We are seeing our neighbors as we have never seen them before – or never NOT seen them. Suddenly everybody is masked, concealed, withdrawn, hiding out, dehumanized. On walks around the block, even in grocery stores, if we dare go there,– masked! Who is that masked, muzzled grocery shopper? And what’s she trying to say, muffled like that?
Yet masks are old stuff. Until now they have been pretty much merry, which to the heart doeth good like a medicine. As 4-year-olds we all put on our so-cute un-scary Halloween masks and trick-or-treated, like the darling masked racoons on the back porch. Circus clowns looked like white-faced Jokers with big bulbous orange noses. Even the Lone Ranger (“who is that masked man?”) never really killed criminals, at least on radio. The true American specimen, the baseball catcher’s mask, is so open it hardly counts as a mask. Anyway the season was cancelled, and the teams renamed to be less offensive, which now means less American.
More creepy are the masks bank robbers always wear in cartoons, and the whole-head masks and body regalia worn by otherwise naked savages, whether brown, black, or white, tipsy with cannabis and mushrooms, dervishes whirling and jerking to maddening drumbeats like berserk marionettes, till they drop, presumably happily.
But the archetypal mask is the sequined eye mask of Old Vienna, teasingly framing the lovely eyes of blissfully crocked and gorgeously gowned couples merrily waltzing the night away.
If this article had been written back then, before the world was catapulted into End Times by a certain novel bulbous virus sometimes depicted as orangey, Black Lives, the Brown Shirt riots, and stark leaden panic, the “The Merry Masked Ball” of old Vienna would have been the title. And the article would have been just another unheeded warning against worldly allurements.
Overnight, all the carefree merriment and allurements symbolized by the glamorous sequined mask have vanished. The mask is no longer a merry thing. Nothing is. As prophesied we are in for a time of troubles and maskings as never before, and it won’t be merry.
The debonair masked ballroom is on lockdown and virtual, soon to be set aflame by arsonist rioters, to become naught but embers. The waltzing couples are under house arrest aka quarantine, which strains relationships, especially between teasing transgender gays.
The title now must be “The Masked Ball And Chain,” composed of three metaphors (mask, masked ball, ball and chain). Thus titled, the new article cries out to be written and heeded.
Together the ball and chain and the COVID19 mask are symbolic of forced servitude mixed with preternatural hysteria, confusion, burgeoning clashing ideologies, and moral topsy turvy disorientation, into which are poured tons of alien toxic governances and gratuitously complex regulations all stirred together like a cauldron of steaming witches’ brew encircled by dancing demons. In a word, evil!
The soul of evil is dishonesty, lies, misrepresentation, deception passively or eagerly received, rewritten history, plastic surgery for gender change, artifact, day-dreams, and falling down prostrate before graven idols rather than desperate prayer upon the rock. Award-winning special effects. Familiar spirits and metaphysics. Higher politicized hermeneutics. Fakery. Fiction.
By comparison with the COVID19 mask, WWI gasmasks were heroic, courageous, and unifying, symbolic mainly of single mindedly winning a war against a relentless foe.
Once happily promenading grocery shoppers now affix masks with trembling fingers and willingly submit to mass identity forfeiture under penalty of law.
Even without a mask the very flesh may become a sham. Herod’s face was such a perfect mask that to the Magi he came across as ingenuously worshipful while inside he was murderously furious.
Alas, a mask is worn by a man being executed by a firing squad. It is death. Shrouds. A death mask.
Society is scared out of its jolly masked-ball-and-chain wits.
It all started with, of course, Satan disguised, let us say masked, as a shimmering serpent in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve he tricked, not treated. As the “Waltz King,” Satan wildly leads the Zoom End Times virtual orchestra of The Manic Masked Ball And Chain. The “Beautiful Blue Danube” has become a dirge.
By their sin in falling for Satan’s masked seduction, Adam and Eve whacked dead any manner of contact or communication with, or reconciliation to, God. Enchained mankind’s doom was sealed, utterly.
But at that very moment God does the unbelievable, even unimaginable. For God so loves even masked and ball-and-chained mankind that He sacrificed His only Son, Christ, – the one being in the universe with the key to our fetters.
Unbelievable, unimaginable indeed. But many, perhaps the majority, do not believe. Their hearts are so hopelessly masked and ball-and-chained that they disbelieve God’s very existence, or, as SDAs are wont to do, compartmentalize Him, which is to say cage Him up like a tamed lion in an golden ornate cage in a circus parade.
Oh, yes, believe, and accept Him, mankind must. As absolute as the enslavement by the mask and ball and chain must be our belief in God and Christ’s love and sacrifice for us. If this sounds like an altar call, it isn’t. There’s no organ playing in the background, only gagged speech of a masked grocery shopper, or the far away cacophony of a riot.
To present God’s true character of justice coupled with mercy, and to reopen personal communication with man, and to free man from his ball and chain, and to offer man eternal life and a closer relation with Himself and the Father than if he had never sinned, Christ willingly takes on the most horrid and humiliating of veils, mankind’s own nature, thus to experience infinitely worse torture than terminal COVID19 victims on respirators.
But to culminate the Satanic masked ball and chain will be Satan’s final and supreme disguise, deceiving if possible the very elect. This time not impersonating a serpent, or behind a devilishly cute Halloween mask although he is never more delighted than when he is thought merely comical, Satan will materialize as the promised glorious Christ Himself, complete with famous beard, glowing robes, blessings, and edicts that must be obeyed under penalty of death.
Whereupon, as Christ Himself had indeed promised, He shall return, this time in His full unveiled divine glory and power and righteousness, glorious beyond Satanic imitation, so glorious that the wicked, even if in welders’ masks, cannot endure it and run with open terrorized arms for cover and plead for avalanches to bury them and earthquakes to swallow them up. Their therapy dogs have panicked and scattered. All this is reality, not Hollywood special effects.
Meanwhile the righteous, who themselves have been made blindingly glorious in a twinkling of an eye, joyously greet the returning Christ and the end of Satan the inventor and impresario of lying masks, evil charades, doomed masquerades, and crazed maskiteers.
If now we see through masks darkly, then when unmasked, face to face. And then will God, Christ, and the Angels walk among us as in Eden, mingle with us, sup with us. If now we are unrecognizable even to ourselves behind masks, and without masks we know not our inner selves, then we shall know ourselves even as we are known.
The lake of fire will be a mass mask-burning. There will be no masks or tears spilling down over masks, in heaven. Freed of ball and chain, we shall flash like angels from planet to planet, proclaiming and witnessing to God’s unbelievable, unimaginable, redeeming love.
Dr. Kime was born in 1929, in Los Angeles, California.
Kime pursued dual careers in art (since childhood) and medicine (physician; specialties in internal medicine and pathology; clinical and academic). He studied the principles of art, chemistry of paint, and the works of master artists as assiduously as medicine. After retiring from pathology at Kettering Medical Center in 1994, Dr. Kime has concentrated on his art, producing portraits, seascapes and figural work mainly in oils, and urbanscapes predominantly in watercolor. Dr. Kime currently lives in Redlands, CA.