During my brief time in Churchill, Manitoba, I had a chance to puff on the Last Lion's favorite kind of cigar while listening to his "We Shall Never Surrender" speech. It seemed fitting, given the times we live in, to pay homage to the man and what he stood for in the town named after him. On that same day, the local friar gave a homily at mass, weaving the parable of the talents and Dante's Inferno seamlessly without notes. How this all providentially fits, I'll explain.
We must understand with no uncertainty that as individuals, families, citizens and nations, we are always in the midst of a colossal struggle. On this, the great thinkers are all in agreement, from Plato to Peterson. But how we go about that struggle remains the ultimate question - "how shall I then live?" - and on this point, both the wartime prime minister's speech and the Franciscan's sermon have salient points. We must not capitulate to hell in anyway.
To be clear, I am not now waxing philosophical from any kind of self-righteous mount - I confess, to you my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned, in what I have done and what I have failed to do. Yet such acknowledgment cannot be an end itself, an acquiescence to resignation and despair. Indeed, to defeat chaos, evil, and the infernal, we must do as Churchill and the Christ taught us - we must overcome ourselves, invest our talents, and fight back.
There are many among us, regardless of affiliation or self-identification, who have, in one form or another, either resigned to the triumph of evil or have become active members of making ourselves and our world little more than an ash heap. I fully admit that I have a proclivity for this very activity and I have wasted or intentionally destroyed more than enough good opportunities, while hurting others in the process. I am the least helpful authority on this topic.
Yet, I am convicted that I must persevere and I encourage you to do the same. We must rise to a heroic resistance. We cannot give into despair; for despair is just irresponsibility dressed up in fashionable terms. As long as there is life in our flesh, we can indeed struggle against the worst in us, which is where the worst in our world comes from. To choose any other way is to damn ourselves to a vicious existence long before we've descended into hell.
It's often been said that the gates of the inferno are locked on this side. The darkest parts of our own minds, the darkest congregations among us who will not yield to mercy or to reason, are ample evidence of the human capacity to cling to evil while spurning the true, the good, and the beautiful. As the 20th century showed us and as the 21st century is showing us now, temptations are a constant, and no amount of coercion or utopianism can stop them.
Thus there is only one solution. The Last Lion roared, "we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the hills...we shall never surrender." I only add that "we shall fight them in our souls," for as he said elsewhere, "without victory, there can be no survival."
