A Christmas Wish: That You May "Touch Immortal Things"

(The following message is a reprint of our first Christmas post in 2007)

"Adoration of the Magi" by Peter Paul Rubens, 1616-17

"Were Men to Learn the Message

Silence Always Brings,

They’d Learn to Span Earth’s Bridges

To Touch Immortal Things." 

 ~ Sister Elizabeth Loretto Triail, C.S.J.

My dear Friends, 

When I began blogging this past July, I could not have imagined the extraordinary worldwide network of friends and the powerful movement of which I was becoming a part. 

Among all the chatter and noise of the worldwide web, are a conversation and a movement from which I have drawn far more than I have contributed. It is a movement in defense of Truth and Beauty. It rejects what Malcolm Muggeridge called “The Great Liberal Death Wish.” It stands up to the new tyranny threatening Europe and America. It is a great multi-national effort to defend the gates of Christian civilization against the demonic Islamism that would murder us all, and it recognizes, as did Churchill, that victory at all costs is essential, “for without victory there is no survival.” 

This blog draws its name from a speech by the great Churchill because I believe that the crisis facing the West is of the same nature and no less perilous than that which Churchill confronted. We stand at a crossroads where we either “move forward into broad, sunlit uplands” or, if we fail, “the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” 

T. S. Eliot in “Notes Towards a Definition of Culture” wisely recognizes that “no culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion.” Eliot also states: “Fortunate the man who, at the right moment, meets the right friend; fortunate also the man who at the right moment meets the right enemy.” Has the West finally encountered the “right enemy,” the enemy that will drive us to our knees and turn our gaze once again to the baby born in a manger who split time into two, the God who “so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting?” 

During this holy season I pray that you and all those who may visit these pages in the months ahead will hear and know the God who speaks to us in silence. May you “touch immortal things” this Christmas, and may God richly bless you and all those you love, now and forever. 

Daniel Cassidy