Perhaps some of you might have been wondering (just kidding: I know you haven't ! Heck, you haven't even been reading my posts any more, have you ? Apparently I've lately been doomed to losing not only my soul, but my audience and readership as well !) OK... Now: where was I, before I've so brutally interrupted myself ? Ah, yes ! Perhaps some of you (key word here being `some` - if any at all...) may have probably wondered by now why I identify with homosexuals, and think about them so much... and not just merely `think` about them, but suffer grievously when contemplating the fate that awaits them in all eternity, not as some sort of detached intellectual endeavour, but rather to the point of being utterly crushed, shattered, and devastated by their destiny myself. Why do I care so much ? No skin of my nose... Right ? (I mean, apart from the fact that I'm kinda going there myself... But -in time- I've ultimately reached a point where I've finally made my peace with that... At least I actually deserve it... Not so sure about the gays, though...)
We all remember the prophetical passages from Isaiah (53:7) and Jeremiah (11:19), alluded also in the New Testament (Acts 8:32), liking Christ's sacrifice with that of a lamb being brought to the slaughter... Likewise David, in the Book of Psalms (44:22), and Saint Paul, in his Letter to the Romans (8:36), draw a similar analogy for the sacrifice of both Jewish and Christian martyrs. But have any of you, dear readers, ever actually experienced an animal sacrifice first-hand ? If so, then what impression -if any- did it have on you ? My last name -quite incidentally- means Christmas, and I'm a Romanian Orthodox Christian. Orthodoxy is generally a very traditional religion, and the traditional Romanian Christmas dish consists of various home-made pork products. (Forty percent of the Romanian population is still rural, as opposed to only a few percent in civilized countries, and the percentage would've been even higher were the Communists not have made it their sole mission in life to utterly destroy and uproot countless villages by numerous house-demolitions and many forced relocations of the rural population to the newly-created industrial towns... What I'm trying to say by all this is that we basically raise and kill our own pigs: and obviously the same goes for all other animals as well. No one does our dirty work for us... We just don't possess the luxury of innocence, or even some false sense of detachment, artificially created by the conscience-numbing combination of distance, and the existence of a whole well-oiled chain of intermediaries, which so many people in the West simply take for granted. It's just us). Five days before Christmas, on December 20th, the day in which the Church commemorates the martyrdom of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Romanians traditionally sacrifice their pigs in anticipation for the upcoming Winter Holidays, which last for two whole weeks, until the 7th of January, and which include -apart from Christmas Eve and the Nativity itself- Saint Mary and Saint Stephen, New Year's Eve and the New Year itself, Saint Basil the Great, Christ's Circumcision, His Baptism, and Saint John. (There are, of course, very many Marys, Stephens, Basils, and Johns among the Orthodox, just in case you were wondering what the deep mystical and spiritual reasons behind our annual fondness for celebrating such a great number of Holidays in a row might really be...) Now, when they bring the poor animal out to the slaughter, you can immediately sense that -despite obviously not possessing the same amount of consciousness as a human being- it is terrified to death, squealing its guts out, madly and insanely, just like a man desperately pleading for his life. Does he know what is going on ?... Doubtful. The mind of animals is simpler than that of children: But this is precisely what makes this whole scene so monstrously grotesque. A fully conscious human being has the ability to crush his base, mindless passions -such as traumatizingly excruciating fear or severe panic- by the power of his God-given intellect, and the promise of the resurrection unto life eternal: But animals do not possess this power, nor this promise, lacking the fundamental faculty that generates it and makes it possible. Their fear is unspeakably great. Brutal. Direct. Devoid of any hope and comfort. When we were children, fear was unbearable. Overwhelming. But -as we grew up- we've lost this primitive, visceral perception. For animals, whose minds are even more basic than those of children, fear is even more monstrous. Even more unbearable. Infinitely more overwhelming. We do not torture our pigs to death. We're not mindless sadists. There is no physical cruelty involved in their unduly demise. It doesn't exactly `hurt` to have one's throat cut swiftly by a knife, and then quickly bleed to death afterwards, while simultaneously choking in one's own blood, and intermittently producing disturbing gargling sounds, the likes of which I never want to hear again, as the only life you'll ever know slowly fades away before your very eyes. (I use both words -`slowly` and `quickly`- without any fear of contradiction (pun intended), with regards to the same thing, because -as we all know- unlike objective time, which flows constantly at the same speed, subjective time flows differently when we are having fun than when we are suffering, or traumatized, or in pain). As seen through the dispassionate and un-lying eyes of a child, whose mind is by its very nature free of any cultural inheritance, and incapable of making excuses -either for itself or for others- these sights are perceived exactly as they are: Devoid of any logic, truth, or beauty; and full of evil, pain, and ugliness. Barbaric and grotesque. Repulsive to the mind, and disgusting to the soul. Devoid of reason and sanity, and without excuse. A socially-accepted madness, joyfully and without any moral qualms or drama engaged in by people that are otherwise kind and good and gentle and loving and normal... If pigs would've cut my throat on Christmas, dragging me to slaughter while I screamed my head off, crying and terrorized to death [of course, that would've simply never happened, since I've always wanted to kill myself, ever since I was a little child, being deeply repelled and disgusted by the way in which grown-ups loved and cared about their own life so much that they debased themselves in front of Communists, bending their knee and bowing down to them out of fear of death and torture, selling their souls to save their lives ( Matthew 10:39; 16:25-26; Mark 8:35-38; Luke 9:24-26; 17:33; John 12:24-25 ), so I would've walked to death rather joyfully and relieved, since it is the only thing I've ever truly desired... but I'm going to allow it anyway, for the sake of the demonstration], on the reason that Scripture does not forbid eating flesh, and that they are only doing this to feed the mouths of their cute little piglets, who are crying with hunger, and that I'm going to a better place in Heaven anyway, and -since I am a human being- I possess an immortal soul capable of inheriting life eternal, and then there's always the resurrection to look forward to; besides, we already know from Scripture that “young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God” (Psalm 104:21), and -of course- this meat that our loving Heavenly Father, in His Divine Providence, provides for them is not always animal, but sometimes also human... Well... Let's just say that I sincerely doubt that my mother and grand-mother would've been very impressed by all these mental gymnastics and rationalizations... (Romanian olympics are of course very good acrobats, and Nadia Comaneci was the first woman to have scored a perfect 10 in the entire history of the Olympic Games, but these exercises are of a different nature than the ones I'm referring at...)
So... Why do I care so much ? Am I a pig ? Do any of my relatives get slaughtered around Christmas time ? I don't know why. Perhaps I was born this way (pun intended). Maybe it's because of the genes I've inherited from my father (pun intended yet again). After all, he is an intellectual, and to accept things on the force of custom, without any recourse to reason or sanity, is not quite really what intellectuals are supposed to do. Or perhaps it is a matter or nurture, not nature: My granny loved me very deeply. She raised me, and she always taught me to be a good person, and to believe in God. (And it was after all Christ Who taught us to care for others, and to make their problems our own. And even if He wouldn't have, our own mind and our own conscience tells us the same, since it is ultimately against all reason and logic to pretend that it couldn't have been us in their place, especially given the all-pervading randomness of life and circumstance). She was kind to me. And I've always wanted for my own soul to have in itself the same treasure of goodness and loving-kindness that she herself had: So that's why I probably despise and abhor so much all the things which are in exact opposition to everything that she ever embodied.
Now, it is only reasonable to care more about our fellow men, created in the image and likeness of God, than for other innocent little creatures, as cute and adorable as they might be. (Of course, not all people agree here with me: Hitler, along with many American Liberals, are vegetarians, yet have no qualms in condoning, or even inflicting, the deaths of countless human beings, while bluntly denying their personhood and humanity). At the same time, I cannot escape the sheer sense of futility involved in this bleak, depressing, and ultimately absurd struggle against oneself, one's own feelings, and one's own nature, for those that were truly born this way... If I would only be a-sexual... If I would only not feel for women the way I feel for them... If it would only be possible for me to resist their sublime beauty... If only I could be devoid of any romantic weakness and desire... If I could only be complete without it... And if I can't do it (nor anyone else, for that matter, except for a few chosen souls, as Christ Himself taught, in Matthew 19:10-12), how could I ever be able to fool myself into pretending that `everything's gonna be alright`, when it quite obviously won't ? (Unless of course someone is actually willing to argue that the `gay gene` goes hand in hand with either a celibacy gene, or with one that renders people capable of finding happiness and meaning in a life devoid of any romantic fulfillment...)
Posting Pictures Of Attractive Young Women In A Desperate Attempt To Attract Readers... :-)
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