Reflections of a Father on the Grave of His Child

It has been a year since my wife and I lost our first child in miscarriage. Miscarriage is a strange event. One is often left wondering if there is something he could have done differently, some signs he missed, some action, in particular, he should have let well enough alone.

The universal human Fall has brought so much suffering, and the knowledge that a certain guilt lies upon us for even these losses brings us to our knees at the cross in sorrowful love, in pain and in thanksgiving.

And yet the burden is not less heavy. The imagined moments, the forecast memories that by all accounts we should have had the opportunity of making -- these flit like shadows toward a deepening twilight. A small boy runs through autumn leaves in an amber sweater. He shouts and cries, falls, rises giggling. The wind blows, a falling sheet of leaves, and he is gone.

My child is gone. His microscopic corpse is buried in a field beneath Christ crucified at a Benedictine abbey. There lies a stone far larger than the tiny casket handmade by monks.

All things are rent with bursting purpose, ruthless purpose tearing us apart. Purpose that seeks each of us out and cuts to the marrow, savagely bruising, scarring all barriers of emotion and flesh. My child honored with expense, with veneration, his life welcomed, shared, memorialized, his little body given a bed on which to wait, a place within the earth, a home. My own body always seeming less viable, less real, a shell I inhabit because I, unlike he, have been blessed with the curse of living.

I have been given the chance to waste the purpose with which my life is infused.

I have been honored with the dignity of accepting or rejecting the meaning of my child's death, his treasured remains, before the onslaught of the world.

I may choose.

I may become a German father, sitting in the deadening silence beside the tomb of my son while the dust of burned Jews bedecks the brick walls and gray rooftops of Auschwitz, of Dachau.

I have determined that I will not be this man. I will sound the horror of a thousand tiny humans dismembered and shipped to a landfill, folded into a mass grave of filth and disease, a pit of blood and poison -- children, beloved children of some kinder parent. The mangled bodies of unoffending innocents. Of this evil I will never cease to speak. I will wail and call from the rooftops into a lonely night of cold neglect until the sharpness of the air tears my throat and the sound of choking blood drowns out my words.

It is true that I am full of dire messages.

It is true that I never cease to think, to plan, to pray for the sudden and final end to this culture of hell, this draining of the very lifeblood of essential humanity. And in all of this my focus centers on abortion, the beloved of Moloch.

Never the less so because of my son. Never the less so because the life and joy that seems stolen from me, never to return, is the same life and joy that sinister faces shrouded in white rip from the wombs of miserable women, crushing their last hope in the murder of their children.

This offense, this desecration of the tomb of my son, I will no longer suffer.

I will inspire fear in every abortionist's heart of gris, heart of merde. For when we fail to form the front of our battle with the great determination of a banner uplifted for the right, we, too, desecrate the tombs of our unborn children, of our children so greatly loved, eagerly expected, lost. We surrender the purpose of their lives into obscurity! We debase their humanity.

When we fail to make the sacrifices discerned by our well-developed intellects as just, we submit to the malaise we decry in our modernist-progressivist contemporaries. We are not here to wait for the Second Coming. We are here, pricked, to slouch toward Bethlehem and be born.  

Charles is my strong warrior, my tiny intercessor. I will not refuse him the dignity accorded to others merely because of their age. Many will accomplish less in a lifetime than he.

But in all of this, I appeal to you, dear friends. If you cannot find in yourself the passionate intensity which, for vision, is necessary, pray for the intercession of my Charles, my great heart, Carolus Magnus.

And speak to me. I am his ill-suited successor. I am the old one who lingers on in the shadows of this earth as night falls, and, who, with the wisdom of death, welcomes with joy the glory of his destruction.

I will, if nothing else, like a gadfly prick you until, unnumbered as the simbelmynë, we defend the tomb of the unborn.



 

Where is the Horse and the Rider

or 'Why you see few art-related posts on my page'

"Where is the horse and the rider?

Where is the horn that was blowing?

They have passed like rain on the mountains,

Like wind in the meadow

The days have come down in the West

Behind the hills into shadow..."

Where is the love of beauty? Where is breathtaking art and poignant song, and where are those who will seek them, praise them, cherish them, and show us how to see?

Like the brief, ephemeral art of our generation, they have been abruptly hidden from sight. Rinsed as from the slate -- no tablet of wax bearing the imprint of centuries' wisdom. Rather, the clean slate of a frontier school that started clean one day and started clean again the next.

Just as we are minimalists in ownership, we are minimalists in understanding or in seeking, in knowing and in wishing to know. And so we receive what we desire, we reap what we sow, which is so close now to nothingness. Where is the love of beauty, the devout appraisal of art? It is as it is in our hearts. Do we expect the tiny race of the people of culture to shower us with the Gospel while we wonder whether we are Princess Belle in her green dress or blue, or which Buzzfeed quiz will show us our best virtues?

Can you hear the overwhelming silence of the artists? I can hear the sea ceasing to sing, ceasing to whelm us over with the peace that she has given the imagination and the further peace that the imagination has given her. Did we think the artists would not starve? But they have all starved -- starved from a destruction of beauty in the world, a destruction of real living, of the seemingly invincible subject. The world has died, and art imitates life as life imitates art. Have you seen the imitation of death? I know that I have.

"The everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and loves the world" has come upon the artists in their silence. And as much as they have loved her, adorned and graced her with their innumerable lavishments, they wish nothing now but for her destruction, her punishment, her fall from pride into desolation and suffering and noisome darkness and fear. Repentance.

The fuel of the artist is life -- life that breeds more life -- life teeming and bursting at the seams -- life burgeoning unstoppably and never ceasing to unfold into new and eternal glories. Is it any wonder that the artists are silent, or that the lesser imitate death until it takes them.

Here is the demand of beauty: life. What prodigies have we killed, or allowed to die? No more.

The death of society is at hand. Were we more bitter towards the slaughter of our friends, we would have burned the fortresses of darkness and salted the earth, leaving the festering fields of evil forever barren.

We wish to intervene against the Islamic State in the Middle East. This is a just impulse. But, in our haste to tender retribution, do we forget the thousands slaughtered daily at home. Are the lives of countless children less worthy than the preservation of political potency in names: in "Yezidi", in "Christian", in "Shi'ite". Do we wish to save lives? Is that our intent? Or do we wish to save particular lives for particular reasons? Are the unborn not our brothers and sisters, and do they not live next door. Do they not die next door.

Can you justify your willingness to stop the IS against your unwillingness to stop the Abortionist State? Is it easier to fight a tyrant thousands of miles away?

The lauds of the poet fall silent. The artist in anger and desperation hurls his brush. Is there beauty in the world.

Can you justify not -- at the very least -- standing in prayer before the clinic, adjuring those who would be murderers to abandon their course? Rationalize, I beg you. Rationalize. Rationalize a way to avoid preventing murder when power is in your hands. I have dispensed with the arguments. I have had them all. I have heard them all. There is not one left with integrity. The truth cries out like a stone. It will not move.

The poet falls silent. The artist's heart roils and burns, and a black anger rises.

If you would have the soldiers stopped who terrorize in the name of Islam, but you will not place yourself in danger for your brother who perishes at the hands of the mercenary next door, the only judgement left to you is that of coward and liar.

Go out into the world. Go out. You have been sent out to bring the good news. The good news begins with the gospel of life. You must protect life, from conception to natural death. If you have not done this basic duty, this basic act for the ongoing creation of society, if you watch society crumble -- you too will fall with it.

Go out into the streets and pray, and beg God for mercy. I too will go with you. Come alive, and reject the systematic destruction of the human person. Overthrow the deathly edifice. This is our duty. It is undeniable. It is irrefutable. It is the supreme test of faith in our time -- the supreme evil, that which requires the most devout action in opposition.

If you wish to have good things, you must give, and you must first give life.

Where is the horse and the rider?

The beauty of the warrior lies in that which he defends.

A Eulogy for My Son

Yesterday, I buried my unborn child, Charles Dominic.

In these latest days, I have often been Theoden at Theodred's tomb. Simbelmynë I have planted in my imagination, ever minding the loss of his brief and bright life.

This great-souled little one has gone from us almost as soon as his arrival. The fiery joys set and burst at his coming have been swallowed at our grasping like will-o'-the-wisps, leading me on to an empty place forlorn.

More than ever, I am alone in that I know and honor the dignity of his life like a child with a raggedy plush that no one wants. Only the child can see its worth. And who in this world will see his worth?

With the same conviction, I know that he is my son. We felt it, and we named him before we knew the Feast of St. Charles would soon follow his death. My first born too early born.

That he was too early for this world is clear. He wanted only one thing, and only one thing I taught him without knowing -- or myself and my ancestors taught him by striving. To seek God only. He learned too well for my weakness.

He has died after the fathers who made his death seem insignificant, and so he has died alone. Laid to rest alone, he sleeps in an open field beneath the stars and simbelmynë, who, like me, only mind him ever -- only we mind. Because the watchful flowers have covered his grave after and before his fathers. They are gone and cannot see him.



My son. Why?



Like you, purpose has come and gone like so much uncaring wind. It did not stay for a fortnight.

Dreadful purpose fulfilled in weeks, to send you where I am to -- I was to -- and would send you to again and again and call you back wanting you without wishing.

Tiny intercessor. Stronger than soldiers. Having suffered the greatest loss -- the loss of even a worthy and blessed trial, a worthy and blessed love of the earth. How could you have despised what you did not know?

Your brothers and sisters will not forget your name, nor your mystery, wisest of us. Love me, son. Please love me from where you are.

Wish me so much pain that the miracle of my empty hands may teach your siblings what I somehow, unknowing, taught you.

Oh my son.

Charles, do not rest while we waste in this vale of tears. You have gone to the house of my fathers. Let them make your spirit great for the wars. And do not forget your weary father. Be ever mindful -- with the fair bright eyes in the grass! -- and await the opening of the world for me.