FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Good versus Evil

Rant Number 519     19 December 2012

‘Now the Virgin returns...A Boy is now to be born...He will receive divine life...He will rule over a world made peaceful by the virtues of his Father...the Serpent will perish...Come forth, O Holy Babe, and greet your Mother and your people with a smile.’

A startling prophecy from the Latin poet Virgil, written 2000 years ago, well before the birth of Jesus. A yearning for a new beginning, a fresh start for a humanity exhausted by civil wars, slaughters and hatred. Virgil was a pagan who never knew Christ but his Fourth Eclogue has been hailed as predicting the true, supernal Light soon to shine into the darkness of paganism, foreshadowing the triumph of good over evil.

Yet the Serpent, that ancient dragon, man’s eternal enemy is not fully subjugated. It still bites and kills. It murders children, too. The Sandy Hook school massacre is a hideous reminder. Guns or not guns, the murderous intent lurks deeply in the heart of man. The gun is in the mind.

The massacre of the innocent has shocked America and the world. So close to Christmas, the joyful time of peace and good will on earth. A ferocious, mocking contradiction of all that the Babe in the manger stands for. But Christmas has a dark side. Souls familiar with the Christian Lectionary, not the insipid calendar of secularism but the bracing cycle of saints’ names, sacred fasts and feasts, will know that the day next to December 25^th is St Stephen’s Day. Stephen, called protomartyr, the first martyr. Christ’s first follower to die for the faith. Stoned to death simply for witnessing to the Messiah. An innocent, non-violent victim of religious violence. Like his Master, Stephen died a martyr’s death, on his lips a prayer of forgiveness for his persecutors: ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’

An even greater, unbearable, bloody paradox unfolds on 28^th December. It is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The boys of Bethlehem, from ‘two years old and under’, whose murder was ordered by evil King Herod, seeking to destroy Baby Jesus. With their blood the innocent ones bore witness to the Saviour they never knew. The Bible does not state their precise number. Probably not very high. As many as the murdered Newtown children, perhaps?

Adam Lanza, the child slayer, why did he do it? Many look for, demand an answer. Madness? That’s easy, lazy. Only a lunatic would commit such an atrocious act? But while all monsters are bad, they are not all necessarily mad. The annals of human infamy are dotted with all too lucid, rational criminals. Asperger’s syndrome? Seems not. (Besides, a witch hunt on those unhappy sufferers would itself be evil.) Abuse victim? No evidence. Divorced parents? If so, the streets would be piled high with corpses. Loneliness? But how many loners do you spot shooting kids? No girl friend? Aargh! Nothing that the ‘solitary vice’ may not relieve. Envy? Of what?

And why did Lanza choose to slay small children? Why something so vile, so low, so atrocious? Yes, our age can get a bit too soppy, too sentimental about kiddies. It was not always so. When Rousseau, founder of modern educational theory, consigned all his children to a foundling home, he was deemed eccentric, not depraved. It is different with violence. A particular revulsion has always attached to any harming of the little ones. Vulnerable, helpless, defenceless, children are the innocent par excellence. Even the worst criminals draw the line at hurting kids. Children remind you of the child you once were, I suppose. And for many parents they are the only promise of survival they can any longer believe in, the only future hope an increasingly godless humanity can bring itself to envisage. So, why? Why did the shooter vomit his bullets on a bunch of pathetic, tiny elementary school kids?

Adam Lanza. Far-fetched but...Could the murderer’s first name yield a clue? Adam, the first man. The mythological father of mankind. Created by God to revel in the blessings of life in Eden. The plentiful garden. Not miserably alone but in companionship with the Woman. Innocent of good or evil. Until...guess you intuit the answer. The serpent, the tempter...the Fall - the rest is known.

Christian theology calls it original sin. A compendious term, not to be literally found in Scripture. Also mysterious, much disliked by enlightened people. (And by Muslims. Sorry, friends, it can’t be helped.) Yet, primeval sin’s dire results are for all to see. Easy to blame nurture, bad upbringing, deprivation, poverty, genes, all that merde – in reality horizontal explanations come to an end somewhere. As demonstrated by Louis Bunuel’s powerful movie, Los Olvidados, some types of evil are too awful, they resist natural reasons. Jaigo, the young gang leader’s wickedness is impossible to endure. Bunuel was an anarchist, an atheist, but in that film he shows he grasped a great metaphysical truth: the roots of true evil are not natural but supernatural – ‘original sin’ is just shorthand for it.

Sin and evil are not final, however. Virgil was not the first to predict a Child Saviour coming into the world. The Bible had got there before him. Had the Prophet Isaiah’s description of the luminous sign from the Lord reached Rome? The good news of the boy Emmanuel, ‘God with us’? The child who knows ‘how to refuse evil and choose the good’? (Isaiah 7:16) A universal aspiration for a Prince of Peace, a kingdom of love, an end of innocent suffering and of malignant, deliberate evil. A hope often frustrated, trampled into the dust but always springing eternal in the heart of man. As valid and topical today as it was millennia back.

Christmas. The Nativity. The priest eschews ranting against consumerism here. Christmas – if you hold that hope in your heart, if you cleave to the tiny, holy Babe in the manger, then... Goodness will have the last word.

A very Happy Christmas to you all.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli