Monica Zuniga Bailey was always the confident, secure girl. Then she lost herself when a man drugged and raped her one night. He looked her in the face and told her, “You are alone.” And she believed it. She felt damaged. She went back home determined to bury the secret of what happened and accept the shame and guilt that she now felt. But though her name, Monica, means “alone,” she later learned that God’s name for her means, “worthy of love.” It was a message she could only accept if she could open up and reveal the truth of her story.
Satanic Imps & Jesuitic Arts
He too reveal’d, that candour bade mankind
Believe my haughty rival weak, and blind;
That all things wrong a ruling God denied;
Or a satanic imp that God implied
An imp, per chance of power and skill possest,
But not with justice, truth, or goodness blest.
Doctrines divine! would men their force receive,
And live to Satan’s glory, as believe.
Nor these alone: from every class of man,
I gain’d new aids to build the darling plan.
But chief his favorite class, his priests, I won,
To undermine his cause, and prop my own.
Here Jesuitic art its frauds combin’d
To draw ten thousand cobwebs o’er the mind.
In poisoned toils the flutterer to inclose,
And fix, with venom’d fangs, eternal woes.
On sceptic dross they stamp’d heavens image bright,
And nam’d their will a wisp, immortal light,
Thro’ moors, and fens the sightless wanderer led,
‘Till down he plung’d, ingulph’d among the dead.
To life, Socinus here his millions drew,
In ways, the art of Heaven conceal’d from view,
Undeified the world’s almighty trust,
And lower’d eternity’s great sire to dust.
He taught, O first of men! the Son of God,
Who hung the globe, and stretch’d the heavens abroad,
Spoke into life the sun’s supernal fire,
And mov’d to harmony the flaming choir,
Who in his hand immensity insolds,
And angels, worlds, and suns, and heavens, upholds,
Is — what? a worm, on far creation’s limb,
A minim, in intelligence extreme.
O wondrous gospel, where such doctrines rise!
Discoveries wondrous of most wondrous eyes!
Timothy Dwight: The Triumph of Infidelity (1788)
Light and Gay Voltaire
To France I posted, on the wings of air,
And fir’d the labors of the gay Voltaire.
He, light and gay, o’er learning’s surface flew,
And prov’d all things at option, false or true.
The gospel’s truths he saw were airy dreams,
The shades of nonsense, and the whims of whims.
Before his face no Jew could tell what past;
Or know the right from left, the first from last;
Conjecture where his native Salem stood,
Or find, if Jordan had a bank, or flood.
The Greeks, and Romans, never truth descried;
But always (when they proved the gospel) lied.
He, he alone, the blest retreat had smelt,
The Well, where long with frogs, the goddess dwelt;
In China dug, at Chihohamti’s call,
And curb’d with bricks, the refuse of his wall.
There, mid a realm of cheat, a world of lies,
Where alter’d nature wears one great disguise,
Where shrunk, mishapen bodies mock the eye,
And shrivell’d souls the power of thought deny,
Mid idiot Mandarins, and baby Kings,
And dwarf Philosophers, in leading-strings,
Mid senseless votaries of less senseless Fo,
Wretches who nothing even seem’d to know,
Bonzes, with souls more naked than their skin,
All brute without, and more than brute within,
From Europe’s rougher sons the goddess shrunk,
Tripp’d in her iron shoes, and sail’d her junk.
Nice, pretty, wondrous stories there she told,
Of empires, forty thousand ages old,
Of Tohi, born with rainbows round his nose,
Lao’s long day — Ginseng alchymic dose —
Stories, at which all Behmen’s dreams awake,
Start into truth, and sense and virtue speak;
To which, all, lisping children e’er began
With, ” At a time, ” or ” Once there was a man, ”
Is reason, truth, and fact; and sanctioned clear
With heaven’s own voice, or proof of eye and ear.
Timothy Dwight: The Triumph of Infidelity (1788)
She Got Very High
“I knew it was over. And I saw my family. I saw my funeral, and I was in the coffin …
and they were saying, ‘She was just a prostitute.’”
Feeling unloved by her father and used by a boyfriend, Annie Lobert yearned inside for the power to exact revenge over men. It overrode any caution in her life and within a short time she was selling her body, gaining the money she thought was her answer to a better life.
It was a lie. The money instead went to her violent pimp and for many years her world descended into a hell filled with prostitution, cancer, drug addiction and no future. Yet when she cried out to God in her darkest and most dangerous moment, hope arrived to give her a second chance.
CONNECT/HOOK 