A Prayer for the Faithful Waiting in Darkness

 

"We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened.  But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.  Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy.  Those who do not want mercy never seek it.  It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness."

Thomas Merton


"Be patient, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord.  See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.  You too must be patient.  Make your hearts firm, because the coming of the Lord is at hand.  Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another, that you may not be judged."

James 5:7-9


"Strengthen the hands that are feeble, make firm the knees that are weak.  Say to those whose hearts are frightened: be strong, fear not!  Here is your God, he comes with vindication.  With divine justice he comes to save you."

Isaiah 35:3-4


"Do all without constant arguing and complaining, so that you may be blameless and righteous as children of God, unlike those of this contentious and perverse generation, among whom you may shine like lights to the world, as you hold firmly to the word of life."

Philippians 2:14-15


"Let us rejoice while we mourn.  Let us look up to our Lord and Saviour.  Let us, in our penitence, not substitute the Law for the Gospel, but add the Law to the Gospel.  As they must not defraud themselves of Christian privileges, neither need they give up God's temporal blessings.  All the beauty of nature, the kind influences of the seasons, the gifts of sun and moon, and the fruits of the earth, the advantages of civilized life, and the presence of friends and intimates; all these good things are but one extended and wonderful type of God's benefits in the Gospel.  Those who aim at perfection will not reject the gift, but add a corrective; they will add the bitter herbs to the fatted calf and the music and dancing; they will not refuse the flowers of earth, but they will toil in plucking up the weeds.

Or if they refrain from one temporal blessing, it will be to reserve another; for this is one great mercy of God, that while He allows us a discretionary use of His temporal gifts, He allows a discretionary abstinence also; and He almost enjoins upon us the use of some, lest we should forget that this earth is His creation, and not of the evil one. 

May God give us grace to walk thus humbly, thus soberly, thus without censoriousness in this day of confusion; enjoying His blessings, yet taking them with fear and trembling; and disciplining ourselves without gloom, yet not judging or slandering those who are more rigid or less secular than ourselves.

John Henry Newman


“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 our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Word, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. Christians are called to compassion and to action.

Only the humble believe in Him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that He does wonders where people despair, that He takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous.

And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly. 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. God is near to lowliness; He loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak, and the broken.

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


"I am speaking now, more directly, to those who embrace hatred and spread thoughts of violence and repression, often in the name of God, giving scandal to His faithful on earth.

I am speaking to those who stoke the fires of hatefulness, and violent words, gossip and name calling, insults and hardness towards their brothers and sisters in this world, while cynically asking, 'Who is my neighbor? Surely not them.'

May God have mercy on any who provide provocation and false teachings to others, and scandalous examples to their brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren.  Especially because of their willful selfishness, stubborn greed, and foolish pride.  And you know who you are, if you are not already completely dead to the life of the Spirit."

Jesse, 19 January 2015


O Lord,help us to understand that it is not only the afflicted who are in danger, but those of us who comfortably look on and at best do nothing, and worse spread controversy, fear, mistrust and hatred.  Pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our blindness, and break the chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose life.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Old as Babylon, Evil as Sin

 

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell

“War is a racket.  It always has been.  It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.  It is the only one international in scope.  It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."

US Major General S. D. Butler, War Is a Racket

“Fear and debt. The two most powerful tools of empire.”

John Perkins, The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent."

Dean Baker

“When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or the other that takes priority over boring stuff such as healthcare and pollution. If the nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has the time to worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.”

Yuval Noah Harari

"We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life."

Jimmy Carter

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

Thomas Clement Douglas


Stocks wobbled around today and finally finished lower. 

The VIX moved sideways.

Gold and silver managed to hold on to some gains and finished slightly higher.

The Dollar edged a little higher as well.

We have some consumer inflation data coming out on Tuesday that could move markets.

There will be an FOMC rate decision on Wednesday.

And finally we will enjoy be the last index option expiration for the year on Friday.

And where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Whistling Past the Graveyard

 

"The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true. It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”

Neil Barofsky, TARP Inspector General

"The American economy increasingly serves only a narrow part of society, and America's national politics has failed to put the country back on track through honest, open, and transparent problem solving.  Too many of America's elites-among the super-rich, the CEOs, and many of my colleagues in academia-have abandoned a commitment to social responsibility.  They chase wealth and power, the rest of society be damned."

Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization, January 2012

"You should thank God for bank bailouts— absolutely required to save your civilization. So I think when you have troubles like that you shouldn't be bitching about a little bailout. You should have been thinking it should have been bigger. You should thank God the government saved the big banks and their investors. Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies. Suck it in and cope."

Charlie Munger, Christian Science Monitor, September 30, 2010

"We are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble."

Chrystia Freeland, The Rise of the New Global Elite, January 2011

"Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population.  Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy.   These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation

Stocks bounced a little from their recent declines.

The Dollar slipped a little, while gold and silver in particular edged up.

PPI tomorrow.

We are sliding into the end of the year.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Prison of the Heart - Driving Miss Daisy

 

"The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."

Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy, 1995

"The wealthy, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day pluck and snatch away from the people some part of their daily living. Therefore, when I consider and weigh in my mind these commonwealths which nowadays do flourish, I perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men in procuring their own commodities under the name and authority of the commonwealth.  They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely without fear of losing that which they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labor of the people for as little money and effort as possible."

Thomas More, Utopia

"Progress is a nice word.  But change is its motivator.  And change has its enemies.”

Robert F. Kennedy

"You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died.  Such souls belong here.  Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart.”

John Connolly, The Infernals


This is being posted early today.

I will be driving our recent rescue stray, Miss Daisy, to the vet, and all things considered won't be back until some time after the close. 

The young man is coming as her emotional support person.

She is a sweet angel, remarkably well-behaved and affectionate. 

Have a pleasant evening.