Self-exiled Welcoming Catacombs

Exile

“Is not my word like as a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?” (Jer. 23, 29)


Our words as well, once, were clean and scorching like a fire; and they had such weight behind them so that hard rocks would shatter under them. In the meantime, our words have lost the purity and heat of fire, and have become like light balloons popping on all sides.


Words are thrown around meaninglessly today and people speak without a sense of the deeper meaning, holiness and responsibility which they carry. And if our words are fiery today, they are used to scorch the lives of others; and if they carry the weight of rocks, it is the rocks which we use to bash the heads of others.


A word is sacred; it is a treasure which cannot be thrown around unreasonably. The Lord calls us to a very sensitive and exact way of utilizing our words. “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” (Mt. 5, 37) The Lord warns us “Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” (Mt. 12, 36-37)


A liar uses many words to cover his lies in a wrapper which would make them presentable. If someone wishes to convince another that today is Monday, yet it is Sunday or Tuesday, tons of words will be used to prove the unprovable.


The best way to assert that which is unprovable, a lie as a truth, is to bend and stretch words to the point where the meaning is stretched so thin it doesn’t resemble itself. I look at the former, whatever his name was back then, now unfortunate Marko, chased himself out of God’s Church and sired himself “exiled”, and his creation as a “diocese” in “exile”.


I know, as well as everyone else, what the word exile means. I remember how Solzhenitsyn was exiled in his time. They packed him into an airplane and deported him to somewhere in Western Europe, where the great Solzhenitsyn, wandered the world until he returned to his fatherland to die.


We know of others who were exiled, and the Old Testament of the Holy Bible speaks of the exile of a whole nation.


As Marko had declared himself “exiled”, I searched various encyclopedias and dictionaries to check this now stultified word so that I may return its dignity. Yet nowhere a mention of Marko or his “exile”.


All the encyclopedias and dictionaries, although varying slightly in their formulations, agreed in one basic and fundamental regard: exile from the Latin exilium is deportation, banishment or a place of banishment. (Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia)


The Latin version of this encyclopedia says that exile is “a banishment or deportation is a word which in its widest form means somebody’s long term involuntary leave from a birth community, village, city, country etc. In the narrower sense exile is a measure of punishment, or decision of a country, in which an individual or group, are removed from a certain territory permanently, or for a longer period of time due to breaking laws, customs, presenting a danger to the country, or personal interests.” The encyclopedia continues “exile was considered a brutal and torturous punishment. In primitive communities it was equal to a death sentence because the exiled person, whose return to the community, village, or tribe, was threatened by death, was left to fend alone at the mercy of nature through hunger, thirst, wild animals, and strife weather.


“Even though exile is not what it used to be”, as Olja Knezevic says (Ne dirajte mi egzil), it remains impossible to squeeze our “exiled” Marko into that term. I don’t believe that Edward Said (Reflections on Exile) could have known our Marko, but it is as if he was right in front of him when he wrote his essay. “Exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical”, he says. And that is all as far as Marko is concerned. Everything which follows has to do with those who were really exiled: “It is produced by human beings for other human beings, and that like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions people from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography.”


We see Marko as he freely traverses Serbia, and even visits Biden’s America, and I ask myself how is it that with all of the heavy sins of the schismatic stabbing of Christ’s Body, His Holy Church, he and his flock in “exile” throw salt into the wounds of real martyrs, exiled ones and people. It is deeply immoral to mock the suffering of people.


This is not the only invention of the sinful Marko. One stupidity draws a whole array of others with it. As such, he, and his, have proclaimed themselves to be catacombs.


Unfortunately, they are merely cataclysmically fatal for their souls. They have nothing in common with real catacombs and the suffering of martyrs.


It is known that in the early periods of Christianity, when the blood of martyrs flowed like rivers, and when they were massacred and persecuted a safe hiding place for prayer was usually found in graves and cemeteries. These were the catacombs.


“The term catacombs is derived from the Latin word catacumbe and refers to underground corridors, sometimes several kilometers long, in which the first Christians hid and buried their dead.” (Stefan Lukic, Katakombe: Pojam i Istorija)


With consideration of the misuse of words I visited several of these “catacomb” web sites. One would expect passwords like a fish, shepherd with a lamb on his shoulders, or some other secret sign to be given access. But none of this. Entrance granted to everyone. Centurions and Roman soldiers free to enter. These sites show how the members of the “catacombs” visit each other. A hundred of them, or even two hundred, gather and they proclaim this gathering a council of sorts.


One thinks how is it that that they came here from their dark “catacombs”? How long did they crawl through the black dirt to make corridors from one “catacomb” to the next? Especially Marko, how is it that he dug a corridor all the way to Biden’s America?


If there are no deeper or heavier reasons for disapproval, then this mockery of words and the suffering of the early Christians is certainly enough.


Seriously, what demonic pride! “We are the true and authentic Christians. All others are traitors of the true faith and this is why we spit at them all in turn. We can merely be compared to only the early martyrs like Stephen.”


I ponder what awaits them when the Lord, who suffered for us, sees them at His judgement a real martyrs meet them along the way and ask them: “you charlatans and donkeys mocked us and our suffering. You deserve the dark catacombs, from which you will never see the rays of God’s light”.