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Happy Easter!!!
“… dying he has destroyed our death, and rising her has restored our life.”
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There is no human life on earth that is not subject to sin and death. Sin fractures relationships with others and indeed fragments our very self. Death is “that ubiquitous reaper.” But Christ changes that default setting that bedevils man and woman, child and adult.
Christ on the Cross redeems each of us from sin and neuters the dread of death, the pain of this mortal exodus. In Christ we are upright in soul and being – sin does not imprison and death does not threaten.
In Christ we have a whole new existence – human wholeness, spiritual expanse, contentment, strength, truth, humility, certainty amid the unknown, community, friendship everlasting. In Christ, all troubles teach and insight and wisdom abounds, patience too.
In Christ, love prevails as love is practiced in all manner of life’s encounters.
Imagine a culture in which consciousness of Christ was for each of us – the substance of each daily transaction, each moment, each idle hour, each day month after month, year after year. Imagine Western Civilization restored to its formative reality – Imagine America and Americans at their historic best – humble, compassionate, brave, sacrificial, honorable, hardworking, strong, independent, dignified, sober, gentle, just, forgiving, confident, grateful for each day and each breath, faithful and kind.
The worm, Friends, is turning. We have gone too long divided, disgruntled, angry, joyless, self-serving and without Christ.
The truth of the matter is quite simple – we need not “fundamentally alter America.” Those who think this are mistaken, ignorant of many things – and in need of faith. For them we might pray.
Shalom.
He, the eternal, dwells concealed in the heart of all beings. Though himself devoid of all senses, he is the illuminator of all the senses, the source of their powers.
The Mahanirvana Tantra, 6th Century B.C.
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The Tantra records the mystical practices of Hindus and Buddhists. The above, dating back 600 years before the birth of Christ, records the view that God dwells in each of us.
When you live your daily life do you think of God dwelling within you?
Do you perceive that others might carry that belief? Does the demeanor or actions of others so suggest this?
The idea of an indwelling God has been spoken of and written about throughout the Ages. I give an illustration. One finds this in the Svetasvatara Upanishad of 400 B.C., in Ovid’s Fasti written in 5 A.D., in Epictetus’s Discourses in 110 A.D., in Plotinus’s Ennead, Ephraim the Syrian’s view, in the works of Meister Eckart in the 13th Century, the words of St. John of the Cross in the 16th Century, in the works of St. Francis de Sales in the 17th Century and Baruch Spinoza in the same Century, in Emerson and Huxley, Buber and Gandhi, etc.
The indwellingness of God has been common wisdom for centuries, but how much evidence of this do you see among men and women today?
The notion of God within humbles the sane person … and we could use a large dose of humility today. All life is made far more charitable and kind by humility of self as manifest in contact with others. Humility is the proper disposition for those who realize that God dwells with me and thou.
Abandoning the indwelling God does not erase God’s presence in us. Rather it just submits God to the indignity of our behavior. In this, we are like a person with a house guest who speaks not a word to the visitor, nor does he feed him, or offer him a place to sleep or to wash his face. Such a “host” says neither “Hello,” nor “Goodbye” – and never wishes him “God’s speed.”
Are you such a host of the Divine Creator?
Shalom.
Then they set out along the black top in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.
Cormac McCarthy, in The Road
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McCarthy writes of a father and his most beloved son who walk under the grayest of skies in a burned out and broken America. It is both a compelling book and extraordinary movie. In both I am struck by the love of the father for the son and the son for the father, and by the grayness of the sky amid the ruin. The latter reminds me of the verbal and video landscape of the present days where hostility is thick as fog and division seems the only objective of the public voices we hear and where each day brings stories of death, cruelty, hatred and the commentaries of the C- and D+ scribes and talking heads whose range of thought is a tad lower than that of a carnival barker.
In a most extraordinary land darkness has descended. What was once one is now fragmented into many bruised parts .
He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. He tried to remember the dream but could not. All that was left was the feeling of it … he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was his own ashes.
This father like me had lived a dream – a dream in better times. I was conceived when the Second World War was near its triumphant end. My childhood was spent on a street of veterans and their families – remarkable men and women whose childhood commenced in the Great Depression and turned then to World War – its millions dead, others murdered in Stalin’s gulag.
How does one speak of what we had and lost? How does one make that the known experience of an adult son? Give him the optimism purpose and meaning I, poor as we were, knew so well?
How do my grandson or my granddaughter gain what had been, but now is so damaged? How can my ashes live to sign their forehead?
The Road. Where this father and son had the dark shadow and penetrating cold of a dying orb – they at least had silence. We have the unstoppable voices and words of those whose lips bring darkness and cold. They are now our dismal cover.
“You have to carry the fire … It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”
So says the father to the son. So say I to you, this day.
Shalom.
News as Soap Opera – This is where we are in a superficial mass communication, digitized social media culture. We interview people with no achievement or proclaim and, in doing so, cannot distinguish people of substance from people who have no particular accomplishment. We are more soap opera than not. We can no longer tell the difference between depth and shallow, or what is substantive and what is not. A real astonishing decline.
I define evil, then, as the exercise of political power – – that is, the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion – – in order to avoid extending one’s self for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth. Ordinary laziness is non-love; evil is anti-love.
M. Scott Peck, M.D.
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Dr. Peck, of course, wrote a marvelous short book about evil (People of the Lie) in which he noted that lying is evidence of evil. Peck observes that evil is built on lies.
Peck’s above words (that of a noted Psychiatrist) are worth thinking about with what we face today: the questionable conduct of high-ranking people in the FBI and Justice Department and, seemingly, in the intelligence community. Yes, we see a collective partisan interest in using their positions politically – in order to destroy a candidate for President and, once elected, the man himself.
Such conduct as we see is ripe with lies. For Peck – this is evidence of evil.
Notice that in Peck’s words he says that those who pursue evil do so rather than extend themselves to grow spiritually – in effect, to mature and take on a healthy wholeness.
The root of evil is, it seems, faithlessness – a disregard for God.
When you think about it – he is describing (in the extreme) people like Stalin, Hitler, Mao and others – those who are godless and treacherously sick. Yet, people as people can easily submit to lying and evil.
That said, Peck reminds us that evil is anti-love. Yes, hostility to God.
What an indictment he has made. Where do our present miscreants fall?
We live in times that are fundamentally challenging. They put us to the task of asking: Who are we? And, what have we become? And, who dared corrupt us this way? What shall we do to those who destroy what is good? Shall we all return to faith, to Truth and to God?
Shalom.
“The works I do in my Father’s name testify to me. But you do not believe, because you are not my sheep.”
Jn 10: 25, 26
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These are the words Jesus spoke to Jews in Jerusalem at the Temple. Let’s put them in today’s context.
Yesterday a young man in Toronto drove a van down the sidewalk and killed ten people and seriously injured more. A few days ago in Nashville, Tennessee, a young man entered a restaurant early in the morning and shot and killed four patrons and injured others. Each young man had a history of mental health problems.
These two incidents are reminders of the Parkland, Florida, school shootings that took the lives of 17 students. That young man also has a history of mental illness. In that case, the public authorities totally failed to address the needs of that very troubled young man.
” … you do not believe, because you are not my sheep …”
The success of Alcoholics Anonymous is dependent on recognition of the existence of God (“a higher power’) and on our limitations to address our problems as if we are that “higher power.”
It seems to me that the constant signs of our neglect of those in need and the violent actions of those who (in their deranged state) randomly kill innocent people is an indication of our neglect of our own spiritual needs.
I think too of the two lesbian women who adopted six foster care children and retained custody of those children while having had run afoul of child welfare officials in three states. As you recall these two women drove a vehicle (with the children in it) off a California cliff to their collective deaths 100 feet below.
We are a troubled nation because we have forsaken belief … because we have neglected our full health, our need for spiritual sustenance.
Indeed we live like we are each a god unto our self. We are, in this regard, absolutely NOT helped by all the discontented “special pleaders” in politics and particularly the angry godless voices on the Left who create division and disorder and their counterparts in the Democrat Party in the U.S. Congress, the federal bureaucracy and in state and local government. Yes, godless voices breed sickness and hostility.
Let’s be honest, we awake each day to read or hear about one or more horrific accounts of murder, child abuse, infanticide, abhorrent sexual assaults, or some form of human deprivation that is beyond our imagination or understanding … and we see day after day the utter failure of authorities to do much of anything about these matters.
You know I recall the hubris of Mr. Obama who boasted about fundamentally transforming America and that no one seemed ever to ask in what form this change might take, nor did anyone dare to say to him: “Hey, pal, you’re NOT God and you have accomplished nothing thus far in your life.”
The point to be made? Man is not God. Heck, we are not now even clearly showing that we are the Shepherd’s sheep.
Might be time to believe again. But do we have it in us to be humble as we once were?
Shalom.
Warped Self-interest – No Democrat Senators on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted in favor Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State. They did so largely to deprive President Trump the person he wanted in that position.
Mr. Pompeo, a former Congressman and Director of the C.I.A., graduated first in his class at West Point and first in his class at Harvard Law School. He has had both a successful military career and an excellent business career in which he started (as I recall) two successful businesses.
When you think that we have had recently both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry as Secretary of State (neither of them who achieved any particular success in their lifetime), it shows you that Democrats always put their own interests before the interests of the Nation and its people. Shameful.
Listen, O my people, to my instruction; incline your ears to the words of my mouth … tell to the generation to come the praises of the Lord … He commended our fathers that they should teach them to their children … even the children yet to be born that they might arise and tell them to their children … (Emphasis added.)
Psalm 78: 1, 4, 5, 6
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I have written lately of our need to separate from the pagan, secular culture and turn away from the public discourse for it is destructive and devoid of God.
Yet, turning away is not enough. We must turn to God, His words and instructions – to the good and faithful ways of His Prophets and Saints – His Disciples and Teachers.
We live in serious times, in a time of great deception and destruction whereby we jeopardize our nation and its legacy, and that of Western Civilization.
Our faith, beliefs and ways of living are attacked by those without God. Yes, we are attacked by those who occupy positions of authority and command public presence.
We have failed to teach our children well. We have been silent when we should have spoken. Our silence has allowed evil and division to take root.
It is fair to say that we have not lived in more serious times than these.
I ask, then: do you read Scripture each day? Do you grow in holiness? Do you teach your children? Do you stand in opposition to what is godless? Stand against even family members who deny God and live in opposition to what is right and good and just?
This is a time of fundamental challenge. Where do you stand today?
Shalom.
Men and Boys. The state of men and boys is not good. Men have more suicides than women. Mortality among working class men shows men are dying younger than they once did. Institutions like schools thwart the masculine aspects of young boys. White Men are assumed to have a privilege and held suspect for it. It is no surprise that police officers are targeted, hunted, killed regularly.
That said, we do not own this reality and its origin.
Its origin is explained in no small part by the division between men and women that Feminism has promoted. Feminism, of course, is a simple variation of Marxist dialectic – that is, the notion that one must have an enemy to oppose in order to gain power.
Yes, Feminism has been at war with men for several decades.
Funny thing – having reduced men, one wonders how Whoppi Goldberg (62) and Joy Behar (75) will defend us from foreign enemies now that 71 percent of young men subject for military service are disqualified by reason of intellectual deficit, addictions, criminal records and health (obesity and mental health issues among them).
To the barricades Joy – to the barricades Whoppi!!! What a mess the Left has made!
