Vengeance is the LORD's

We will never forget what was done and is being done. And neither will God.

Earlier today, a dear friend and a kind mother (let’s call her Penelope) texted me on the verge of tears. She lives in a small town in the American Northeast. While at a neighborhood park, she pled with a stranger—a father—to let his daughters, playing soccer in 90˚F, take off their N95s. Oh no, he insists, his daughters are safe; his wife is a PhD who works in Big Pharma, they know what they’re doing, etc. [My friend used to work in a research lab at an Ivy League; she is not uneducated.] Penelope then went and talked to the soccer coaches, who flatly remarked that they had players who were vomiting from wearing masks in the heat. The coaches couldn’t do anything about what the parents did to their kids, though.

As Penelope and I talked, I was reminded of the below. What follows is an excerpt, a few pages from the end, of an essay I wrote in Jan AD 2022. The essay is around twenty thousand words; perhaps someday I’ll contrive a means of publishing it.

It is titled: A Joy Observed; or, “It’s Not Just—”

For context: a central thesis therein is that the medical tyranny of the latter two years composes a sort of new circumcision, with vaccination as the circumcision itself, and masking as a public pledge, or rehearsal, of religious alignment therewith. Accordingly, those disinclined to submit to either/both are classed as ritually unclean, afflicted with leprosy, fit only to be cast out of the cities.

I am well aware of the Christian teachings that we ought not plead for justice, that we could not stand in that day, that vengeance is the LORD’s, etc. Fair enough. Go to your neighborhood’s elementary school. Study the eyes of the children. Stare into the hollowed, vacant eyes of the alcoholic twenty-somethings shuffling through the grocery store, accumulating freezer dinners, and look at their left hands, where you will see no glint of silver or gold or diamond. Stare at the obituaries of men (and, increasingly, women) my age who have biopsied their brains with buckshot, exploded their livers with alcohol, shattered their vasculatures with amphetamines and opioids, or hurtled down the road, not across the street, and left their wrist a scarlet fount. Read the tearful mournings of their families, or face it yourself in the flesh. Ask anyone you see on the street, with a sincere countenance upon your face, “Do you have hope?” Write the response down, and rewrite it a hundred times. Burn the fact into your brain that irrespective of “all-cause excess mortality” rates and whatever else the bean-counting actuaries may track, just over 40% of all death, worldwide, in 2021, was that of babies murdered in the womb. Write a five-paragraph essay arguing why a public health apparatus which fights tooth and nail to preserve, if not all the more enlarge, such industrialized infanticide, would then suddenly exhibit a vivid, vibrant, indefatigable drive to preserve human life amidst the SARS2 outbreak. [Ignore for argument’s sake that that very public health apparatus created SARS2.] Read your essay out loud to the next person who tells you that he does not have hope. Ask the widows and orphans if they have been more alone, less alone, or equally alone over the past twenty-two months than before. If you do not know any widows and orphans, then perhaps try asking those with no family adjacent or proximate to them, as that is what “widow” and “orphan” more generally meant in the anthropological context in which the New Testament was written. In today’s brave new world, many live far from family, and most have no families of their own, marriage rates being what they are. Travel to the average Christian (much less secular) college in the United States and observe the “contact-traced” students who have been forcibly “quarantined” into their dorm rooms, irrespective of symptom presentation or test result (as if the tests themselves are accurate), with meals delivered to their doors as if in a common prison. Ask them if they experience joy. Ask them when the last time was that someone touched them: shook their hand, or touched their shoulder, or hugged them. Ask them if they feel loved.

Indeed, vengeance is the LORD’s. Read the Magnificat. Write, for as long as it takes to convince yourself, how God smiles upon the abuse and exploitation of His beloved image-bearers over the past twenty-two months. Dissert upon how rather than mourn for the lost sheep of society, He instead concurs that the making of a transhumanist omelette necessitates the breaking of more than a few eggs. Consider the joy with which God must behold the eyes of those schoolchildren which you, moments ago, studied. While He once made claims concerning the children, the abusers thereof, millstones, and bodies of water, realize how He must now smile thereupon. Because after all, everything which has transpired has to have been just—not least of which because the Church has openly participated (depending on geopolitical jurisdiction) in most or all of the aforementioned. Besides, I have been told countless times that it is all “just” such and such anyway, and therefore a small thing. No small thing can be a grave matter of injustice, surely. That an entire body of human beings—a colossal, multigenerational, multiethnic body—has been cast into the oblivion of leprosy is, well, “just” the way things went. It wasn’t particularly unjust. It was a small thing. It was just. The new circumcision was just.

But though the Church may abandon its mission to seek and love the lepers, Christ has not. Christ, who walked amongst the lepers, who healed the bleeding woman; Christ, who loved those whom men called filth; Christ, who bestowed His cleanness upon all as a free gift of faith; Christ, who reckoned His cleanness not a thing to be grasped; Christ, whom I fear and tremble before. But never shall I so do unto the State, or agents, instruments, apparatchiks, or slaves thereof. There are no Sacraments but what Christ has instituted; and I shall render no meet sacraments to the kingdom of death.

Here, perhaps some will exclaim, with fiery glint in their eye, that I am but a fool, that I wish to foolishly ignore all of the “changes” (progress?) in the world of the past two years. Well, they are not entirely wrong: I certainly am a fool. However, were I to wish anything, I would wish for greater change, not some callous blindness to what has already transpired. I wish for a Church which cares for the sick, not which casts them out. I wish for a Church which jeers death, not which renders it burnt offerings. I wish for a Church which is a Family, one in which blood is thicker than hand sanitizer. I wish for a Church which boldly claims its inheritance of undying Love poured out from Christ’s side; for a Church which glories in Christ’s strength being made manifest in her weakness.