2019 was a terrible year for Project BLACK MAMBA, The Secret Base's daily "Saints + Scripture" post. There were too many demands on my time & too little time to meet them all, & as a result I fell further & further behind on the daily post. Trying to make up for the backlog put me further & further behind schedule until I finally had to cut my losses & content myself reluctantly (& temporarily) with keeping current, with not falling any further behind. It was all I could do to keep up, without catching up on any of the backlog.
2019 was not just a terrible year, but the worst in the five-&-a-half-year history of BLACK MAMBA. That was, at least until the Panic of 2020 shut down not just the political economy of these United States & the world entire, but even more astoundingly the sacramental economy of the Church. The food that fuels your humble narrator is not the cold pizza, chocolate chip cookies, & Red Bull in which I overindulge all too frequently, but the Bread of Life—the Body, Blood, Soul, & Divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. In A.D. 304, as the emperor Diocletian's persecution raged, a certain Emeritus answered, to questions about why he & his fellow Christians had disobeyed the divine emperor's edicts, "Sine dominico non possumus" ("Without Sunday, we cannot live"); yet this is precisely what our bishops have ordered us to do, to live without Sunday, with the Body of Christ in the Eucharist, without the Body of Christ in the baptized gathered to worship & sacrifice. I am obedient to my bishop, even as I disagree (Matthew, 23:1-7).
But without the food which endures (John, 6:27, et al.), I was starving to death. I endured fifty-three days without the Eucharist before finding a courageous priest who heeded Pope Francis's call to be creative, "to be with the people so that the people don’t feel alone.” Since last Sunday, I've been coming back to life, feeling myself again after the numbness & apathy of the last two months, but such a resuscitation takes time & fuel (Mark, 5:43). I do not know what shape the reactivation of BLACK MAMBA will take, but I hope to find those answers sooner rather than later. Thank you, dear readers, for standing by The Secret Base throughout this crisis & torpor.
Code Name: CHAOS | In memoriam
I've not followed the National Basketball Association (N.B.A., seemingly a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party) since the heyday of the Detroit Pistons "Bad Boys" in the early 1990s; so, though I knew of the late Kobe Bryant (1978-2020) as a great basketball player, I had no idea he'd nicknamed himself the "Black Mamba"—& successfully so—'til the widespread journalistic coverage of his sudden & unexpected demise this past winter. Wherefore do I mention this? Simply to state that Project BLACK MAMBA was not so code named as a reference to the late, great Mr. Bryant, though upon learning of the Black Mamba's Catholic faith, I did smile at the coincidence.
Commentary: In memoriam Kobe Bryant (1978-2020). Requiescat in pace.
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