I have--since turning into an extreme reactionary--always thought that this is what I thought; that I am a cultural supremicist. I wonder how long I will hang on to that increasingly tattered notion? Is the slide from cuturalism into racism inevitable as, one by one, all the beautiful icons are smashed in the interest of a bigger box of crayolas for the Ruling Elite to play with? Will I be able to continue to convince myself that it's all just a coincidence that so many of the things I love were, originally, the handiwork of white men? Can I continue to tell myself that the disaster brought about by the (mostly) white men in the Catholic Church has nothing whatsoever to do with the catastrophic collapse in the confidence and vigor of white men in the wake of a century of mass murder and government policy?
Of course these men teach me that racism is a sin.(But so is buttering up altar boys, I think.) And my reason still flees from racial ideology. But for how long, I wonder? And is culturalism the notorious "near occassion of sin" we are warned about?
Or is it merely human?
Maybe being human is the essence of the near occasion of sin.
Do you believe in Luck? I think I do, or at least in a form of Grace that is indistinguishable from Luck. We white people were lucky in this way, belledame: Out of the Gothic holocaust wrought by Alaric and facilitated by the dilapidated pagan elite, there emerged an old, white(ish) man named Augustine of Hippo. Amid the smouldering ruins of the entire world, he and others like him rebuilt the City, this time of sturdier stuff than travertine and mortar.
The Word went north out of Canaan. I don't know why. Was Europe at the time somehow deserving of it? Were the soft, Mediterranean olive people entitled to such a Grace? How about the Germans in the woods, with their faces painted in human blood, slouching toward Ragnarok? How can one not believe in Grace as Luck looking back on these people who became Europe (Great Europe!) only after they were transformed by the Word?
And how can one not feel pity and rage now that, after 2000 years, they stuff logs into their ears to stop out the sound of the Word that made them great?
No doubt we are all going to suffer as the new Goths besiege the City of God (you know, the one that is in our hearts); will it help us to remind ourselves of Christ's suffering? What kind of suffering will it be? Confusion, paranoia, despair---the suffering of the beseiged, I think. The near occasion of sin...the near occasion of sin...the near occasion of Alaric...