“We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way. Blessed are they who love their brothers and sisters as much when they are sick, as when they are well and of service. And blessed are they who love their brothers and sisters as well when they are far away, as when they are close. When you leave this earth, you can take nothing that you have received, but only what you have given.” Francis of Assisi
“Political decisions helped to create the super-elite in the first place, and as the economic might of the super-elite class grows, so does its political muscle.”
Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats
"Flagrant evils cure themselves by being flagrant."
John Henry Newman
"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that they may not wish to come out of hell, but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good."
C. S. Lewis
"If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves.”
E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World
“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction."
Simone Weil
"True opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, that we are not going to be judged.”
Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism
Gold and silver were visibly slammed today for the April contract option expiration on the Comex.
What a surprise.
Stocks were trading weakly, but managed to rally strongly in the quiet afternoon trade.
It never gets old.
There will be a Non-farm Payrolls report on Friday.
“The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned...
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!”
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus
"Truth be told, most politicians couldn't care less about the plight of the poor. There's so much profit to be made from poor people - think payday loans, high-interest rent-to-own stores, for-profit colleges, and overpriced mobile homes - that politicians and their crony-capitalist donors have a vested interest in keeping them poor."
Joshua Wilkey
"For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality.
They want independent central banks.
And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses."
Pierre Bourdieu, L’essence du néolibéralisme
"To some who were confident of their own superiority, and looked down upon and despised others, Jesus told this parable: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ''God, I thank you that I am not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.''
‘But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
‘I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’"
Luke 18:9-14
Pride, intended as a recognition of our achievements, ironically diminishes our fullness as human beings, and often quite dramatically. Pride can make people act in ways that, from a distance, seem very pompous and silly.
And among these proud ones there are often those who not only go beyond a simple agnosticism and indifference to the vastness of creation, but actively refuse to acknowledge anything greater than themselves. And they do so almost with a kind of fervor, aggressively despising any forms of humility and simplicity among others as a weakness of mind and character.
They proudly build their castles, made of money and honors and power, on the weak sands of their own ego and worldly achievements. That form of worldly pride is easier for us to understand. We see it clearly in the self-proclaimed elite of our time. The balance of things may only be restored for them by the four last things, death, judgement, heaven and hell, the hard realities which are irresistible, even to the mighty.
But less obvious perhaps is the spiritual form of pride, that reduces us into a distorted order of things that would be equally silly if it were not so insidious. Spiritual pride blinds and binds us to our faults, of course. But even worse than that, it leads us to magnify and fix ourselves upon the faults of others.
In doing so we seek to justify our own imagined achievements, and at the same time dismiss our bad treatment and low regard for them. Like the worldly and wealthy, it is often used to justifiy the swindles and deceptions they inflict upon the weak and the troubled and the poor: the least of these.
There is no person who is spiritually proud whose heart will serve as a home for the Holy Spirit, the spirit of humility, and mercy, and of love. They are too full of the law, and of judgement, and of the trappings of righteousness, and themselves.
Pride makes us think that we are a superior specimen of all creation, a model for others, if they were only able to rise above their weakness. Even if we acknowledge a greater God intellectually, or so we think that we do, in fact we are accepting Him on our own terms, terms that we ourselves have set, and often in a very legalistic manner. God becomes the perfection of our own goodness, and not the other way around. This is the leaven of the Pharisee, the exacting experts of the law, as noted so often in the gospels, and in the parable above.
Spiritual pride leads to a lingering spiritual death. It turns the living being into a whited sepulcher, all bright and polished on the outside, proudly ornamented with scrupulous attention to detail, and ostentatious adherence to the letter of the law— but inside full of corruption, and festering foulness, and 'dead men's bones.'
This is all too common among those whose love is directed to the rituals and the forms of religion, but wanting nothing to do with the human realities of it, the acts of mercy to others which are the second great commandment.
It is a sickening romance with the self, a sickness unto death.
But isn't this just what it means to be human? If Mother Teresa had decided to hell with the poor and the dying, and run off to join a reality cooking show in Hollywood, to seek her own fame and fortune, wouldn't that only behuman?
No. There is a difference is between the things that people may do that are beneath their calling to be fully human, and what they do that strives to achieve the fullness of their humanity.
It is the general lack of moral aspiration and the glorification of that perversion of individuality which is selfishness that marks our time, as it has done so many times in the past. It distorts our vision, and makes the saints incomprehensible, laughable, almost repulsive and contemptible to us. And it is a sickness, the lingering death of a soul and of a society.
“Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son,
and you shall name him Jesus.
He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High,
and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father,
and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever,
and of his Kingdom there will be no end."
Luke 1:30-33
"Let Gabriel’s word be held in your mind, for nothing is impossible to his glorious Majesty, who humbled Himself for us and was born of our humanity. God assumed smallness in her, without diminishing His nature, to make us great."
Ephrem of Edessa, (306-373)
“The Church Fathers were fond of exploring the relationship between Eve, mother of all the living, and the new Eve, Mary the Mother of God. Where Eve grasped and lost, Mary surrendered and received; where Eve said no to the alluring mystery, Mary said yes.”
Robert Barron
"God has prepared for Himself one great song of praise throughout eternity, and those who enter the community of God join in this song. It is the song that the 'morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy' at the creation of the world. It is the victory song of the children of Israel after passing through the Red Sea, the Magnificat of Mary after the annunciation, the song of Paul and Silas in the night of prison, 'the song of Moses servant of God, and the song of the Lamb.' It is the song of the heavenly fellowship.
God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs His wonders where one would least expect them.
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
"Isn't it a riddle and awe-inspiring that things can be so beautiful, despite the horror? I've seen something wondrous peering through my joy in the beautiful, a sense of its creator. Only people can be truly ugly, because they have free will to separate themselves from this song of praise.
It often seems they will drown out this hymn with cannon thunder, curses, and blasphemy. But I have realized they will not succeed. And so I want to throw myself on the side of the victor.”
Sophie Scholl
Stocks were weakly trading today, perhaps digesting their recent gains from the other day.
Gold and silver were off a bit, perhaps for the same reason.
The Dollar chopped sideways and finished essentially unchanged.
Next week should provide a challenge for the precious metals, given our recent experience.
On Monday we have a Comex option expiration for the April futures contracts for gold and silver.
And on Friday we will be seeing the Non-Farm Payrolls Report for March.
In the background we still have a simmering geo-political stew that could boil over at any time.
The ascent of selfishness and pride causes many to turn away from the faith. And false prophets appear, and deceive many. And because of the increase in wickedness, the love of many grows cold.
But his kingdom will not end, and the darkness will not prevail.
"Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all."
Edmund Burke
“The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences."
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope
"The transnational corporations and the money markets have declared the era of human-designed regulations over. Now the market must reign. Because few people in the business community are paid to think about phrases such as 'western civilization,' they don't seem to realize that they are proposing the arbitrary denial of 2,500 years of human experience.
Ever since the democratic systems permitted their various courts to give corporations the status of persons, the individual as citizen has been on the defensive. How could it be otherwise? If you are a person before the law and Exxon or Ford is also a person, it is clear that the concept of democratic legitimacy lying with the individual has been mortally wounded.
If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is, after all, not a natural state.
It could be argued that we are now in the midst of a coup d’état in slow motion. Democracy is weakening; few people would disagree. Corporatism is strengthening; you only have to look around you. Yet none of us has chosen this route for our society, in spite of which our elites quite happily continue down it. Certainly corporatism is creating a conformist society. It is a modern form of feudalism.
Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet."
John Ralston Saul
Stocks were off to the races today, after yesterday's sharp decline.
Wash - rinse - repeat.
Gold and silver rallied, which is a bit of a divergence of its recent inverse correlation with risk assets.
The Dollar chopped sideways, but finished slightly higher.
The VIX continued to decline as trading with risk becomes more complacent.
So why the divergence with the precious metals?
Let's keep in mind that Monday the 28th is a fairly important option expiration for the April futures contract on the Comex.
So let's see what happens, especially in light of the fluid geopolitical risks.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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