Truth .. Into Great Silence

The hive has been greatly disturbed. The MSM is busily filling the air with droning reports. The blogosphere is humming with this pet theory and that (and that and that and that). Youtube video clips hum and fly before your eyes. Bzzzzzzzzz!

Simply the best and quite nearly only interpretive voice to bring coherence to the carnage at Fort Hood spoke several months prior to it occurring:

We are witnessing a new stage in the escalation to extremes. Terrorists have conveyed the message that they are ready to wait, that their notion of time is not ours. This is a clear sign of the return to the archaic, a return to the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, which is significant in itself. But who is paying attention to this significance? Who is taking its measure? Is that the job of the ministry of foreign affairs? We have to expect a lot of unexpected things in the future. We are going to witness things that will certainly be worse. Yet people will remain deaf.

On September 11, people were shaken, but they quickly calmed down. There was a flash of awareness, which lasted a few fractions of a second. People could feel that something was happening. Then a blanket of silence covered up the crack in our certainty of safety. Western rationalism operates like a myth: We always work harder to avoid seeing the catastrophe. (emphasis added) We neither can nor want to see violence as it is. The only way we will be able to meet the terrorist challenge is by radically changing the way we think. Yet, the clearer it is what is happening, the stronger our refusal to acknowledge it. This historical configuration is so new that we do not know how to deal with it. It is precisely a modality of what Pascal saw: the war between violence and truth. Think about the inadequacy of our recent avant-gardes who preached the nonexistence of the real...

The work to be done is immense. Personally, I have the impression that this religion has used the Bible as a support to rebuild an archaic religion that is more powerful than all the others. It threatens to become an apocalyptic tool, the new face of the escalation to extremes. Even though there are no longer any archaic religions, it is as if a new one had arisen built on the back of the Bible, a slightly transformed Bible. It would be an archaic religion strengthened by aspects of the Bible and Christianity. Archaic religion collapsed in the face of Judeo-Christian revelation, but Islam resists. While Christianity eliminates sacrifice wherever it gains a foothold, Islam seems in many respects to situate itself prior to that rejection (emphases added)..MORE>>

Girard's mimetic theory is the hermeneutic for understanding human violence par excellence. It is a shame that it is cast into the "blanket of silence" of Western rationalism where men walk on it and do not know what treasure they unwittingly reject.

And while there are few - a very few - who seem to comprehend Girard's work without straying into using mimetic theory to bolster their own agendas, it sure makes living in these troubled, sinful times more tolerable for me.

Which in turn makes it easier to engage in the vital work of Marian chivalry.