Some thoughts...

The sun is shining this morning but they say that rain and snow are on the way. So I'll take advantage of the moments to write a bit about the days past and those to come.

On the longest scale of things I remain, like Christianity, optimistic. The shining city of God with the beauty and purity of a bride remains within my sight and the political junkie riding the emotional roller coaster with every newscast has long ago slipped away into the night. I slept well on November 7th and last night as well.

I'm not naive or locked in some pious delusion. I read the papers and know it's a troubled world. I'm tempted sometimes, like everyone else, to seek refuge, to hide away, to go to some far away place where the world can't get at me but I know it's no use. I feel bombarded sometimes and sometimes I even envy those who are already asleep in the Lord. But that never makes what is here and now less then what it is and somehow I and we have been providentially ordered to be in this time and place.

I know, too, that the world has always been troubled. It is our lot since the first broken day of exile from Eden and only the technology, and not the human propensities, have changed. The Romans would have used tanks if they had them and the Babylonians would've have had porno movies in hotels if they could. The biggest difference, I suppose, is that in our modern media age we are force fed a bigger portion of it all and find less and less of what is good and right and pure in the cultural hog wallow.

As the larger and superficial supports in this society that have propped our vision of the world up in at least some lip service sort of way are weakening and collapsing I wonder if God is asking us a simple but profound question in all of this. "Do you believe in me?"

Sometimes all the passing things in which we have placed our hope need to be taken away, or at least threatened, before we see what matters most. And in thier departure we see ourselves as we really are and whether what we claim to believe really matters or was all just fluff.

The ascetics knew this, those holy people of long ago who left the world to pursue God. And perhaps this time, this epoch of history, is a time of asceticism for the Church, a time when God is making for us the choice the desert fathers and mothers made for themselves, and bringing us into the wilderness so we, stripped of everything else, have only God and in realizing that come to understand that we have everything we need, aways did.

Just a thought from a sinner pondering things to vast for him to understand.