Towards Advent and Christ-mass 2005
"My Lord has laid it on my heart to write this; may He, and He alone, Who alone is wisdom, guide my mind and my hand.
As Advent shows its bright face on the horizon, thoughts start turning to that coming of pure Light, Virgin-borne , the Son of God the Father, God of Abraham and Isaac, the Messiah long prophesied, into the World He created.
And sadly, thoughts also turn to the impurity and corruption and darkening of that Pure and Holy Light that gathers momentum increasingly swiftly.
Paganism, false "gods" and idols, the enemy of mankind working his evil, often in subtle ways in the very heart of the Church. In the name of liberalism and tolerance, of broadmindedness....
This has been an increasing theme in the email that come to me, often via my own web site, which is as pure a vessel as any can be. People seeking solitude often...
One such woman, a devout and practising Roman Catholic, expressed interest in a place which, while itself RC, embrace the " universalist" idea that all religions lead to God.
When I took this up with her, she said that she happened to be RC because she " liked the rituals and symbolism" and went into detail re the idea that all religions are the same. The term " narrowminded" came up; an epithet I treasure as a compliment now....
Somehow she had misunderstood the purpose of the coming of Christ... The utter pain and sacrifice of the Crucifixion ... Poor Jesus; redundant if all religions are the same.. Jesus; Messiah.. Only Son of the Living God, King of the Universe...abandoned then
As I think all of you here know, if any question is raised, I quote Jesus. That is the only reality and wisdom we have. The only certainty. The words of the Word of God.
"I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.. No man comes to the Father but by me.... Narrow is the gate that leads to eternal life and few there are who find it,.. " echoing " Thou shalt have no other gods but me..." The response to this was " Oh, when people say things like that and say they have found this in the Bible, I ignore it," and a lot more along those lines. None of which was new to me and none of which is true to Jesus.
Many Christian parents across the denominations home school their children to protect them from the mish-mash they are taught, by seculars of no faith, of world religions. Another young woman mailed me with such a saga. She had never been taught truth, simply.. The last I heard from her she was attending RCIA on my advice and talking to a Poor Clare convent in discernment.
And sadly, this is rife in Churches.... Labyrinths, which are a pagan Egyptian rite, the using of Buddhist meditation techniques... A Franciscan friary here ran a Buddhist retreat; led by a monk of that tradition. The write up, written by a FriarPriest, mentioned Jesus not once. And the two traditions are diametrically opposed as was obvious by the focus there of the " getting in touch with the inner self" as the way to peace. Jesus is our Peace, not self.....
In some Roman Catholic Churches in India, the pagan gods are acknowledged and revered at the start of Mass.... The Irish Columban missionaries, they who took Jesus to China, and many of whom were martyred there, now frequently participate in pagan rituals.. One of their missionaries, a Roman Catholic priest, describes in detail his taking part in a Shinto rite; standing naked under a waterfall with the rest of them, then dressing up as a white bird.....
So why is this so wrong?
When I am seeking answers, I talk with a friend who is more learned than I am. Always I know the truth in every fibre of my being, but need the support then. She has studied Scripture in Greek and Hebrew and has a clear and pure and shining faith in Jesus alone. And the words she sent me , from her theology professor, sum it up well. All religions seek God, but only one, Christianity, finds Him and only Christianity leads to eternal life.
Make no mistake here. The idols and false pagan gods are not the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Nor is the New Age pagan ideology... not is the eco-"mother earth" stuff.
One thing I have noticed is that none of these traditions ever claim to be the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ... Isn't that something? Many revere Jesus as a teacher; but not as God....Only we do stray from the purity of truth in Jesus. Only we speak of liberalism that is idolatry and a betrayal of Christ.
Padre Pio, who had a gift of discernment rare in these times, said there are more demons walking the earth than there are people who have ever lived. Rebellious spirits of evil in disobedience to Christ, who will infiltrate an unwary soul. and can impersonate even Jesus.
There are dark and pagan powers. In reality.
Many fall away from the Church, because of human weakness and wrongdoing within that denomination - and who are any of us to judge and accuse.. as Jesus says, before you comment on the speck of dust in your neighbour's eye, take the plank out of your own,, let he who is without sin cast the first stone... Judge not lest you be judged..... And in doing so they cut themselves off from the Christian fellowship which from the earliest days of Christ has been our defence and our bulwark against evil.... They often, as I said to one delivery man here, who had done just that, reverting to near -pagan nature woship,"Throw the Baby away with the bathwater"...And cut themselves off from the Bible also.
Our fault as Christians when that happens... and ours to set right also.
By learning His word and living His word,... not by isolating ourselves and others.....As I write this, verses from the Bible run through my mind; from Jesus, from Paul and the epistles written in those early and hard days....They inform and affirm all I say here.
If you set yourself against His word, then you isolate yourself from Jesus. and the tendency then is to "create God/Jesus in your own image".. to invent in the vacuum of isolation and pride a figure that is not Jesus. The New Age talk is of " light and love"; of something which has no "rules"; all soft and easy and permissive. I think that having read now most of Matthew, you will know that this is not Jesus.. Many of His teachings were so hard that many fell away from Him in His earthly life.
And in doing this, you lay yourself open to demonic attack....
The thing that all these false ideas have in common is simply what one priest calls " Bible illiteracy". Many will read anything rather than Holy Scripture... They will theorise and theologise, wild flights of intellectual fantasy with no foundation in fact and truth.
Thomas Merton's last book, "Asian Journal" is "pure" Buddhism. All the photos are Buddhist. I am convinced that that was why he was taken then in death. Because he had such a following that the harm he would have done was too much.
Many who come to Christ are never taught that our faith is Judeo-Christian. The God of Abraham and Isaac, choosing Israel for His Chosen ones, to give birth to the Messiah.. who then would " open the kingdom of heavne to all believers". They never learn in awe the wondrous story of what some call" salvation history".. the lovingkindness of God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of how He gave Israel chance after chance to obey His laws..... oh so much love He gave them...Always knowing that one day He would need to make that terrible sacrifice of His Son.. and foretelling it all in great detail in the Prophets.
So let us, as Advent nears, cleanse and purify our hearts and our ways by learning these things.
By purging this Holy Season of all pagan influences and ideas... no divali,, no festival of light for us. simply the growing Light of Jesus in Truth and Purity.
When I lived on a barren and non-Christian island, I used to light the windows of my hermitage there in Advent, praying that the Light of Christ would shine out over the dark fields and illumine and warm the hearts grown dark and cold.. ( how it did that in fact I knew not until after I had left that place and is a story for another day) One neighbour, who refused to celebrate Christmas in any way as she had no belief, started one year to bait me about my ways. saying that it was all just a feast of light at the darkest time of year.
"Yes, " I said,"To celebrate the coming of Christ, the true LIGHT of the world," and much more. She never baited me again and we talked much then of these things.
One last image....
In Sri Lanka there is a group of Habited Nuns, living and working in primitive conditions; they have joyfully picked up the torch from their Sisters lost in the tsunami. Caring for the very poor, especially the children, in the devastation there. Feeding and clothing in the Name of Jesus as He bids us. Matthew 25....
They are cared for and respected as the Holy Women of God they are, by the Buddhist monks there.
And they were given hospitality and space in a Buddhist temple there.
That space was painted pink, and full of the trappings of paganism..
The Nuns, "risking" causing offence, stripped it bare, and drawing on their slender resources for the materials, painted it pure Monastic white.
A banner for Jesus.. no compromise, no taint of any kind of anything that is not Jesus.
Let us be like those Nuns.. let nothing we are or do or say betray the love of the God of Abraham and Isaac giving Jesus to us.
Jesus tells us that narrow is the way to eternal life and few there are who find it.... Let us walk that sweet and narrow way with him this Advent.. Love all, serve all, be at peace with all who will let you be at peace with them; all overtly and solely in the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Only Son of the Living God."