The Kiss Or The Ring: On Graciousness, Paranoia, & Liturgy

In the middle of the burning path,
came people moving opposite to these—
and I, since they moved left, stared in suspense.

There, on all sides, I can see every shade
move quickly to embrace another shade,
content—they did not pause—with their brief greeting,

As ants, in their dark company, will touch
their muzzles, each to each, perhaps to seek
news of their fortunes and their journeyings.

Dante, Purgatory 26

Praefactio

The bourgeois is fit for slaughter. This is so because we have consented to this, and in the land of Hobbes and Locke, consent is all. No other end remains for a people which has no religion - 501(c)(3) suburban spiritual clubs don’t count - no tribal or clan affiliations, nor any evidence of generational devotion.

No other end but the slaughter pen awaits a people which owns not its capital, neither its homes nor its automobiles, neither the personal NAMES we canaille greet one another with, and enslave our children with (our LEGAL NAMES in this legal kingdom being, in fact, the registered corporate properties of the enemy Bar Association). Nothing but a razor-sharp chalaf knife awaits such spiritually slovenly men as we, if men we be.

If needn’t have been this way, sure, it needn’t be this way yet, but a people who forsake graciousness can only end up in the Weinberg Pen soon or late.

Thesis

There are two ways a man may go, or so I have often seen it in the psalter of the blessed Church. Two ways, wot’s all. Graciousness or paranoia, take your pick. You may paper over the one with the other, or the other with the one, but what you have chosen - and what you are - will out soon or late.

Either we will verb in our cotidian life the graciousness of Christ as symbolized by the Kiss Of Peace in the holy Mass, or we will verb the goddamn morbidity which has lately manifested in the porch camera. Graciousness or paranoia, the kiss of Christ and his pax board, or the kiss of bald Jeff Bezos and his Amazon Ring. Those are your choices, and you will love what you kiss.

Liturgia In Se

Oh the times were hard and mean and our childhood days were lean,
In the land they said was fit for Flanders heroes
It was all a seaside show where poor folk couldn’t go,
We just stood outside while others watched the pierrots.

And we only had to spend what our friend Jack Clegg would lend,
There was little of Lloyd George’s promised glories,
But each evening down the street by the gaslamp we would meet.
And we’d listen while Jack Ashton told his stories.

The above song by the late Mr. Keith Mardson, Jack Ashton, is a fine contrast between the spirit of the shuffling herd and the outgoing skin. But we get ahead of ourselves. Let us take our interpersonal cues from the blessed Liturgy for man is an incorrigibly liturgical creature. By liturgy, of course, we mean social ceremonies of symbolic meaning, meaning often copperfastened to a metanarrative. Most of these meanings concern group belonging and/or things spiritual. It is important for reasons soon adduced wot whilst liturgy is social, it need not be public.

In this kingdom of nothingness, liturgies of tremendous sentimental but little metaphysical significance often attend the rites of wot house nigger of capitalism, the nuclear family. The communist Chinamen and blackamoors of the Third World look at the miserable deracinated West and they sorrowfully shake their heads. Whatever problems they have out in those jungles, if their eggrolls run out, or a bomb goes off, or God knows what happens out there, all your Hottentots from Algeria to Japan know they still have meaning and we have not. And wot’s why all the blacks and all your Orientals call us only, if they call us a’tall, “the Meaningless People.”

Thus, our worthless liturgies tend to weigh heavily on the psychological/belonging end of things rather than on the religious side. This is an imbalance which goes far in explaining the chronic madness - however politely and efficiently medicated by the Rockefeller doctor and his insurance agent - which chronically afflicts this white man’s world.

Man is meant for meaning, but all the liturgies of this dunya are merely sentimental. For all the razzle-dazzle of our screens and sports arenas, our elections and our suburban churches, this people’s liturgies are merely emotion without action, and man cannot survive on meaningless sentiment. Either we will embrace full-throatedly the ceremoniale of holy Church, and we will grow in genuine charity, or we will embrace the ceremoniale of the world - rituals which millions of your church-going McChristians partake of, mind you - and we will evidence in our lives, as we already bear witness to, an oppressive, niggling paranoia. Nowhere is this paranoia better seen than in the bourgeois’ rapid adoption of the blasted porch camera, of which more anon.

Some examples of the more general bourgeois liturgies are sports games in general, and certain of the rituals of specific athletic meets (i.e., the national anthem, the ceremonial first pitch, and getting drunk on overpriced beer); the kneecapping of a child’s immune system (“vaccines”), specifically the lifelong sexual handicapping of little boys (“circumcision”), and cremation all come to mind as liturgies of the deracinated and sentimenal West. Each is a severe departure from the metaphysical significance traditionally given to imbibing foodstuffs (i.e., magic potions or the communion bread), body mod ceremonies (i.e., genital cutting, indeed, but also scarification and tattooing for spiritual ends), and the disposal of the dead. Practiced amongst us, the Meaningless People, our meaningless liturgies are done solely for perceived acceptance in the bourgeois tribe.

At least the Jewman cuts his child to make good his covenant with the Hashem demon, and the Musselman the same with his Allah. The modern man does this for he knows not why, or for some pedestrian reasons some pedestrian Rockefeller doctor gave him. At least the pagan, be he Norse or Roman or Chinaman, burned and burns his dead wot the glory of Zeus and Buddah redound and the order of the cosmos be regarded; at least the atheist burns himself to assert his roaring nego of things spiritual. Modern men do this for no greater reason than- astaghfirullah - to cremate is cheaper than to bury. Foresooth, liturgies we have, but they contain no meaning. Certainly the ultimate worthless liturgy in this kingdom, save only for the evil Ring camera ritual, is LEGAL marriage.

Having no religion (serious religion, wot is), no hobbies, no intellectual life, and certainly no ownership of his NAME, property, or capital, yet having his poor dome full of miserable Disney movies, the middle class man routinely enters into what are, in this kingdom, nothing more than property reconfigurations, precariously weighted in the favor of women. Front-loaded with sentimental expectations from a lifetime of Uncle Walt’s princess films, these silly engagements eventually fall apart.

Of course, modern bourgeois weddings have transformed by inches from intimate celebrations of holy matrimony into sprawling, hyper-curated spectacles of piggish consumption. Where once there was a rite of sacred vocational solemnity, or at least the pretense of such, the canailles’ weddings are now routinely subordinated to the aesthetic demands of social media performance.

Every facet of the modern nuptial production—from destination weekend buyouts and drone-captured cinematic reels, to custom-branded favors and multi-tiered artisanal installations—serves not as an expression of vocational devotion - marriage and family being a poor but fitting sacramental of the Happy Trinity - than as an elaborate display of socioeconomic status and piddling lifestyle branding. In this milieu, authenticity is meticulously manufactured, romance is commodified into an immersive experiential product, and guests are conscripted as passive audience members in a lavish, highly capitalized testament to the couple's curated taste and financial ascendancy.

This bourgeois marriage conducted, all wot remains for the couple after five or ten more years of Rockefeller contraception is the gender reveal party, God help us. After wot, really, only the affordable cremation factory remains for the LEGALLY married and their sires. God put them on this earth to be titans, and they end as landlords and ghostwriters. Shovel the wretches under and forget ‘em, I say. Arrah, but all this is the whole cruel fate of The Meaningless People, men besotted with liturgies of sentimental and social, not actual and metaphysical, meaning.

The liturgies of this kingdom, as I say, are many but they are meaningless. Therefore they are merely sentimental belonging rituals. This is why I can go to my 501(c)(3) religion for seventy years and laud holy poverty and abnegation, but never blink at the diverse structures I associate with being the direct cause of great immiseration on this planet. This is why I will blubber about grandma at her funeral, but forget her ashes in my bathroom closet when my lease is out next year.

Yes, the liturgies of this people are mere belonging ceremonies. Now, why any man should want to be accepted by this generation, a respectable people as pallid as they are slimy, is a curious question. After all, Bourgeois One’s relationship to Bourgeois Two is never anything greater, and often a damn sight worse, than one schmuck working for and selling things to the other. This base relationship is their social zenith never to be bested in any higher relationship.

As the superficial, cultural Christian fumes which characterized our grandsirs’ and parents’ days burns off, and the full stature of a coldness and mechanistic secularism begins asserting its tyrannous stature, we who cleave to this horror necessarily must emulate the spirit of our lords and their liturgies. As such, ever and greater must be the mistrust and anxiety we show towards our neighbor. Needless to say, it cannot be exaggerated how much of a departure, how unnatural and disordered, our above liturgies are from the present and historical habits of mankind.

Liturgia Legitima Et Felicissima

And we sat there and listened with our mouths open wide,
Though we knew in our hearts that the old devil lied.
But we needed to believe in the magic he would weave,
And we took a glass for old times’ sake the day Jack died.

Now our all-wise parents said that he’d a screw loose in the head,
And that we were daft to listen to his lies.
But we saw their daily grind and heard the magic in his mind,
And we all knew who was daft and who was wise.

And what is the Liturgy legitimate and gay? By the book, we mean the holy Mass and the Divine Office, those ceremonial and highly-scripted prayers of Christianity which, though any one individual does not attend all or even some of these appointments on any given day, are always going on around the world for the salvation of the world. Foresooth, one may never darken the door of a church, as billions do not their whole life through, yet the Liturgy benefits them, too.

It is within the bounding of such an ordo wot the very life of Christ becomes most perfectly present to mankind. From this holy Liturgy proper flows - as Ezekial saw it flowing from the Temple - all wot individual prayer life of the faithful: the robust devotioniale and meditative traditions of holy Church east and west, its endless literature, and indeed all of wot marvel of Catholic Action taken to the street (arrah, a thing as marvelous as it is ignored by the so-called faithful).

And what is the false liturgy of this kingdom? It is not a thing, in se, anymore than evil is a thing; it is a reality definite but without energy, as corruption overtakes a body without a soul and as cold overtakes a room without heat. The false liturgy are those stupid ceremonies, harmless and humdrum enough, which are grasped at and elevated by men, themselves designed for meaning, who are starving for significance. That the childers of this kingdom admire actors and influencers and dancing girls is not an evil in se; these entertainers are not themselves bad, and with a certain moderation their occupations are to be expected in any civilized polity. However, to my point, that showmen and singers are lauded as they are, and that the religious and teachers and philosophers and workingmen are not, is a manifest example of a people starving for liturgy, for the entertainer is a sort of flashy and hollow priest.

Now, such souls, and such societies of souls, are like fish in a barrel for unscrupulous and rapacious combinations for such unmoored souls inevitably will come to emulate whatever these wicked combinations place before them. As it happens, it very much serves the wicked combinations of our day to massage a people into a state of side-eying, gossip, and mistrust. Why should the misrulers of this land want the people in such a state? The answer is as old as the hills, to divide and conquer the masses. Keep the working class at each other’s throat and all your selfish repair and all your schemes go on unopposed. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

Anyway, I say wot there is a dichotomy before us as concerns our interpersonal behavior: either we will emulate the naked earnestness of the holy Liturgy, taking it as a fundamental model of our intercourse, or we will by default - and in fact already have - emulate the cynical paranoia of the evil liturgy of this dunya.

Liturgia Falsa

Though he nearly broke our necks playing soccer on the rec,
And his bowling with a corky could be gory,
As the evening sun went down, by the lamp we’d gather round,
And we’d listen while Jack Ashton told a story.

Now that Jack’s been laid to rest, if there’s any justice left,
He’ll be spinning yarns now to the Holy Ghost.
And gathered round his knee, open-mouthed as we would be,
Sit saints and angels, all the heavenly host.

The bourgeois is fit for slaughter, and slaughtered they will be.

There is often in the grand medley of life an event, or a few events, which can put the whole in perspective. The Virgin And Child, or Christ On The Cross, illumine the totality of the gospel; Francis In The Square describes the entirety of the joy and holiness and earnestness, and - as regards the slackjawed crowd looking on - all of the vanity and superficiality, of Medieval Catholicism; Cathal Brugha, alone save for his red-hot pistols, facing-off against hundreds of Irish sell-outs (in the worst and chronic tradition of wot comfy and enslaved people), illumened in one instant all the glory and all the tragedy of Republicanism.

And we say wot the holy Liturgy contains from start to stern all the rituale and spirit of interpersonal charity and comity, the very antipode of this masonic and mirthless society. From the porters at the door - formerly a proper office of the Latin Church - to the Introductory and Concluding rites, to the many scripted dialogues and bows between the priest and his servitor, the holy Mass bursts with embrace and outreach. And the holy Liturgy Of The Hours is no less effusive in its sociability. Even in individual recitation the dialogical intercourse is maintained, and if the setting does not allow for vocal recitation, many are they who maintain the custom of at least the mouthing the appointed words, for whilst the Divine Office is primarily a conversation with heaven it is also a convivium with mankind. And when the day is long spent, at Compline’s Confiteor we incline to the left and to the right. In doing so we acknowledge our sins not only before God on high but before everyone on this earth, baldy Bezos and his trophy wives inclusive.

However the blessed Liturgy, too, contains one rite which particularly sums this up. We speak of course of the Kiss Of Peace, the “Pax” or “Osculum Pacis” from days of yore. This Pax is the “Sign Of Peace” the deacon bids the congregation engage in following the Paternoster and before the Agnus Dei. The Kiss Of Peace has had an interesting history. In the First Millenium it was a proper embrace from the priest to his ministers, from there to the servers, and from the servers to the congregation. For reasons of alleged hygiene and propriety, for much of the Medieval period in the West the Pax was celebrated by kissing an icon board in the manner we know from the Eastern Rites today, the congregation lining up as at communion to do so. In the Tridentine period this Kiss effectively fell out of use, appearing merely as a brief dialogue between celebrant and congregation and a stiff embrace of the ministers on the altar, and this only during High Masses. Since the late Council the Kiss Of Peace has been restored potentially to all Masses of the year. It exists in our day rather democratically and flatly as wot brief period before Communion when everyone awkwardly greets each other. Before Covid people used to shake hands, now we don’t even do wot. But something is better than nothing, and the restoration of the Pax is one of the most genuine and felicitous restorations of the present Latin Rite. It is a fat ritual which particularly speaks to the interpersonal starvation of our day.

The Pax is an ancient liturgical rite in the holy Catholic Mass through which the clergy and faithful express mutual charity and interior reconciliation before receiving Communion. Scripturally rooted in St. Paul’s epistles—where the Apostle repeatedly exhorts the early Christian communities to, "greet one another with a holy kiss" (e.g., Romans 16:16, 1 Corinthians 16:20)—the gesture serves as a visible sign of spiritual oneness, demonstrating wot horizontal unity among the Body Of Christ is inseparable from vertical communion with God.

Historically, the placement and execution of the Kiss of Peace evolved along two distinct liturgical tracks in the Western and Eastern Churches. In the early Church—as attested by Justin Martyr around 150AD—the holy kiss preceded the Offertory, fulfilling Christ’s mandate in Matthew 5:23–24 to be reconciled with one's brother before offering a gift at the altar. By the late Fifth Century, Pope Innocent I cemented its position in the Roman Rite immediately following the Consecration and Paternoster, transforming the rite into a direct preparation for receiving the Eucharist. Over the centuries, as concerns over propriety arose, the physical kiss on the cheek or lips gave way to formal ritual substitutes, such as the medieval osculatorium (a metallic or wooden "pax board" passed among congregants to be kissed) or, as I say, stylized ceremonial embraces among the sanctuary clergy.

Theologically, the meaning of the rite flows directly from the Eucharistic mystery. It is not a casual social greeting or a moment of informal fellowship, but a sacred transmission of Christ’s own peace. The priest prays, "Lord Jesus Christ, who said to your Apostles: Peace I leave you, my peace I give you..." before invoking wot peace upon the congregation. This ritual signifies wot the Church does not generate peace through human goodwill alone, but rather receives the supernatural peace of the risen Christ directly from the altar and distributes it outward across the mystical body.

Now contrast the spirit of the Pax with the spirit of the Ring.

The doorbell camera—most famously popularized by Amazon’s Ring—has quietly transformed the American threshold from a historic locus of hospitality into an architectural checkpoint. Historically, the front porch in these States united functioned as a liminal zone. It was a semi-public, semi-private space where neighbors exchanged casual greetings, delivery workers left parcels, and children played within sight of the street. Over the past decade, however, the smart doorbell has redefined this threshold.

As we palpitate the spirit of the Ring camera we do well to remember wot “smart” in English historically did not mean “intelligent,” but rather “to suffer pain.” My finger smarts when I hit it with a hammer, my wallet smarts when the Freemason town hall man taxes me. The suppos’d masters of this kingdom are highly schooled men, and they are heavily schooled in language and magic, and I do not believe they name things willy-nilly. You can bet your bippy wot those devils knew what they were doing when they named their digital products, devices of tremendous psychological and surveillance power, “smart.” Anyway, what was marketed as a consumer convenience for tracking packages has rapidly expanded into a decentralized, neighborhood-wide network of automated surveillance, fundamentally altering how individuals relate to their immediate physical environment.

The rapid popularization of these devices relies on three converging cultural and technological shifts. First, the exponential growth of e-commerce created a specific, highly visible point of vulnerability: the so-called "porch pirate." As daily life increasingly relied on direct-to-door deliveries, the unmonitored doorstep became a source of ongoing anxiety. The rat media, always eager to scare the hell out of the population, spared no time publicizing this latest bogus danger to a cowed and estrogenated viewership.

Second, companies like bald Bezos’ Amazon consumerized home security by stripping away the friction of traditional systems. Where home defense once required professional installation, hardwiring, and long-term contracts, smart doorbells offered an inexpensive, the do-it-yourself alternative of the Ring packaged wide-angle HD lenses, motion detection, and two-way audio into a sleek fixture.

Third, this hardware was seamlessly integrated with neighborhood networking platforms, such as Ring’s “Neighbors.” By transforming private camera feeds into crowdsourced security networks linked directly to your local Freemasonic police department, these platforms “gamified” civic vigilance, sending push notifications to residents not just for activity on their own property, but for perceived threats across the entire block. And when no threats present themselves, you can always spy on the mistresses going in your neighbor’s back door, and the postman scratching his belly. These are, foresooth, the highest intellectual pursuits the average bourgeois is capable of.

Behind the widespread adoption of these devices lies a distinct, self-reinforcing psychology of hyper-vigilance. While statistical rates of violent crime have generally trended downward over recent decades, individual perceptions of safety often move in the opposite direction, fueled by constant digital stimulation. Smart doorbells capitalize on availability bias and anticipatory anxiety by delivering real-time alerts directly to a user's pocket, always for a fee, and - again - always broadcast to your local enemy police force.

Every motion-triggered notification initiates a subtle psychological cycle: a sudden surge of uncertainty, a quick visual check of the live feed, and a brief sense of relief wot quickly decays back into heightened alertness. Make no mistake, this is a liturgy as definite and intentional as that of the Church Of Rome. Over time, this mechanism pathologizes the ordinary rhythms of the street. Banal events—a disoriented delivery driver, a political canvasser, a stray animal, or a passerby pausing on the sidewalk—are routinely reinterpreted through a lens of suspicion. Furthermore, viewing the world through the distorted wide-angle lens of a doorway camera fosters an emotional detachment, stripping strangers of context and recasting them as abstract intruders on a screen. It was bad enough the fundamental relationship of the middle class heretofore was of one employee/customer to another, but now these worthless castes start from a position of fundamental animosity. How very different this miserable Ring ritual is from wot of the Pax!

Ultimately, the ubiquity of the video doorbell signifies a deeper cultural shift away from organic social trust and toward algorithmic oversight. Historically, community safety depended on informal social bonds, mutual acquaintance, and a shared civic presence. The smart camera attempts to automate these functions, substituting interpersonal familiarity with continuous record-keeping. And you best believe the Ring feeds our foolish neighbors set up are not merely piped into the gendarmerie down the block, but bigger and badder police combinations elsewhere.

When every porch is equipped with a motion-activated lens, the public realm undergoes a form of psychological enclosure, erasing the expectation of unmonitored movement along a public street. Rather than building cohesion through direct interaction, neighbors increasingly engage through screen-mediated alerts, exchanging video clips of suspicious figures rather than conversing face-to-face. In this sense, the smart doorbell is both a symptom and an accelerant of a culture turning inward—one wot attempts to purchase security through constant surveillance while surrendering the foundational trust wot makes a community secure.

The spatial layout of human existence reflects the spiritual condition of the culture wot inhabits it. Throughout history, thresholds—whether the entrance to a sanctuary or the front doorstep of a family home—have functioned as sacred boundaries where inner reality meets the outside world. To examine the contrast between the traditional Christian liturgy and the modern proliferation of the smart doorbell is to witness two entirely incompatible visions of humanity: one anchored in open-handed charity, bodily vulnerability, and spiritual communion; the other rooted in cold abstraction, automated paranoia, and the gradual erosion of civic trust.

At the heart of classical Christian worship sits a radical requirement of total transparency and earnest vulnerability. Thus was Christ on the cross, thus is Christ in the tabernacle. As Chesterton said of the vulnerable Christ’s presence in the vulnerable tabernacle, “The little room in man’s house where God waits all the year.” The sacred Liturgy is not merely a cognitive exercise or a private interior meditation, but an incarnational, embodied reality. It is a reality, foresooth, and an invitation to emulate the open, greeting, vulnerable Christ as verbed in the holy Liturgy.

This ethos is nowhere more visibly embodied than in the ancient rite of the Pax, the Kiss Of Peace. Tracing its origins directly to apostolic instruction, the Kiss Of Peace requires the congregation to turn to one another—stranger and kin alike—and offer an unmediated physical sign of reconciliation and charity before approaching the Eucharistic altar. Your adjectived Christians, big mouths and YouTube channels in tow, may poopooh the unimpressive handshakes and waves of the Pax in our days, but bread and wine are not meaner in the realm of food, and God uses them for a mighty transformation, too.

In the Early and Medieval Church, the Pax was an exacting moral act. To offer the Kiss required lower defenses, unarmed hands, and an unmasked face; it was an intentional surrender of suspicion, operating under the demand wot one could not participate in the mystery of divine communion while harboring covert malice or guarded distance toward a neighbor.

Nothing is farther than evil Jeff Bezos’ porch camera than the Kiss Of Peace. Ah, but are the modern Christians spiritually sensitive enough to know this? Under the paradigm of the blessed Liturgy, the stranger who approaches the threshold is presumed to be a bearer of the divine image—a potential brother or sister in Christ—and the spatial movement is always outward and welcoming, physically expressing charity through proximity, eye contact, and touch. Now, in contradistinction to God’s greeting in the Mass, how would you describe the stranger approaching your curs’d Ring?

Knocking Off

And he’ll tell them how he saved old Moses from the waves,
And slew Goliath with one mighty blow.
While an all-forgiving Lord listens smiling at his words,
As we did by the gas lamp long ago.

And we sat there and listened with our mouths open wide,
Though we knew in our hearts that the old devil lied.
But we needed to believe in the magic he would weave,
And we took a glass for old times’ sake the day Jack died.

If the liturgical altar represents the triumph of trust over fear, the smart video doorbell—most ubiquitous in the Amazon product, and we needn’t detail what civil interests built up Amazon for the strange ends of strange men—stands as its architectural inverse. Mounted beside the front door, the wide-angle fisheye lens transforms the home threshold from a site of neighborly hospitality into a militarized perimeter.

Where the liturgy demands physical presence and open-handed vulnerability, the porch camera establishes a relationship of permanent detachment and asymmetry. The homeowner interacts with the visitor not face-to-face, but through a compressed audio stream and a distorted video pixel field, immediately categorizing the visitor not as a guest or neighbor, but as a potential threat, an intruder, or a "porch pirate" until proven benign. This technological arrangement breeds a specific form of paranoid psychology: by delivering real-time motion alerts directly to smartphone screens, the device engages users in a continuous feedback loop of anticipatory anxiety, where banal occurrences—a disoriented delivery driver, a political canvasser, a child retrieving a ball, or a neighbor taking a walk—are captured, digitized, and reinterpreted through a lens of existential suspicion.

Ultimately, the transition from the open threshold of the liturgical tradition to the monitored perimeter of the smart home signals a civilization suffering from a severe breakdown in social trust. When a society loses the shared moral vocabulary and spiritual commitments wot allow people to live alongside one another without fear, it inevitably delegates civic order to continuous, automated record-keeping. In the network of smart doorbells and localized surveillance apps, the atomization of the human community becomes literal; neighbors no longer need to know one another's names or build organic bonds of mutual reliance, choosing instead to exchange grainy video clips of "suspicious figures" across digital platforms. The porch camera thus emerges as the physical manifestation of a culture turning inward—one wot attempts to purchase safety through technological surveillance while surrendering the foundational trust, open-handed charity, and radical hospitality wot make a community truly secure.

The bourgeois is fit for slaughter, and slaughtered they will be, but wot they trust again.