Fury Combat

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The Holy Burden of the Watchman
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The ancient watchman had the loneliest post in the city and the most unforgiving. He stood on the cold stone of the rampart while the streets below surrendered to sleep, his eyes straining to read the dark. His mandate fit inside a single breath. See the enemy. Sound the horn.

Should he set the brass to his lips and blow, the gates would bar, the militia would arm, and the city would meet the dawn with a fighting chance. Should he drowse, or glimpse the dust of the approaching vanguard and falter out of fear or disbelief, the blood of every man, woman, and child below would settle on his hands.

The ancient world reserved its harshest verdict for the sentinel who held his peace.

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Today the Church stands on that wall. We are the watchmen now. Even the dullest eye can mark the siege engines grinding toward the gates. The decay has gone to the root. The deliberate dismantling of the family, the surgical mutilation of children beneath the banner of progress, the brazen inversion of the natural law...these stand already at the threshold, and the sword rests against the throat of the Christian West.

Look, then, at the men on the wall. We carry the deposit of faith, the unbroken Tradition handed down from the Apostles, the bedrock of reality itself. And we keep the trumpet hidden beneath the cloak.

We murmur in private chats. We grumble in the safety of our own parishes. We swallow the alarm because alarms are jarring, because they disturb the comfortable slumber of our neighbors, because we have judged good manners to outrank faithfulness and decided that a warning shout might cost us our standing among polite men.

"But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, and the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any person from among them, he is taken away in his transgressions; but his blood I shall require at the watchman's hand." (Ezekiel 33:6)

The terror of the passage settles on a single figure, the man who saw the truth and chose silence. To hold the faith is to shoulder a heavy and holy burden, a post on the wall and a horn pressed into the hand.

At the Dread Judgment God will turn His eyes upon you, and He will ask why you watched the chaos pull the city down and held your peace.

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The hour for paralysis has passed. A man cannot stand as a passive connoisseur of theology while the ash of Christendom drifts down through his living room. A shelf loaded with Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus profits him nothing if it serves only to make him the most learned co**se in the rubble.

Take responsibility for the ground beneath your feet. Speak the truth plainly and without apology...in your home, at your work, and in the digital square where the nations now gather.

If the alarm wounds the pride of the sleepers, let them be wounded. Far better they awake in anger than perish in their beds.

Pick up the trumpet.

Deus Vult.

- Marcus Sterling