The Fire this Time: There is No Escaping Ourselves - A Reflection on the Reported Arrest of Church Ministers
A Reflection on the Reported Arrest of Church Ministers
By Kevin D. Annett
It was business as usual that spring morning in 1943 at the Nazi death camp of Treblinka. The cattle cars methodically unloaded the latest batch of men, women and children slated for extermination as the SS guards dutifully went about their job and their bosses looked on with satisfaction. But at the nearby Roman Catholic church in the Polish village of Malkinia, all was not well.
The previous night, two SS guards had broken into the church and stolen a pair of golden chalices from the altar. The village priest was outraged; not at the smell of burning human flesh and the screams of the condemned that wafted nearby, but by the loss of church property. He immediately protested to the Treblinka camp commandant about the theft. The chalices were quickly returned with the personal apology of the commandant, and the thieves were reprimanded. The priest was satisfied, as were all concerned. For what was more important than the friendly working partnership of Church and State?
Canadians understand that partnership. The tag team of Crown and Pulpit gave us this land by ruthlessly wiping out the people who lived here, beginning and ending with their children. When some of us surfaced the hidden truth of this homegrown slaughter of the innocents, the churches of Canada responded like the priest of Malkinia. What mattered to them was their possessions and not, of course, the hordes of children they had killed and interred in mass graves across the country. And so, like the Treblinka commandant, the Canadian government stepped in and ensured the Catholic, Anglican, and United churches that their golden idols and property would never be threatened by lawsuits. And then the official Christians were satisfied.
Like any serial killers who escape justice, they thought well of themselves after, and spoke of “healing and reconciliation” to the few survivors of their domestic holocaust.
I thought of this when recent news reports described the arrest of Christian pastors for not complying with COVID regulations. These clergymen were outraged, for some reason. Apparently, they don’t understand that they are legal employees of the Crown since their churches are a registered arm of the state. That is how they can have their church buildings, their privileges, and their cozy tax-exempt status under the law. They are in bed with the state and have been for many years. Maybe this makes pastors feel they are not like the rest of us and are exempt from arrest by their bed buddies in the Canadian government. That makes the pastors in question more confused than anything. They are like SS guards who act shocked when they are arrested for not obeying an order from their commander.
Wisdom begins once we know ourselves and know what we belong to. Are Canadian Christians really surprised that their governmental partner in crime is now calling in the debt they owe to it and demanding their loyalty to its tyranny? The genocide of “non-believers” that Christian churches created and funded and prospered from is now blowing back on them. Their pact with the worldly devil is coming home to roost. In nature that is called the Law of Return. In the Bible it is called judgement.
Woe to those who worship dead idols and lie down with the enemies of God, for they shall reap a whirlwind. Whoever serves Moloch will become like it. The blood of the innocent shall cover them, and the judgement of heaven will condemn them.
It is time for Christians to read their own Bible and place themselves in its story. The churches of Canada are now reaping the bloody fruit that they have sown, and there is no escaping its consequences. All that we knew is ending. But death is a time for learning and change among those who are willing and able to let go. This is a time for Christians and for each one of us to choose who and what we will serve. We can stay rooted in our complicity with a godless state or use its present tyranny as a springboard to break free from it, even when only a remnant will do so.
We will serve God, not man. For what does light have in common with darkness? Therefore, come out from them and be separate. These Biblical voices speak to us now as never before, not as nice words but as guides to radical action in a time of collapse. But to act we must first see clearly and use our God-given reason, which as inhabitants of a dead city is harder for us to do than we can imagine.
Amidst the internet-driven hysteria that pastors are being carted off somewhere, let us remember that such stories are often circulated by the State as a psychological warfare technique to inflame people’s fears and keep them intimidated. But even if the stories are true, under section 176 of Canada’s Criminal Code, whoever tries to arrest Christian pastors or prevent them from performing their duties can go to jail for two years. Is the Criminal Code of Canada now suspended? Apparently. If so, it proves that there is no rule of law or legitimate government in Canada, and the police are acting as private individuals who have no authority over anyone.
Lesson number one: we are not to obey such an arbitrary, illegal power. But neither can we expect to escape the consequences of disobeying it. That is why Christians, and the clergymen in question, must focus on what matters, which is not fighting a godless state on its terms but on our own. It means acting in a separated state of mind, focused on the word of God and the way of Jesus. Why do we rely on church buildings at all? Why not gather in our homes and in forests as do all persecuted people? To escape the violence of the Church of Rome, my French Huguenot ancestors did so, as did my Scottish ancestors and indigenous people of this land. What mattered was remaining faithful to God and our conscience. So too today.
Lesson number two: once we separate from the system, we must remain that way and conform our lives to our separated faith, shunning the lies of the world and seeing things clearly, like any adept warrior who knows his enemy. We must look through the fog of hysteria being generated. After all, does it make logical sense that the Canadian state would attack its historic partner, the churches, and antagonize more people into resistance? That is counterproductive to the state’s main purpose of peacefully assimilating everyone into the global Corporatocracy.
As we saw with the story from the Treblinka death camp, the Nazis punished theft and random violence by its SS soldiers because it created resistance and interfered with their bigger aim of orderly extermination and genocide. The death camps in Europe and at Canadian “Indian residential schools”, were not simply brutality. They were a new society of total domination and control achieved not through random violence but the cooperation and obedience of the slave population.
So too today. Do we not see flying everywhere now the new flag of the Canadian police state, which is a human heart in place of the maple leaf?
Understanding this, we need to soar above the foggy present moment and see the wider panorama and drama that is at work. I was blessed the other day to do so on the wings of my Eagle spirit. Above the fallen city we call society and its growing tyranny I see a divine purpose, unforeseen by high and low alike. I see a great cleansing at work, a destruction of an old world to allow a new one to emerge.
As in nature, when a fire slashes and burns old growth to fertilize the soil for a resplendent new growth of life, so too is our world being incinerated by a divine judgement out of which few if any will survive. To both the prophet Isaiah and Jesus this message came: these people cannot be saved, they are too evil. Do not speak the truth to them lest they open their eyes and ears and be turned and redeemed. Those startling commands from heaven show something greater at work than our human desire to shore up our old lives and preserve the status quo. As with Sodom and Babylon, our world is over. What matters is the creation of the new world, and the removal of everything and everyone that stands in the way of it.
We should pray and hope for the downfall of the old, murderous world we call civilization, for its aim is nothing less than the extinction of humanity and our absorption into a single global corporation. If it does not fall, if we do not leave its corruption and tyranny, we will have no future as sovereign and free people. We will all be consumed in the coming, inescapable judgement.
Few people can accept this hard truth, even when it is born out by history and the events around us. The few who can accept it are led by conscience to know that divine judgement is not like ours. We cannot escape the consequence of our actions, and they are returning now like a final verdict from heaven. Those few people, who are the chosen remnant who may survive the unfolding Holocaust, are given a sacred task “to execute judgement on the world and bind the rulers and nobles in chains, so that God’s justice may be done”. (Psalm 149)
How ironic and how fitting that at this time of death and birth, it is the official Christians who are standing under judgement for their incestuous partnership with criminal worldly rulers. Perhaps the arrest of clergymen and the closing of their false churches is a blast coming not from Ottawa but from heaven.
At the end of the day, not one stone of the old temples will be left standing, for they are not meant to survive. That which we have done to the least of God’s people is now being done to us. The great circle of justice keeps turning, with the outcome in the hands of the Great Mystery.
Kevin D. Annett is a Nanaimo resident and former clergyman. He was expelled from the United Church of Canada without due process after exposing the torture and murder of native children in their Indian residential schools and facilities, including the infamous Nanaimo Indian Hospital. He has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. See his books and the evidence at www.murderbydecree.com and https://republicofkanata.ca . Write to Kevin at angelfire101@protonmail.com
