Holden,
Thank you for your response. Here it is just a matter of time to get hit by the China bug. So far we have had 205 deaths, if we are to believe the numbers given by the Ministry of Health. Next time I will be one of them.
I read about the Cathars a few years ago. It was a book written by Stephen O´Shea. Then I read a book by a Spanish author, Antoni Dalmau, who wrote a novel on the Cathars. I underlined a few paragraphs:
“Unlike what Catholics preached in the temple, everything, from time to time, was governed by two principles, one good and one evil. He also said that this earthly world - and everything visible: the sky, the sea and the fish, The sun, the moon and the stars, snow and rain, all living things-was the work of the evil god. On the other hand, beyond that world of corruption and evil, where life is so precarious and painful, where wars, epidemics and death reign, there is another formed by incorruptible spirits that the God of truth and justice had created at the beginning of time.
At the beginning of all things, the Evil One set out to rise to heaven and establish his throne there because he wanted to resemble the Most High. It was a great battle, terrible and bloody, but Satan was defeated and fell, and there are those who say that in his fall the crystal firmament containing the Earth and the seven heavens that the devil himself had created was broken. Thus, the Prince of Darkness was forced to remain for years and years at the gates of paradise, always thinking and striving to enter. Until one day, using surprise and deception, he managed to penetrate the kingdom. There he addressed the spirits created by Heavenly Father, convinced them that they lived in subjection, and offered them earthly goods that they did not know. In short, he made them believe that they would be like gods.
In this way, Satan dragged a third of the creatures of Heaven, which fell like a thick rain, more stuck than the tips of the fresh grass of our meadows. So it happened for nine days and nine nights and, along with the spirits seduced by the foreign god, there were others who fell carelessly, as if dragged by a kind of vertigo. Until the Father of Heaven, warned by the faithful spirits of what was happening, rose from his throne, set his foot above the hole through which the sinful spirits slid, and warned those who remained that, if they moved, they would NEVER EVER REST; and the falling spirits: "you may go, for the time being."
Once fallen to Earth, the heavenly spirits remembered the good they had lost and grieved for the evil they had encountered. Seeing them so sorrowful, the devil told them to sing a song to the Lord, as they had custom. They answered what we read in the Psalms: "How can we sing songs to the Lord in a foreign land?». There was even one who turned without fear to the evil God and asked him, " Why did you deceive us and make us leave heaven to follow you?
The devil answered him that they would never return to heaven, for he intended to cover each of those spirits with a robe of skin, made of land of oblivion, from which they could never get out: bodies of flesh in which they would lose the memory of the goods and the joy they had enjoyed in heaven.
When the time of grace came, God sent his son into the world to preach his father's Kingdom. That is, he came to remember the heavenly homeland to the Sleeping Souls and prisoners in the fur robe and to teach them the liberating gesture that could return them to Eternity and free them from evil and time. This gesture of freedom and salvation is the baptism by the spirit, the Consolament, which Christ transmitted to his apostles with the laying on of hands.
Stay well.