With apologies to Narcissus

It has been some time since my last post and it has been for a good reason. Because for the longest while I have been under the veil of utter despair.

The reasons many fold, of course, and, to regular visitors and readers of this blog, quite obvious. I am something of an introvert, you see, while I can chat up a storm when in the right mood, I nonetheless keep alot of thoughts close to my chest including personal ones, as is only proper and gentlemanly. However, it led to a disproportionate amount of naval gazing on my part, self criticism and defeatism which conspired to choke whatever flame I had to motivate my writings on this blog. For quite some time I doubted I even believed anymore. But such is the way of depression.

Over this period I attacked myself for personal failings as well as the impossibility of saving this world, restoring monarchy in any sense were it would be worthy to be restored, or even as moderately saving Ireland from its own downfall.

Well so it was until I went to the Novena of St. Gerard Majella in Dundalk this past week, as did thousands of others. There, amdist the confessionals, the soaring arches, the beautifully vaults of the ceiling and the high altar did I make my first confession in a quite some time. There really is nothing like having a weight lifted off of you to give some perspective on exactly how silly you have been. I started to analyse exactly why I had been the way I had been.

My answer came to me as soon as myself and my mother walked back to our car. We passed by a corner bar, quite a large one, that had been shut down. Iron grates placed upon the windows and doors and in a doorway there was a pair of red slippers and an empty bottle of vodka.

It was a microcosm. The reasons why I had been in such despair in miniature form. Upon asking my mother about the bar I learned it was actually quite a popular one back in the day, and the most stereotypical of Irish bars as Irish bars get and looks about what you'd expect. Complete with the now old fashioned hanging sign advertising Guinness. The global recession had killed it and the area was poorer and more distraught for the loss. And as we drove passed newly built yet thoroughly empty office buildings I began to consider what else had been killing me silently.

The first of many instances I recall was walking in the castlecourt shopping center in Belfast. I was standing in line for burger king (fastfood being a problem in itself but one cancer at a time please), and in front of me in the line were a pair of girls no older then 14, 15 at the most. Both were wearing black jackets with a pink female figure in silhouette on its back grasping a pole suggestively. They were both attendants at some pole dancing instructor class, I saw this and my heart broke. What was once and still is illicit, erotic and shameful is now being thought to young girls as exercise and socially acceptable. This and a million other things accumulated silently but it was only now I realized that it wasn't these evils that had been having such an effect on me, but my impotency in countering it.

I am reminded of a post on the badcatholic blog on Patheos, which rages against the ephemeral and immaterial nature of modern day language and concerns. Modern morality is relativistic, good and evil are relative, which ultimate means all moral concerns are immaterial and do not ultimately matter. Therefore you must constantly talk in circles when confronting someone on a matter. He compared it to something like trying to grasp smoke or boxing with a ghost. Futile by design.

And it was this powerlessness that got to me in the end. What was I to do? Scream at the children in front of me that they were being trained to prostitute themselves? Insist in paying the shopkeeper in grams of gold for my purchases to frustrate the monetary noose around our necks? What issue could I truly solve without proclaiming myself Dictator and usurping the nation?

And so I festered, failing to look after my own well being of body or soul for such was my despair. I started this blog knowing I was fighting an uphill battle from the utter depths of the Marianas trench for a goal that was ultimately intellectual: that of propagating monarchism as a valid idea in the Irish consciousness. But all the horrors of the modern world desecrating absolutely everything sacred and beautiful, and the blunt truth that nothing but forceful emotionalism will win hearts in this narcissistic age of hedonism and vice forced me to curl up in my foxhole, shell shocked. King David had it easy, it seemed, at least Goliath could be struck.

So it would have been the end of this blog had it not been for that Novena and my remembrance of that kernal of Irishness. That stubborn, dogged, bloody minded refusal of evil. The same spark that brought the Drunkard to prayer, and the spiteful man to give to charity. Less because it is expected and more because it is what ought to be done and somewhere within us we know it. It is what brought my mother to confession even though she continues to stress to me that she doesn't believe she requires it. A strange sort of hope that confounds despair, and sunders confusion. That even now with our culture so thoroughly ravaged and destroyed by Americanism and the financial follies of the modern world, Hibernia can still be saved, body and soul. If Ireland could survive the horrors of neglect, murder, rapine, famine, torture and war through the centuries, it will survive this most brutal of drug addictions. Such is what I believe. Or else I will die.

I know not how, or by what means, but this ship will be righted and by God, it will have a crown.