Wicked Sprights

First Day of 2022 - Wicked Sprights

Fr dear Fr: In the prayer at the end of Weekly Mass that we say in our local church, we ask the archangels to thrust down Satan into Hell, which presumes that he is not always there, in which case, where is he most of the time?

At the risk of sending a chill down the happy revelling spines of tonight’s party goers, just at that merry moment when oceans of Prosecco and Champagne are pouring down gullets, there is a scene in the movie Legend where the dark Lord Lucifer actually steps out of a mirror to accept the corrupted soul of a girl that has been charmed through dance by a wicked spright. A chilling scene for all of those who spend too long staring into their mirrors and admiring their beautiful looks and gorgeous make-up. But anyway, I digress, now down to the meat and potatoes of this responsory:

In the softly softly teddy bear religions of moderne vulgate parishes, far from the polite little drawing rooms of Oxford chateaux, even of catholic parishes of the novus ordo kind and charismatic kind with sacraments incorrectly and very vaguely celebrated, it is hard to find an account of Jesus that actually bears much genuine resemblance to the real Stalker Jesus that walked the earth in human Israelite history and stalked the stalkers of the human race. The prayers that parishes say at the end of Mass for new kinds of evangelisation methods for the modern innovative world assume that Lucifer has to be thrust down below the surfaces of this planet by mightier angels than he. A tall order, a tough assignment, given that the Fallen Angels are often almost as tall and powerful as the redeemed angels above. These are mighty tall powerful angels, the angels of the dark side, so there is much to think about if one is a sleepless prophet like Hosea.

Many middle class couples do therapy and endless hours of it, to explain to each other why they are unfaithful to the marriage bond, but few ever consider taking a course in demonology in the local Baptists chapels and charismatic churches in order to find out what are the weaknesses in their psychology and physique that the dark side knows it can capitalise upon and triumph over - No bible teaching in their churches - No bible Jesus - just the more and more inane sight of teddy bears being thrown around churches of God's sanctuary, but God will not tolerate being mocked in his own sanctuaries by the inane, those bizarre superficial idiots and bigots of the olde worlde of the 1960s with no spirituality who have never in their miserable greying boring lives of purgatorial denial ever picked up a book like the Kempis Imitation. And as for the Minor Rite of Exorcisms, forget it.

Yet for all this, there is the deep down freshness in things, and the freshness that is found in the sacramental life is a promise from the streams that flow continuously from the Gardens of Eden above. The prayers at the end of weekday Mass are designed to seek the help of the taller and more powerful angels above in the struggle of humanity for its wits end. The dark side is very strong, and consists of far greater intellects than a thousand professors at Oxford in one conference. They have minds the dark angels, whereas professors especially ideal professors only have babbling bubbling organs at the top of their craniums - poor biochemistry seeking biochemical solutions to all of their problems and offering very poor advice to little children on the way to the markets of flowers.

But the dark side and the wicked little spirits of the dark love nothing more than those professors of the 1970s and 1980s that could be depended upon and relied heavily upon to deny strenuously, strainedly, and stressfully the very existence of Lucifer and the dark spirits, those ideal Aston driving well-heeled German professors who casually denigrated the feelings of ordinary persecuted Christians, early and late, who told people they felt a strange oppression in the middle of the night in certain chosen locations and castles and chateaux and the like. Those professors were a gift to the dark side, sending more and more Christians to the couches of NYC and such cities in their search for a more "integrated" solution to their nightly visitations and moral dilemmas as more and more Christians throughout the 1970s and then 1980s fell to the wicked sprights of those times serving them up as fresh dishes and tasty morsels to the newspapers of the time. Above and beyond this ideology of large scale denial was the attendant ideology of a pelagian reliance on sheer will power as more and more Christians, getting fewer and fewer at the older churches throughout the 1970s, decided that they did not need the helps of holy mother Church in their campaign to better their characters, indeed that they needed no sacraments at all or even holy confession in that struggle against unseen and more powerful forces than they. They figured they could survive for one more year without the healing streams of grace and mercy and a power of keys, unloosing and unbinding.

So anyway, these are tall Sprights that can move quickly around the world, and though this planet is now their designated homeworld and preternatural prison, by supreme order of the victorious angels above and their prophets on earth, the humans on it have to endure much by way of interference in their minds, especially those that have keen and sharp minds, and can offer bad example to other younger Christians coming up the snakes and ladders of society. The prayer at the end of weekly Mass makes mention of "the wicked evil spirits that wander the world for the ruin of souls" so it seems they are many and can impose themselves with ease, chiefly through the senses and through the imagination, especially among over eating and over drinking middle class humanity. Jesus warns the crowds - "Do not fear those who can destroy the body but cannot destroy the soul - fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in Hell" - so the teddy bear Jesus never really existed, he was a figment of the fevered brow of the post-conciliar reformers who were busy trying to redesign Christ and Christianity and offer it again in a much reduced format of positive moral choosings - altogether removed from the drama of the dark side.

Little gossoons of proportionalists happily and merrily told their spiritual directees in those years that all they needed was to pray blindly and choose blindly and God would look after the moral rightness or wrongness of their choices - a free world full of free people, and no declarations of juridica facts. Nobody approved more of those theologians who say denied the Holocaust as a metaphysical problem like those evil spirits. How much they were served by such theologians and their pastoral planning - "theology in a vacuum" it was called in Germany at the time - how often they denied to suffering souls the bad news behind the good news. So the Dark Lord and his tribunes and sergeants were all left free to wander happily, freely, destructively throughout those years of the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s in some respects, but I digress - this planet is their homeworld - and the humans on it face tough choices, as they grapple with the grappins of the night. "Creatures of the night" - so says Count Dracula in the movie Dracula of Bram Stoker.