It might have all been different. 

We might have been forced to watch child sacrifice elevated to a national sacrament, sales of potassium iodide and fallout shelters exploding in anticipation of nuclear strikes, twerkers and groomers and drag queens in the White House Christmas videos. Innocent men and women held hostage here and abroad might have given up hope at their utter abandonment, along with the millions of children sold into slavery.

I don’t think we have even begun to realize the enormity of what we escaped. Remember in The Passion of the Christ, after Jesus is crucified, Satan kneels at the bottom of a mud-cracked pit and howls like a Stygian wolf? We might have heard the same demonic yell from the goblins of the deep state, had the American people not mobilized. 

We’ll never know all the stories of poll watchers and backup lawyers and good Samaritans (like the person who had pizzas delivered to the Pennsylvania polling place that kept people waiting outside all afternoon into the evening, hoping they’d go home for dinner) that kept this election from being plucked like the golden apple by the Wicked Queen.

It’s my private opinion that we would faint in fear and horror if we glimpsed the enormity of what we avoided by this last election. Were we granted a vision of it, there could only be two sides: God’s and Satan’s, like a great illumination of conscience. Neutrality would not be possible when the atrocity was fully revealed, but that day has not yet arrived. We still have time to affect the outcome.

The whole world might have all been different, but it’s not. God. That’s the difference: God. I am convinced that God rescued our country because we can now, in turn, help the billions who have no voice or power to rescue themselves. What we put down in the last election was poised to spread true hell over all the earth. 

But God deigned that we sit down at Thanksgiving in relative peace, the world not entirely consumed by war, despite the best efforts of the dementors in the outgoing administration. Pray God we will sit down to Christmas in the same calm, though it’s getting less certain by the day. 

The outgoing administration is now taking actions with no concern for their own future and with all-out enmity toward the people of the United States (sale of the wall materials, more billions to Ukraine, people still in tents in North Carolina, pardons of truly evil people, the refusal to inform the people about the drone armies, plans for a new pandemic). When someone has nothing to lose, their actions make no sense except for sheer malice. 

We are witnessing an open war on us. It’s not new, but now it’s out in the open.   

In every moral fantasy or myth, the enmity between good and evil comes down to a final battle. Evil, in its bid to possess everything, has to take a terrible all-or-nothing risk. In order to commit its full strength to the battle, it has to leave some part of its power unguarded. Sauron puts his power into the One Ring, which becomes his vulnerability. Arawn leaves his Land of Death unguarded when he goes out to meet the Army of the White Pig. A lone Rebel X-wing finds the one portal that can destroy the Death Star while all the Empire’s TIE fighters are engaged.

If the pattern holds true, then we are about to see the evil in this world make a grand stand, leaving a fatal vulnerability. We have to do the equivalent of analyzing the Death Star blueprints to effectively arm the X-wing fighters to fire the kill shot.

I am of the opinion that their weak spot has to do with children, which makes the stakes of this battle deadly serious. Our Lady of Fatima has told us that the final battle will be over marriage and the family, and the fruit of family is children. In our corrupted, jaded, now-I’ve-seen-everything world, the one thing that will still galvanize every good person is the protection of a child. 

So, doesn’t it make the most poetic sense that this season is all about a Child? We have the chance to quietly contemplate the wonder, really the total inadvisability, of the salvation of the world resting on the dumpling shoulders of an infant. God’s plans confound us; there is no predicting how He will accomplish His purposes. 

But we were alive, we got to actually see it, when He reached down and saved our country, and the world, from a frightful, Satan-saturated future. This Christmas, we can approach the Child with an immediate, personally-witnessed experience of how much God loves us and guards us. And we can take that appalling wonder into the new year, to infuse our wills and send us out to cast the Ring into the fire, to save the children.