The World is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon

William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Came across this Wordsworth poem -- actually a friend mentioned it to me as we were driving down the street and I Googled it on my smart-phone. (How's that for irony?)

But as so often happens, the thing perfectly described my situation -- and the situation that I've found myself operating in for the past several months now. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

As we leave behind bright October and enter grey November, my thoughts are directed toward the changing of the seasons in both the geographical sense and the allegorical. I observed my forty-seventh birthday last weekend with a hike in the woods. Now don't get me wrong -- I love the woods and I love hiking. (I even have some pretty cool videos I took with my cellphone of Cam and Maddie and Abby playing in a mountain-top pond.) See here:




But there's a certain attenuated sadness -- not depression, not even really unhappiness -- that wreathes my thoughts as we head down into the bottom of the year. There's a sweetness to my sorrow, a sort of melancholy that I find myself not running from but embracing instead and occasionally even stealing glances at from my mind's eye.

Maybe it's just middle-age. Maybe it's regret for the things I haven't accomplished yet. Maybe it's the season. Hell, maybe it's just plain old exhaustion. I don't know.

Anyone have a cure for the malaise of middle age?

FBC

Ron Paul Inteview with Time Magazine

Saw this 9/17/2009 interview with Congressman Ron Paul -- the unsuccessful 2008 Republican presidential candidate.

Nightmares about the Coming Facist State

Wichita Kansas: early Sunday morning, August 8, 2009 --

I woke up in our hotel room this morning a little before 5:30 a.m. and couldn't make it back to sleep.

We've been attending the Midwest Catholic Family Conference -- an annual event in Wichita that draws Catholic speakers and families from all over the world. Great event, very positive. It's exciting to hear these apologists and speakers whose names and stories I've only read about up to now.

But one speaker's story has particularly affected me: Immaculee Ilibigaza -- a survivor of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Immaculee hid in a bathroom with 7 other women for weeks, while another tribe was hunting for people like her to hack them to death with machetes. At one point, a mob of 300 people entered the house where she was hidden, and despite searching the small house for 2 hours, Immaculee and the others were miraculously preserved through prayer God and spared the machete-wielding crowd. Immaculee wrote about the harrowing experience in a book entitled "Left to Tell".

Although her story is an uplifting one -- full of the power of grace and forgiveness -- it has kicked off the realization within me that what happened in Rwanda *could* happen here. For westerners, the horrors that occurred in 1994 -- when Rwanda was suddenly cast into a maelstrom of violent killing and tribal genocide is nearly inexplicable. We cannot imagine that anything could cause people to suddenly rise up and begin hacking their neighbors to death as quickly as if someone threw a light switch turning otherwise normal people into raging savages bent on an orgy of murder.

Actually, I guess we can imagine that -- we hear of violent murders on a daily basis, now that I think of it. No -- it's not that some people went berserk; it's that half of an entire nation did so at a moment's notice. That's the unbelievable part of this tragic story.

Part of the impact of Immaculee's story on me personally has to do with the setting. It was here in Wichita several years ago that some black men abducted two couples at gunpoint and forced them to commit various sexually degrading acts, before murdering them all. I can't help but think of this horrible incident whenever I think about Wichita. Man's capacity for atrocity apparently knows no limit. (Another troubling aspect of this horrific event was the fact that the mainstream national media gave this -- like so many other black-on-white crimes -- almost no coverage, so those who do not live in the area are very likely never to have heard of this shocking crime, unlike the Rwandan genocide of course.)

Anyway, so Immaculee's story has got me thinking about the ease and the quickness with which this country could descend into the same kind of ethnic and political violence. As the national debate - to the extent there even is one - continues over President Obama's alleged "healthcare reform" (read: "slide into Facism") we move ever deeper into a national morass in which the rabidly anti-life U.S. government will be able to decide who gets medical treatment and when.

I recently gave an interview (really just a soundbite) to a local news station in opposition to the healthcare reform proposals, arguing that it is extremely scary to contemplate giving the U.S. government the power over who lives and dies. This will amount to the government deciding who gets catastrophic medical care, and alternatively who is instead merely giving palliative care to ease their slide into death. Healthcare administered by the same "warm and fuzzy" bureaucrats that run the IRS, if you will.

Fortunately, there is a sizeable group of Americans who see the implications of handing over the routine power of life and death to this anti-Life government of radical 60's leftists. These people have been turning out to give their congressman and senators an earful in their districts -- where they are allowed to speak to their Capitol Hill masters, that is. (Some congressional office holders have moved to prevent public speaking at their appearances back home in their districts.)

In other places, groups of thuggish union members and community organizations like the corrupt to the core SEIU and ACORN have actually threatened and intimidated people from speaking out at these meetings. Elsewhere, others have likened these people to the Brownshirts -- Nazi-orchestrated civilians which were used to silence dissent in pre-war Germany. Seems to me that ACORN and the SEIU fit the brownshirt description nicely.

Being here in Wichita brings up better memories as well, though. Wichita was for a long time the home of Rich Mullins -- one of a very short list of men who have had a profound impact on my life and faith. Last evening after the family conference shut down, we drove over to Friends University where Rich attended and got his music degree, and nearby Newman University, whose St. Joseph Square is featured in Mullins' song, "Peace: A Communion Song from St. Joseph's Square."

One of the many things that Rich said that has stuck with me, was that governments are inherently anti-life, and we should not be surprised to realize this. At one point, Rich thanked God for Richard Nixon, because he said, Nixon made it impossible for us to think that governments would ever be anything but anti-Christian and anti-life. "Democracy is not bad politics," Rich further explained. "It's just bad math." "It's the mistake that believing that a thousand corrupt minds are better than one corrupt mind."

I don't think there are very many if any people out there in America today who imagine that this country could descend into the same bloody violence as what occurred in Rwanda in 1994. Surely, I must be nearly alone in fearing this. Some conservatives recognize the dangers that the Obama administration poses to our very lives, but overall the American people remain fat and happy. (I'm reminded of the line from the movie Animal House in which the dean tells the college student "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.") If that's not a perfect description for Americans in general, it's close, nonetheless.

But still -- this is the stuff of nightmares that keep me from sleep, these days.

God help us.

So SSAD: the Triumph of Homosexual Propaganda

Got a couple of Twitter posts in the past two days that were promoting a local "Gay Pride" festival. (I prefer the term/acronym SSAD -- Same Sex Attraction Disorder to "gay".) The first of the posts was passed on by a perfectly nice young lady who often promotes local festivals, events, etc. around Tulsa.

At first, I was a little taken aback -- you get to know people on a limited basis and probably don't know them as well as you think. (I know, I know -- it's the internet, what should I expect?)

I would have liked to ignore it, but I just couldn't. So I sent the young lady a direct message (for those of you who don't "Twitter", a direct message goes only to the recipient sort of like a regular text message) expressing my disappointment, and then un-followed her future public posts. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a neutral reply back thanking me for the feedback, via direct message. (The young lady in question is nothing if not polite, and she should be commended for showing such obvious class and grace.) But no discussion of the subject matter. I suspect that she sees "Gay Pride" like most secularists as a civil rights matter.

The next day I received more notices of the homosexual pride festival from other sources -- one of which was happily inviting people to visit the YWCA booth at the Gay Pride (yuck) festival. Think about that for a sec -- the YWCA, the Young Women's Christian Association is apparently promoting a festival which glorifies an objectively sinful behavior. These are the depths to which we've already sunk.

Why should this be? Much of it is the triumph of secularism over religious belief, and secularism seems to be a fruit of the poisonous tree of relativism. The late great Pope John Paul II decried this philosophy in his landmark encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), when he noted the threat that relativism poses to our society and culture at large.) Relativists are able to believe contradictory mutually exclusive propositions (both "A" and "Not A") simultaneously, without so much as a blink. Where people have lost the common sense understanding that there is such a thing as objective truth, the whole culture is at risk.

But it also seems to me that this has to do with a generational difference in the way homosexuality is viewed in society at large. The current generation -- a product of years of skillful and insidious propagandizing through the media -- has accepted that homosexuality is merely an acceptable alternative lifestyle, and not an objectively immoral or sinful (they seem to have little concept of the latter) behavior. That a whole generation could view something so objectively sinful as "normal" is testament to the success of 40 years of gay propaganda. But it's also proof that we have failed to publicly oppose it and speak out when confronted by it. Too often, we just "let it go" and silently cluck to ourselves.

But what to do about it?

I would suggest that we Catholics and Christians and even other non-Christian religions must necessarily push back. We must not be silent in the face of such things, but step out in courage to calmly and peacefully point out that such behavior is objectively wrong. We have to call attention to the fact that homosexuality is unnatural and a perversion which should draw pity, not pride. We cannot be silent. Lives are lost and a generation is the process of losing their very souls. At multiple apparitions in the 20th century, beginning with Fatima in 1917, the Virgin Mary has testified that more souls would be lost to sexual impurity (of which homosexuality is but one form, of course) than anything else.

The Progressives rely on intimidating Christians into silence. Don't let them do it, for we remain silent we are betraying Christ. Speak up and speak out against these sins.

"The Greatest Mistake of My Life" - Dr. Bernard Nathanson

The last surviving founding member of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League), recants his involvement and frankly admits lying to the American people and the judiciary about when life begins.

Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy!

I Am A Craft Brewer from I Am A Craft Brewer on Vimeo.

Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy! -- Benjamin Franklin

My latest favorite craft brew: Choc Beer's Pietro Piegari - an American Amber ale, brewed in Krebs, OK. http://chocbeer.com/choc_beer.html?#/beer/

Great stuff. Got six in my fridge as I speak, and I'm looking forward to this afternoon.

FBC

Pass the Salt: Fr. Jenkins arresting priests at Notre Dame