I was on New Liturgical Movement recently and was made aware of a ripple in the trad-blogosphere with the conversion of one Michael Warren Davis from Roman Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy. Just to ground myself on the context, I searched his name and found an interview from a few months back on Pints with Aquinas wherein he relates his journey away from the Dark Arts to (his then-professed) Catholicism.
I felt the NLM article to be a bit disjointed, so I didn't think about it for some days until I came across a YouTube post that name-dropped Charles Coulombe. I don't make my disdain for Sir Charles a secret, but thankfully I don't have to belabor the point as this article sums up nicely his history of, and lack of remorse for, gnostic dabblings. Then, through a blogger named Dymphna, I was treated to an extremely long essay on the "open secret" problem the Traditionalist movement has with practitioners of Gnosticism. Skimming the first of eight parts was enough for my choleric temperament.
This last point got me thinking of a recent encounter my wife and I had with a mutual friend. We knew this youngblood as far back as our courtship days and at the time he would love to tell new acquaintances about having left his Wiccan wizardry behind to love and serve the Traditional Latin Mass. Years past and now we've come to realize that he has traded the fundamentalist and toxic trad scene for a "reverent" NO. One could definitely make worse jumps, but this is coupled with an unironic love for bardcore, costumed trips to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and his consistent choice of the necromancer role in weekly Dungeons & Dragons games.
The NLM article linked above, for all its faults, acts as a decent examen for assistants to the Latin Mass. Are you there for the right reasons, or just for the smells-and-bells?
The first time that my wife Alexandra assisted at a TLM, she sat behind a well-dressed young man and woman. When Alexandra knelt down to pray, she noticed on the pew bench near them two cigars and a copy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. As she later quipped, “My first thought was, ‘I’m home.’” … What if her primary reason for attending the TLM was not that it fostered her friendship with God but that she liked hanging out with old souls and young fogeys, with twenty-somethings who smoked pipes, wore bow ties, sported fedoras, and danced divinely to the Squirrel Nut Zippers?
Admittedly, I have to ask myself those questions. Am I at St. Anthony Mary Claret because I like to be labeled as a rebel, or because I like public-domain spiritual books or because there's no other outlet for the 800-year-old sequences I discover? Or is it because the Crucified One impels me to a continual self-immolation in the confines of a liturgy intrinsically joined with the seraphic Sanctus?
But if I'm allowed, as I have been doing for the past month, to psychoanalyze my occult-friendly friend then I have to say, with all due charity, that he didn't have a true love for the Mass. He had a knowledge of Evil, which he willed to forsake, but he didn't have a sufficient knowledge of Good and Its demands. Put away childish things... I am a jealous God... the lukewarm I will vomit. My friend believes he has found the golden mean and can live comfortably in both worlds, but the truth is obvious to the onlooker. Evil is promiscuous and will allow some admixture of Good with it, but Good distinguishes Itself emphatically de gente non sancta.
I ask rhetorically if these gnostics and pseudo-gnostics who defect from the Bridegroom in varying degrees have ever read one work by St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Alphonsus de Liguori before eschewing their corpus for Meditations on the Tarot. I take for grated that they've read the Bible, but maybe that is too generous since both Testaments are replete with diviners getting their due. But as with the good thief who gives the exception to the absolute folly in hoping for a death-bed conversion, the three wise men from the East give the exception to the inevitable perdition of the magician since "they went back another way into their country" (Matt. ii. 12.). May they intercede for us all, this rad trad author included.
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