Windswept House

A comment I received on this tweet from Matt Walsh.

Imagine you live in a beautiful city, and you were born there.

You grew up in a wonderful neighbourhood, knew everybody, went to school in great schools, graduated and got your dream job within walking distance of your very own first home -- also in your old neighbourhood.

A little time goes by, and a certain person you like becomes a certain person you love, and then your spouse.

And the city is full of promise, hope, industry, and excitement. But one day...

While you are at your job working hard, and near to the end of your shift, a strange, menacing storm descends upon the city.

Out of the strangest clouds you have ever seen, the storm spawns dozens of twisters. The dust and debris, the noise and shock are terrible.

It lasts only a few moments, but it seems like a lifetime. The storm abates, and you and your co-workers rush out the door, concerned for your homes, your loved ones...

And the city, instead of being destroyed, is intact -- but strange.

All the buildings have been moved to different places.

Streets which you once could walk blindfolded were going in all other directions from what you knew.

After a long time walking lost, you come upon your neighbourhood, and don't recognize anyone there. They don't know you.... and finally you find your home...

The home you love and know is empty.

All your things are gone, your family and your spouse are replaced by strangers, and all that remains ...

is a windswept house.

When I asked my friend, a veteran of Her Majesty's Canadian Forces, who had written it, he replied,

I wrote it five years after Canada's last combat missions in Afghanistan (on my last Tour of Duty), and four years after retiring from Active Duty.

It just seemed to be the most perfect response ever for this post, so I copied and pasted it here.

I should also be remiss if I didn’t mention that what I wrote was inspired by Windswept House, a novel by the late Malachi Martin.

In the novel, I seem to recall that the author was talking about Vatican City, and the Vatican Palace was the inferred Windswept House. 

I am pretty sure you already know all that, but sometimes it’s important to say it all out, especially since what I wrote implied (in 2016, and also now) that the city is the City of God, the neighborhood is the Church Militant, and the Windswept house is every place in the City of Man imposed upon the City of God that real Catholicism and its real Catholic adherents are leaving from.

Malachi Martin often loses his narrative in false romanticism, and the book was a good read, but wasn’t a genuine way to view the Church, the Vatican and the Way. Martin never offered much in the way of answers to the problems he novelized.

Yes, I agree with Dr Kwasniewski about how he sees the post conciliar Church and where we are today.

But I think that sometimes even he forgets what — and especially who — the Real Catholic Church is.

Our people — brothers and sisters in Christ— are the real Church, not the buildings and lands.

(And certainly not the thieves and villains who stole these things, promote a false religion and arrogate powers to themselves that were never granted them by God.)

Those who remain in those stolen places and buildings, clerical or laity, belong to a different religion altogether from us.

And they are not our brothers and sisters anymore until they repent and leave it. Full stop.

We are those Adherents to the Traditional teachings of the Real Catholic Faith who will never accept the tasteless fare of the world, and it’s worldly religion.

Year by year, decade by decade, a Great Exodus made up of us has been going on, and the motu proprio of last July only opened the gates even wider for more people to realize the truth of where they were and come out of this latest attempt at a spiritual Babylon.

Each of us, like soldiers coming home from the wars as I did, look to our once familiar City, but find it changed. We seek our home and find it empty and the occupants are unwelcoming strangers.

Each of us who discover, just as I did coming home, that there’s no going back, there’s only going forward.

An ocean of people were left out in the cold and abandoned by the false shepherds, but have been and are now being lead in their faith by The Good Shepherd Himself -- and Who is doing the Evangelical calling Himself that was abandoned by the hirelings: calling the lost lambs, helping them find their way from all over the earth to what is broadly called the Traditional Catholic movement.