George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858
"The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt. And pain is not only immediately recognisable evil, but evil impossible to ignore.
We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 1940
"Behold, I am standing at the door, knocking. If one of you hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with that person, and that person with me."
Revelation 3:20
"God is constantly knocking at the gate of my heart to invite me to go beyond the state I have reached, because my whole life should be a journey on the way to Love. I cannot give a renewed assent to Love, nor above all can I give a more intensified assent than hitherto, unless a divine movement comes secretly to my heart to help it ascend higher. I can refuse it. But if I let God act he will raise me further, step by step, to a greater love."
Charles Journet, The Meaning of Grace, 1960
"This great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, compassion, historical necessity or even social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on traditional concepts. The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man.
In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all. Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth."
John 1:14
A person who does not read, who has not explored and reflected upon the thoughts and experiences of those from other lands and times, those gone before us, is left stumbling through life, afflicted with what the Buddhists call the three poisons: greed, hate, and delusion.
And many grow quite comfortable with that impairment, with the notion that their cravings are the principal laws of the world. And they will destroy all that is the truth, and offends their hollowness. They raise their flags on fields of barbaric self-absorption, and attempt to fill the great hole in their being with things and structures and people whom they consume.
It is the role of the law, and the duty of good people through all time, to restrain the bestial spirit which possesses those given over to madness, who if they can will live on the flesh of the innocent.
Let us not judge those who have been derelict in their duty toward God and their fellow men in days gone by, but rather learn from them, and not place that mantle of disreputable guilt on ourselves and our children.
Stocks managed to gather themselves and squeeze a little higher yet, falling back a bit into the close.
There is little doubt in my mind that this is a purposeful distortion of the markets for a number of reasons, the most potent of which is the need for gilding the lily of failure by those unworthy few in power. But primarily to help to disguise their looting, and their future plans for retaining it.
As one of their vile breed once said, 'Never waste a crisis.'
Gold managed to rally higher again after its recent event-driven shellacking. But silver bolted higher, with the force and momentum that never ceases to amaze.
The industrial component of silver is powerful, but also a two-edged sword of beta volatility.
VIX ticked up a bit, but is still in a fog of delusion.
Bitcoin is continuing to break up and out of its trading range. So far the action looks more calculated than organic. But we'll know more at overhead resistance.
Inflation data tomorrow.
A serious economic dislocation is gathering on the horizon. And the captain and crew of the goodly ship of state are busy looting the purser's office, and walking the decks saying 'all is well'.
Who could have seen it coming?
Have a pleasant evening.
