browned while the butter became little sunshine puddles of saltiness? Mrs. Orr has been on a kick lately of preparing my toast this way instead of in the toaster, and it’s culinary art, folks. Just art. The butter flavor is more intense than when it’s spread across the entire piece of bread.

I was also a huge fan of skillet toast when I was a boy. I still make it on occasion. If you’ve never had it, skillet toast is what a grilled cheese sandwich would be sans le frommage. It ends up being about as thick as a poker chip, and is ideal for cutting into thin strips and dipping into orange juice or hot chocolate. Ah, hot chocolate. One of my food peculiarities as a teenager was french fries dipped in hot chocolate. I played in the band, and after high school football games, several of my friends and I would pile into cars and race to our favorite burger joint, Burger Chef. They offered a really creamy hot chocolate, and nice long fries. Dipping the fries in the chocolate gave me that good sweet/salty thing, and I’d be tempted to pawn a spotted dog for the chance to sit down in a 1976 Burger Chef and spend an hour with that mouth-treat.

***

In prayer this morning, I gazed at the crucifix before me and watched the light play on the silver corpus and I thought of my own approaching death (and yes, your death is approaching, too, dear reader) and pondered all the martyrs who have died for the faith once delivered to the saints, and my mind stopped for a while on Saint Joan of Arc, the teenaged French girl whom I love –forgive me my bluntness, Holy and Blessed Mother — more than I think I could ever love the Virgin Mary. I cannot nor will I even attempt to explain my devotion to the Maid. But I will say that her presence in my life is a great comfort to me, and my requests to her to pray for me and my loved ones and my readers are daily comforts to my soul, my soul that sometimes aches as if it had been slammed onto the cold ground repeatedly, my soul that I know is singular and precious and irreplaceable, my soul that savors the dark winter evenings.

So I watched my crucifix and thought on the Maid, and I wondered if anyone will ever truly die for the faith again. Compromise seems too easy now, and we are all of us too, too weak. Will anyone ever truly die for the faith in the future? Who might it be? And what might be the circumstances? And who will tell the tale? And who will say the Mass, or light a votive, or thumb a bead while frowning and making a candle flame dance with the breath of hushed and holy whispers?

***

One other thing on current events, and then I will try to avoid the topic for some time to come.

I recently re-watched Martin Scorcese’s beautiful and reverent film Silence, which is the second film treatment of Shūsaku Endō’s historical novel. The film delves into the Japanese persecution of Christians during the Tokogawa shogunate, and focuses on a pair of priests who have undertaken the hazardous journey to the Land of the Rising Sun in order to locate their missing mentor, a Portuguese missionary priest. One of the priests is martyred before the missing priest can be found, and when the surviving padre finally meets his hero, he is horrified to learn that the older priest has apostasized.

The Christians of feudal Japan were so brutally suppressed that few refused to publicly become apostate. The most common method of showing loyalty to the Emperor and of rejecting the authority of Christ was to stamp upon an image of the Savior, or to spit on a crucifix.  The film portrays these actions in a stark and moving way.

Watching the film again made me think of the Coviet Union in which we are now living, with the ever-changing and arbitrary “rules,” the calculated stoking of panic and the spit-flecked accusations of heresy and disloyalty. And watching the Japanese Christians attempt to save their families’ lives by stamping on a holy icon of Christ made me think of the so-called “vaccines” being pushed today. The peasant villagers who kept their faith even in the absence of any clergy for long years thought that by going through the motions of publicly apostasizing, they would be free from suspicion and persecution.

But no. For the Inquisitor and his minions, it was never enough. The initial stamp on the holy face was merely the beginning of an endless series of verifications, of “boosters” of their rejection of the Christian god. stomping down with their muddy sandals upon the face of Christ Jesus, profaning again and again His image and claim to lordship. The Inquisitor never let the former Christians rest, including the priests. There would always be a new round of icon-profaning, a new show in the market place of the former Christian’s renewed allegiance to the Emperor and the Shogun.

So, too, with the highly profitable injectable drugs being referred to as “vaccines,” which are as much vaccines as Bruce Jenner is a woman. There will always be a new booster, or a newer, deadlier variant which requires a new shot or a new booster or both, and then all will be well until the profit margin wavers and the compliance level drops a bit, and then it’s into the public square with you, eta, and let’s see you grind that face under your foot just one more time. Just one more time to make sure. It’s for the good of the Empire, you see.

I have said for some time now that I aspire to be a saint. I have also now speculated about the probability of there being any future martyrs. I hope that I possess the strength and grace — or will be given the strength and grace — to resist to the death ever apostasizing or receiving das Bidenreich’s death jab. Who can say whether these things may be linked in the future, and that the age of saints and martyrs may come round again?

This is a holy day. Tonight, in the dark chill of the final Sunday of the Advent season, candles will be lit and holy words will be spoken over the flames. May Christ grant grace and strength and calm reserve to those who have set their faces towards Heaven and against the Emperor and the shadowy forces who control him.

The people that walked in darkness, have seen a great light: to them that dwelt in the region of the shadow of death, light is risen.

Prophecy of Isaias (Isaiah), Chapter 9, verse 2

~ S.K. Orr