This recent message by a priest is well worth hearing. In the early days of the United States, political sermons by strongly evangelical ministers were the expected norm at the time of an important election. This November 2020 election is the most sobering, the most significant since 1860. Would that every preacher in every pulpit of faith in the nation would have the boldness, sensitivity and love of the Gospel truth to sound this timely alarm.
This next video is perhaps the clearest, most reasonable summation of the state of our union during this critical election period. It is 17 minutes of truth.
“Bad officials are elected by good citizens who don’t vote.”
-George Jean Nathan
In connection with the above two messages, here are some thoughts on the violence emerging in our land:
The eruption of violence is the definitive marker of the end of an age--the violent return to infancy. The toddler functions by violence. He bellows and wails and yells; for him, the immediate moment is all there is. He yanks his sibling’s toy away. “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.” He scribbles on walls; she tears pages from books. Toddlers bite, kick and scream. We are born thugs.
We only develop civil behavior by a careful training of character. Maturity is marked by an increasingly awakening to “otherness,” a perspective beyond oneself. As the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said: “Civilization is a thin veneer.” A consuming expansion of self absorption will quickly tear it asunder.
Violence is itself a language. Violence is a temper tantrum. Nothing must exist but endless “me.” There is no tomorrow for the violent. “I have no use for your successful business, so I will torch it, even if it produces the food that would have been my necessary food tomorrow. I live by immediacy, impetuosity, and my own indulgent “now.” I pound and pummel you to the ground; I go yet further and beat you to a pulp, because you don’t think exactly like I do, and I cannot live with that.”
As a culture, our thoughts have gone south. Without God, we are diseased. Violence is our inevitable, final, incurable wound.
Oh, let us return to our God,
to earnestly seek his ways,
and, again, lift high His praise.
