Addressing Privilege and Falling Through Cracks

 I am writing this in a very frustrated mood today - I have been facing a serious issue that I seem to be hitting dead ends with, and to be honest it is tiring me out.  Going through this though has made me think about some things, and I have a few thoughts to share today. This post will be a little different, and could be unpredictable, so please bear with me as I sort through my thoughts and organize them coherently.

Today, the culture of "wokeness" that pervades society has an awful lot to say about something called "White privilege," and it merits attention.  What is "White privilege" anyway?  It seems no one has a clear definition of what it is other than just "White people are evil, racist, and they have privilege," and that is it.  When I hear someone go off on that (and in 99.9% of the cases, the rant comes from a fairly well-off White liberal) I start thinking back to my childhood.  I grew up in a small, poor West Virginia town, and my parents divorced when I was very young and I was raised by a single mother.  When we weren't shuffling back and forth between relatives (one year, I believe I went to four schools in one year), we lived in a town which was made up of many people just like us but some were in worse circumstances than I was.  Although the tiny town I lived in was 100% White, none of us were rich tycoons by any stretch.  Many of the kids in town had alcoholic parents, many were abused, some of them had emotional and social issues that hindered their progress in school and even in jobs later, and there were many of us kids who had nights where our dinner was either a bag of potato chips (if we were lucky!) or at one point for me even having to raid the neighbor's gardens to get fresh corn, green tomatoes, cabbage, and other vegetables just to eat that day.  On some nights, dinners consisted of just fried cabbage or potatoes and drop biscuits I learned to make at a young age. This was the days before the internet too, and in my own house all the entertainment I had was a radio, and the Sunday night program of vintage big band music on WBT-AM out of Charlotte, NC, was a major event.  And, I read a lot - there was nothing better to do, but I had access to books at least.  Late, when life got a little better, some of the neighborhood kids I was friends with would come over and we would play Yahtzee or Uno in my room while eating fried chicken nuggets and listening to my modest but nice record collection I was amassing from the local junk store in the nearby town of Rio.  Life was simple, but we made it work, but it was not in any way "privileged" at all for any of us.  

I did decently in school, and over the years getting involved in church and playing in my high school band was my social life, and eventually I did graduate and went off to college.  In the ensuing 30 or so years after, I earned three degrees, one vocational certificate as a paralegal, and a postgraduate certificate at the halfway point of my doctoral program.  Yet, I faced issues over the years too - despite having over 26 years of work experience and a very decent education I worked hard to get, I find myself still being passed over for jobs I should be perfect for, and that flusters me.  My question to the idiots who cry about "White privilege" all the time is this - if I am so damned "privileged," then why am I not getting opportunities I earned??  Even at brief times when I have had to resort to public assistance, I was told I "made too much income" (despite the fact I wasn't pulling in anything at that point) to qualify for help - where is my so-called "privilege" there??  After a while, I began taking note of some things, and a few observations came to mind I will get into now.

Does an "American Dream" really exist, and if so, who can achieve it?  I was reading on a site called Qora several threads on the topic of individuals who moved away from the US.  Many of them were middle-aged men, and there are several things that were recurring in each of their conversations that got my attention.

1. The over-regulation and over-taxation of everything - you cannot even pass gas in some places unless you have a permit to do so. Then you get charged an exorbitant amount for the permits. 

2.  The lack of work - many of these individuals are highly qualified and represent a large diversity of backgrounds ranging from blue-collar professionals to Ph.Ds. Yet. they get passed over for jobs they should be a perfect fit for.  You meet one educational or occupational hurdle and are still told it isn't enough. 

3. Ridiculous cost of living - Many of these individuals correctly pointed out that they are essentially being priced out of existence where they live.  People with $40K/year salaries are living hand-to-mouth. 

4. Lack of safety - many individuals in these discussions lament (rightly) that they cannot even go to a gas station without the risk of being mugged or murdered.

5. Lack of community - another complaint that came up is how many of us don't even know who our neighbors are, and how disconnected many families even are these days.

These are just five things I observed, but there were probably even more as I didn't have a chance to read every discussion post on the topic.  But, these five are enough - some Americans are starting to see that there is a more reasonable cost of living, and that their skills and talents are more appreciated elsewhere.  The COL (cost of living) ratio to the GAI (gross annual income) of many people are making it impossible to meet basic needs for many Americans, and with rich Democrats in power, it is getting worse.  While American citizens are forced to pay a lot of exorbitant costs for even basic necessities, the bureaucrats in many communities in the US are rolling out the red carpet for illegal aliens to come in totally unvetted.  I have to show an ID to just get Sterno for my fondue, but an illegal alien gets a luxury hotel, a $5000 debit card, and a bunch of other perks that hard-working Americans are paying through the nose for while they struggle with the choice to either keep a roof over their heads or eat dinner that night.  And, as I mentioned the other day about student loan forgiveness, both major parties are clueless as to what that even means - the Democrats want to extend that to everyone, while the Republicans often want to deny it to everyone.  Again, here is a thought - why not give it to those who actually need it, and maybe hit the universities with tuition caps so they don't charge an exorbitant amount for degrees??  Also, if students really work their butts off studying for those degrees, why aren't they rewarded with career opportunities after they graduate??  If that were the case, student loan debt would not be an issue, would it?  However, the state of both education and Corporate America is such that even if someone achieves a milestone, they want more, and more, and more...is all that extra nonsense even necessary for most jobs?? If we took care of those pivotal issues that many college graduates and mid-career professionals complain about, perhaps it would solve the problem.  And, that leads to another serious issue I have grown somewhat vocal about recently.

Part of this fictional "American Dream" should be property ownership.  Yet, a majority of people cannot afford to buy a house, and need to rent their homes - I am one of those.  Yet, in some states, such as Maryland, the state and local governments are disproportionately manned by rich realtors who don't understand what it is to have to rent a home just to have a roof over their heads.  Because of that, rich realtors tend to favor unlimited rent ceilings that make it almost impossible for many people to keep their homes.  This is an area which self-designated "conservative Republicans" fail in miserably, as they tend to favor rich realtors over struggling families, so they are against what are called "rent caps."  A "rent cap" sets a limit as to how much a landlord can increase rent costs on a tenant, and unfortunately here in Maryland many localities don't have caps so the rents can be extremely expensive.  That has been an issue I have personally experienced over the past couple of years, and frankly, it is a stress I don't need personally.  There are ways to bring this COL down to a more manageable level, and I think the key to that is broadening representation in local and state governments to include people who are affected by these things. 

In short, I am disappointed in our country - we have failed in so many ways and now I am even entertaining maybe moving to a more affordable place and getting the hell out of here.  I am a native son of America, and I love what it used to be, but in all honesty what it is becoming sickens me.  Maybe it is time to dissolve the union as it is and maybe start over with a smaller nation with far less bureaucracy.  It is one reason why I am also a Monarchist as well as paying attention to bioregional theories such as Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America.  The "Empire" is failing because it was never meant to be an empire to begin with - only permanent restructuring and change will reverse that.  Thank you for allowing me to share this week. 

Addressing Social Ills

 I have been more prolific in my writing this week than I usually am, and that is because I have been reflecting on a lot. A couple of days ago, I was at the supermarket, and after doing my shopping and leaving the store, I noticed a young man sitting just adjacent to the exit on the ground.  He had what looked like all his belongings piled next to him, and the boy looked as if he was either in his late teens or early 20s.  We all see the panhandlers and people with signs at shopping centers and on street corners - many of them we just casually ignore, as there are a fair amount of scammers who are doing this as a career choice and not because of any urgent need.  This kid, however, was different - he did not look as if he deserved to be there.  He had a very intelligent face, and a smile despite his situation, and to be honest the image of him I had in my mind really struck at the center of my soul - I actually felt really bad for that poor kid.  He didn't belong there and was more than likely forced because of circumstances beyond his control.  And, he was just too young to be like that, which really pierced my soul.  Due to my own situation (I have a lot of struggles myself right now I won't get into) I was unable to help him in any way, but I could do one thing - pray for him.  And, I really hope that young man does get a break, because I believe he deserves it.  I don't know his name, and may not ever see him again, but I do pray the best for him.  And, seeing that got my thoughts going as to a few things that have been on my mind for a long time. 

I am both a fiscal and social conservative, and a very strong one at that.  And, while I do share many things with the conservative Republicans, I cannot be a Republican by choice because I don't believe that political party is as conservative as many think it is.  Politically, I am actually a Monarchist, and would welcome an heir to the Hapsburgs or something being coronated as king of our nation, similar in many respects to the fictional scenario my good friend Charles Coloumbe created in his insightful book Star Spangled Crown.  There are many issues I significantly differ with Republican talking points on, and I want to address a few of those now.  However, in all fairness, I think the average conservative Republican voter may actually have more in common with me than with, say, Mitch McConnell or Marjory Taylor-Greene.  Therefore, on a couple of specific issues, I want to address these differences I have with many of our elected officials, in particular those who profess to be politically conservative.

One of the big issues which is front-and-center of political discourse right now is student loan forgiveness.  In all honesty, it is one of the few things the Democrats have that actually would be beneficial to many of us who do have student loans.  The Republican opposition to this has some validity, but also many of the staunchest opponents of it are out of touch with the reality of what an issue this really is for many of us.  Likewise, the Democrats have a good idea in theory, but they go way too far in what they propose to implement.  A middle ground on this is essential.  Having almost $200K in student loan debt myself, this does directly affect me, and what I am noticing on many of the talking points on both sides of this issue is that they miss some important facts.  As a Gen-Xer, we were encouraged to go to college to get an advanced degree, and it was supposed to help our work prospects.  Many of us got those degrees, and then Corporate America told us we still lacked what they wanted and we had to do more education.  So, many did that, and still it wasn't enough.  So, many well-intentioned people woke up one day and realized they had hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans but they were not seeing the fruits of all that effort.  Many of these people are not lazy - it takes a lot of work to earn a degree, and many of us have excelled.  Also, the average student borrower I don't believe is wanting to be an intentional burden on the system - they are just trying to make a better life for themselves, because in the words of the old School House Rock ditty, "knowledge is power," or at least it's supposed to be.   Should these people be denied relief just like they are being passed over for opportunities they are more than qualified for?  I ask the Republicans in particular who oppose student loan forgiveness that question. However, there are legitimate issues with universal student loan forgiveness that the Democrats didn't think through fully when they touted it, and this is where the problem lies.  Let me tackle a few of those now. 

Recently, university education has been declining in value - the exorbitant tuition rates in many prestigious universities are being utilized to finance weird ideas and instruction.  For example, take a look at the pro-Hamas protests happening on the campuses of prestigious schools like Columbia and Yale.  These kids, who are getting fully-funded Federal aid for their education, are literally chanting "death to America" and are assaulting Jews, Catholics, and others because they are so indoctrinated with hatred and bad interpretations of history that they are essentially educated fools. In my opinion, students like that don't even deserve the honor of being students, because many of them are spoiled, privileged White kids with too much time on their hands and they would rather be supporting actual terrorism than actually trying to apply themselves to the education that many of them are being paid thousands of dollars to receive.  They have their Palestinian and "gay pride" flags, their pierced noses, their flourescent green and purple hair, and some are dudes dressed up like girls and vice versa.  They get violent with people who disagree with them, and many of them are so strung out on marijuana and other substances that they barely attend classes.  This is one thing some Republican officials see that makes them really skeptical of total student loan forgiveness, and that is a valid concern.  If these kids are to go to school and get financial aid, they need to be vetted in some way - they need to maintain an acceptable minimum GPA, they need to actually attend the classes they are registered for, and in all honesty, I would say implement a comprehensive evaluation at the end of their programs to gauge what they actually learned.  If they cannot demonstrate these basic things, then they should be denied student loans in the first place and then forced to pay whatever they did receive back in a certain amount of time. If they are foreign students on a student visa, they should not be getting taxpayer-subsidized aid at all, as their own governments should be taking care of them.  Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, none of this would have been necessary as the levels of entitlement were not there like they are in this generation now.  So, on this, I say there should be absolutely stricter standards for receiving Federal aid, and if we did that perhaps a more focused student population could really be educated at our universities in this country.  And, that now leads to a related issue.

The price of tuition at many higher-profile universities has been astronomical, and unfortunately the fault of this is lenient Federal student loans.  The universities make a killing off this, and they have intentionally inflated their tuitions to assure the maximum benefit.  A similar thing happens in the rental markets in many states such as Maryland - the rental laws favor oftentimes the property owners over tenants who have to lease homes, and they have no rent increase regulations (called rent caps) in place to make sure affordable housing is accessible to everyone.  Universities (especially the so-called "Ivy Leagues," which frankly are overrated these days) do the same thing with tuition prices.  By jacking up university tuitions, it forces many students who otherwise would not be able to attend college to borrow huge amounts of money just to stay enrolled, and that is a scandal.  So, then students graduate with this huge debt, but then they are not given the job they hoped to have with this education.  It is perhaps time to call into practice an accountability system for universities to disclose the reasons for their tuition rates, and excessive rates need to be eliminated.  Then, the career counseling centers of said universities should take a more active role in helping graduates get the jobs they deserved on par with the education they received.  Likewise, curriculums need to be evaluated, as too many professors act more like activists than educators, and thus is diminishes the quality of the education received.  If some things were instituted like that, it would make student loans a less volatile issue in public discourse.  That is just one man's humble opinion though.  

Another aspect of student loan forgiveness entails those who have been out of school for years but they have personal struggles financially.  These are middle-aged people who, despite their achievements, are being passed over for career opportunities and often have to resort to food stamps, Section 8 housing, and other government programs just to survive.  In addition to struggling to just make their rent or mortgage payments every month, they also have to face a huge financial burden of their student loans from 20+ years in the past for an education which they are not being recognized for.  This is a scandal, but thankfully not all is lost.  Aside from the recent student loan forgiveness proposals, there is a good Federal program called IBR, or Income-Based Repayment.  Once a borrower's financial situation is evaluated, an affordable solution is put in place to help them pay their liability, and in many cases a few years of consistent payments can get them a permanent forgiveness of their loans.  Fortunately, I don't hear a lot of opposition to this on either side, and it is a good program to have.  And, in a sense, it is actually loan forgiveness.  In many cases, IBR payments are even $0 per month, and that is even a better situation for a borrower that may be really down on their luck - a friend of mine who ended up in a homeless shelter despite doing very well in college and also being a Navy veteran was recently blessed in this way, and she deserved that.  And, that leads to my point about student loan forgiveness.

I am of course for student loan forgiveness, as it would be a personal benefit for me.  But, it doesn't need to be a universal program that forgives everyone's student loans.  For instance, if you are a doctor, lawyer, or a corporate executive making hundreds of thousands annually in take-home pay, you are in a position where you are able to pay your loans, and you should accept that responsibility.  Forgiveness programs should never extend to those individuals.  Likewise, if you screwed off in college as a student, didn't apply yourself, and you got a job based on nepotism or affirmative action rather than the merit of your skillset, you can pay for yourself too - you don't deserve benefits.  The ones who deserve to have these benefits are the hard-working underemployed or unemployed graduates who despite all their achievement and personal value are denied opportunities.  They are not being paid the salaries they deserve nor are they even taken seriously for what they can bring to the table.  Loan forgiveness should be an option for them.  This is why although Biden's idea for student loan debt cancellation is probably the only decent thing he is doing, but it needs some kinks worked out in order to make it more feasible and less of a burden on the American taxpayer.  Not only that, but students at community colleges, vo-tech schools, and apprenticeships should be eligible for other benefits as well - while they are not traditional university programs, they do serve a more practical purpose and promising talent among students in those schools needs to be recognized and rewarded.  That means other funding options besides loans should be implemented.  If Biden had half a brain, maybe he could have figured this out, and if the Republicans were not so against everything, they could actually listen to the concerns of real people and perhaps a solution could be reached.  It remains to be seen whether or not this proposal would be seriously considered, so we wait.

There are other good ideas that could be implemented - homelessness could be resolved in many cities if they would allow private benefactors to provide housing - the tiny house idea is a wonderful solution - as well as not punishing good-hearted individuals who are trying to help these people.  In the latter category, look at what a crooked local (and Democrat) politician named Jack Siler did to a good-hearted old man named Arnold Abbott in Florida a few years back.  Abbott had a vocation to provide hot meals for homeless people, but the crook Siler punished him for it with fines and I believe even jail.  That is ridiculous, especially when Democrats like him take over luxury hotels to house illegal immigrants in New York while many veterans and other American citizens are forced onto the streets.  Republicans are not much better, as a sort of quasi-Malthusian mindset possesses them which presupposes that every homeless person is a worthless bum and thus needs to be eradicated from society.  In reality, no two homeless people are the same - like that kid in the supermarket I saw yesterday, they often don't deserve to be homeless yet they are due to the craziness of American society.  And, both sides are equally at fault for different reasons.  That must change.  

Any rate, those are some thoughts today, and I may expand on this later as much more could be said.  Have a good remainder of your week, and see you next time. 

The Most Familiar Sin

 I wasn't actually planning on a second writing this week, but I got an urge to do this based on some sudden inspiration.  This is a mini Bible study of sorts, as it does deal with a particular theological issue, and it does merit some attention.  Therefore, let's settle in and learn a new perspective on something so familiar we often take it for granted. 

The Ten Commandments (also known as the Decalogue) is one of the "Four Pillars" of Catholic faith. It is so important that the Catechism of the Catholic Church has 25% of its content devoted to it.  Many of us know these by heart, and in all honesty, they are just common-sense moral law that does benefit us if it is followed.  One of the most interesting of these commands is found in Exodus 20:16, and it is commandment that forbids "bearing false witness."  Now, if you grew up as I did, you more than likely have the understanding that this is talking about lying.  While telling lies is definitely a sin and not a good thing to get into, in reality this command has more context than that interpretation, and this is where we are going now. 

First, let us look at the verse in its full context - the whole sentence is "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor."  A regular old lie doesn't have to be directed against anyone else - many of us are guilty at some point of lying about ourselves, either by bragging about things we didn't accomplish or denying some other misdoing we may be guilty of.  And, yes, we all have done that whether we admit it or not.  It is still wrong, but it doesn't quite meet the criteria of "false witness" against anyone else.  So, what does it mean then?  Let us unpack this a little.

The Decalogue consists of two sets of guidelines/commands.  Five are directed toward God, and the remaining five are directed toward how we relate to one another.  This is why Jesus expanded the Shm'a of Jewish faith in such a way as to more or less be inclusive of the entirety of the Decalogue.  We see that in his exchange in Matthew 22:36, when I believe he was doing a teaching moment with his disciples. One of them asked him in verse 36 what the greatest commandment was, and he answers in verse 37 with the Shm'a - "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind." He calls this in verse 38 the first and greatest commandment.  But, then in verse 39 he adds something else - "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Jesus was not proposing anything radical here, but rather he gave a very succinct summary of the Decalogue to his audience, and he further stresses that these two things are upon which all the law and prophets rest (v. 40).  In the older Anglican liturgy based upon the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, this is included at the beginning of the Anglican Mass and I believe at one time it was also part of the Tridentine Latin Mass found in the 1962 Roman Missal as well (feel free to fact-check that if you disagree, as maybe I am mistaken on that, but I am almost certain it is in the old Mass somewhere).  In those liturgical texts, it is called the Summary of the Law, and it adds a catechetical dimension to the liturgy.  In addition to being a summary of divine law though, it is also a summary of human life - our actions toward God are interconnected with how we relate to others.  Based on that, the Decalogue names several things that we are commanded not to do - rebelling against parental authority, murdering someone, stealing from others, coveting what others have and trying to essentially play "keeping up with the Joneses," and of course bearing false witness against someone else.   Again, looking at it this way, the context goes beyond just fibbing about eating cookies before dinner or accusing the dog of eating your homework - this affects someone else directly.  After really thinking over this, I came to the conclusion that the broader meaning of this is not restricted to just lying.  Rather, it is more destructive activity that is directed against someone other than the self.  And, that is where we are going now. 

There are verbal violations of personhood that can be damaging to another person if they are committed, and some even can carry consequences of civil law because they are so serious.  They include gossip, defamation of character (slander, libel, etc.), and stereotyping and profiling others based on externals like race or ethnicity.  One example of this has to do with how I was raised up until my early twenties, and it unfortunately was clothed in "Christian" lingo to justify nasty habits.  Back in the day, many of the Pentecostal churches I knew of then had what were called "prayer groups" or "prayer circles," and although there were many sincere people who really had the heart to intercede for others, unfortunately what more than often happened was that these groups would be controlled by individuals - usually bored housewives who were members of the particular congregation - who had selfish motives.  The common characterization of such people was either "old bitties" or "cackling hens," and oftentimes the "prayer group" ended up being a gossip club in which certain of these people would delight in something bad happening to other church members or people in the community.  Unfortunately, some of my own relatives engaged in this nonsense, and they thought that somehow they were doing "God's work" when in reality they just wanted to defame and gossip about others, often bookending it as "please pray for so-and-so..." and they would then launch into a juicy discussion of the intimate details of their targeted victims.  It is one reason why many people would not attend those particular churches, despite many good people also being part of them.  This was a classic example of what "bearing false witness" means, and unfortunately, they were aiding often in the spiritual isolation of people and imperiling souls of folks who had serious needs and were hurting.  What often was worse were the pastors - some pastors were blissfully ignorant of what was going on, and others actively engaged in this sin with their erring church members because those members had money or influence.  The trust it betrayed to the communities where this took place often caused many small churches to close as people began to catch onto the slander and gossip emanating from so-called "good church folk." This was not necessarily limited to Pentecostal churches either - it affected churches of all denominational identities then.  Given that gossip is a verbal sin against another person, it is the true definition of false witness.  Another example is far more insidious though, and I want to get into that now.

A couple of years back, there was a young lady on a social media platform that befriended me, and for a while she seemed OK.  However, despite being a devout Catholic, this young lady also delved into apocalyptic conspiracies as well as being quasi-charismatic in the way she presented herself.  To be fair, this lady had some trauma caused by things in her past, and she used religion as a sort of defense mechanism to supposedly protect her against anyone she felt was "toxic," and in doing so she claimed some prophetic gift or something.  I was all too familiar with this from my Pentecostal days, and in all honesty she was starting to be a source of concern.  On one particular day - I think it was around my birthday or something - this girl was talking about a particular Ukrainian Catholic parish I was familiar with as I had visited it many times years ago when we lived in that particular area.  As an innocent question, I asked her if this was the parish located on such-and-such street in that particular city.  The reaction I got from her on that was totally off the rails - she accused me of sabotaging the church, endangering people, etc., but then she got really personal by trying to "prophesy" that she felt I had some "hidden sin" and it was just so outrageous I had to block her on social media.  This girl, in a defensive and aggressive manner claiming to "protect" the members of that parish, claimed a level of spirituality that many saints canonized by the Church neither claimed to possess or rarely exercised.  By exalting herself like that, she tried to use religious justification to defame my character, and in doing so she engaged in the sin of bearing false witness against me - I had witnessed her doing that to others as well, and to be fair to her, she had some psychological issues I believe that drove this behavior, but still it was detrimental to others. The conclusion I got from this was being thankful that God was God and she wasn't - using charismatic gifts (which I have to say I don't believe she genuinely possessed either) to manipulate and defame others is another serious sin - witchcraft.  I now want to touch on that briefly before I wrap up this conversation. 

After being involved in the Pentecostal tradition for many years before I finally came home to the Church, I can tell you I have seen it all - the crazy, the bizarre, and even also some genuine moves of God.  There are some individuals in that tradition - and they are among more mystical Catholics as well - who are presented with a problem.  Can one commit an outright sin in the name of God, especially when claiming some special "gift?"  The answer is clearly no. Scripture builds upon Scripture, and no part of Scripture will be contradictory to the rest. That is why when people have these "gifts" but use them in ways contrary to Scripture and Church teaching, they have one of three problems.  One, it could be possible that a demonic spirit is counterfeiting the gift.  Two, it could be the person is utilizing a supposed gift as a weapon.  Three, the person is genuinely confused and may believe they have a supernatural gift when in reality there may be other explanations.  The true test of a "gift" though is whether or not its manifestation lines up with Church teaching and Scripture - if there is something off about it, then it must be rejected and ignored before it is used to cause trouble.  Many, many things alleged as "words from God" or "discernment of spirits" have in reality been the sin of false witness against someone else, and when a supposed gift - real or not - is used vindicatory to manipulate either a person or others against a person, that is a form of witchcraft and is no different than necromancy or gazing at crystal balls or tarot cards.  There is no place in the Body of Christ for that garbage, and if it is a problem in a church, it needs to be removed quickly.  The perpetrator of such behavior should then be confronted, and in many cases may need some sort of counseling as there is an underlying issue which facilitates the behavior too.  On that, let me give some final thoughts.

Bearing false witness is the deliberate defamation, slander, and gossip of one person against another, and as such it is a sin against one's neighbor and violates the command to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Therefore, while lying is bad, and can even be a component part of false witness, lying is not totally synonymous with bearing false witness, as that entails a greater sin against humanity.  May we watch what we say about others, and to use a well-worn cliche which video creator Dhar Mann uses all the time, we need to be careful not to judge a book by its cover.  If we don't know anything about a person's life, we should keep our mouths shut until we can understand their situation better.  Thank you for allowing me to share today. 

Life Challenges

 Yesterday at Mass, our priest Fr. Grassi was recounting the story of St. Nicholas Owen in his homily.  For those not familiar with him, he was a martyr during the English Reformation due to the Puritanism of Cromwell persecuting Catholics, and what he was most noted for was constructing secret hideaways for persecuted priests called "priest holes."  A priest hole was a secret room that was hidden from view by anything such as a board that served as a door, and its purpose was to keep priests safe until the danger of being arrested by Cromwell's goons passed.  Owen constructed many of these, and some have still not been found and each was different - in many cases, a secret chamber was constructed even within a secret chamber for an extra measure of security.  What made this guy more interesting was the fact he was of short stature - it was quite possible, like St. John the Dwarf many centuries earlier, that St. Nicholas Owen had achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism.  Like many of these saint homilies that both Fr. Grassi and our deacon, Dave Galvin, present on different Sundays of the year, it aroused curiosity for me and I decided to research it more which is how I found out about this information.  Had St. Nicholas Owen lived during World War II, I would guess he could have even saved many Jews who were targeted by the demonic hordes of SS in the Third Reich - the attic hideaways that are documented in Ann Frank's diary as well as Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place bear remarkable similarity to St. Nicholas's priest holes as a matter of fact.  

One of St. Nicholas Owen's priest holes at Harvington Hall Mansion in Britain, with a board as an entrance.

Fr. Grassi's discussion of St. Nicholas Owen got me thinking about something.  With the increasing hostility toward people of faith - Catholics, Protestants, and Jews are all targets of secularism - perhaps we need to face the realization that for our own safety we may need to take precautions against our own government.  With Merrick Garland issuing a crazy order from Biden's DOJ to spy on Catholic Masses as well as targeting concerned parents last year as "terrorists" for speaking against some implemented things at school boards, we are in a state of war against the secular Left which is trying to impose itself as a new religion essentially - a weird religion that denies the reality of many things, and it has the ironic name of "wokeness."  Although the vast majority of the American public is against this garbage, it is still being imposed upon us by elitists who think we are all idiots or something.  In reality, they are the true fools, and one day they will find that out if they don't have a conversion of heart before it is too late.  Will we get to the point of having to utilize an upgraded version of St. Nicholas Owen's priest holes, not only for our clergy but even for ourselves?   That remains to be seen, but one thing for sure is the fact that we live in a fallen world and challenges will come at us.  As I write this, I have a very serious issue I am facing that I am trusting for God to work out, and while deep within myself I am somehow confident everything will work out, the fact that such a frightening obstacle looms over me is still at times a bit frustrating to deal with.  It just means we have to trust God more, and the example of St. Nicholas is a good reminder of that. 

A few years ago, I had some very interesting dreams involving tornadoes.  In one, I was standing in my doorway, and in the sky overhead a vortex formed directly above me.  However, despite how frightening it was, I was never even touched by it.  In a similar dream, I was in a vehicle on a road with my mother and my late great-grandmother when directly ahead of us this huge funnel cloud - I mean enormous too, as the thing had to be 20 miles in diameter - was spinning and spinning.  As scary as it was, it never touched us.  To give a more apt description of what it looked like, you could not see anything around this thing for miles, and it was black and very evil-looking.  Unlike many funnel clouds though, this one was different as it emanated from the ground instead of from the atmosphere, and there was just something really sinister about it.  Yet. we managed to get home and safely inside the house, and eventually this thing came at our house, but instead of hitting the house, it just brushed past a living room window and never touched us.  Whenever you see a whirlwind in a dream, it does mean facing something in life that is potentially scary, but if the tornado never touches you, it means you are being protected.  That was the case in both of those dreams.  In yet another dream, I recall being in this house - on the outside was a courtyard, and the front yard ended at a beachfront which was right on the sea.  To my right of the front door - which had beautiful French doors on it and a panoramic view - there was a canal that passed under the yard itself possibly by way of an installed culvert.  All of a sudden, a large tidal wave came, and the canal also flooded over, but it never reached where I was at the front door.  I saw this dream when I had it as being very similar to the tornado dreams - the storms of life can be overwhelming and intense, but despite that I was protected from their destruction.   I am a strong believer of symbols in dreams, and that God speaks through them in various ways.  Not every dream is a message from God - many are just the mind's way of coping with stress, and I notice I have more vivid dreams when I am facing difficulties and feel that is the reason.  But, when a detail stands out like that, there is a message in there somewhere.  Recalling these dreams as well as Fr. Grassi's homily about St. Nicholas Owen yesterday got me to thinking about a lot.  Life challenges - we all have them, had them, or will face them inevitably at some point - are reminders as to why we rely on God for our help, and all of this is why I am reflecting on this today. 

If you are a Christian, two things can be true at once when you face challenges in life.  First, despite what may be happening, there are times when deep inside you a reassurance is there that everything is somehow going to work out.  So, if one has that assurance, the idea is to carry on with your regular duties and responsibilities and not let the circumstances sidetrack or derail you.  Second, we as human beings are driven in our daily existence by a concept called time - time entails deadlines, and as a result if you are anything like me you need something concrete to work with so you can plan and execute what needs to be done.  The frustrating aspect of this is that often you are not driven by your own timetables - bills are due on a certain date, you need to have that work or school project done by a deadline, etc.  Others dictate that timing, in other words.  So, when your rent or mortgage comes due, and you don't have the money to cover it, and thus you begin to feel the pressure, it causes one to do many things.  If you are a Christian, it adds an aspect to your prayer regimen in that you start to get frustrated with God.  This is where the "fleece" comes in for instance - this is an idea drawn from Gideon's story in Judges 6-8 when he wants to be sure he is doing the right thing so he sticks a lamb fleece out overnight to determine what direction he needs to take.  While the "fleece" idea is a more recent faith act inspired by Pentecostalism, there is a sort of validity to it.  The idea of a "fleece" is not to test or manipulate God (or at least it isn't supposed to be) but rather to seek guidance and direction for decisions.  This is something I admit I do a lot, and even as I write this, I have three of those I am waiting for answers on. That is one mechanism we use to get God's attention.  Another is bargaining - you can get to a point of frustration where you feel like your prayers are not being effective, so you essentially threaten to stop praying unless God acts in some way.  Admittedly, I have done this many times, and it is only natural to feel that frustration because we are only human, and we have limits.  Is it the right thing to do?  I don't know - God has not struck me dead with lightning or anything for doing it over the years, so he may understand our feelings better than we give him credit for.  Yet another coping mechanism is just blowing up and getting upset with God - yes, I am guilty of this.  I need to be honest and say that I am not proud of the shouting matches I direct at God on occasions (thankfully they are rare though), and I have said and done things in anger with God that frankly I have to apologize later for once I cool off.  Again, I think God understands us better than we do ourselves, and if he had a physical presence when we get like that, I can also imagine him saying "OK, do you feel better now?" in a semi-sarcastic tone like a parent when a cranky child throws a fit. Again, we are human beings, not divinity in ourselves, and thus we will have moments of weakness and there is only so much we can take before we break, and thankfully God knows that too.  While many of us are ashamed of what we may do later when we lose our temper with God, the old adage "God is a big boy and can take what we dish out" rings true. The ultimate human temper tantrum over history against God resulted in the Passion of Christ, but he resurrected a couple of days later and even forgave many who treated him that way.  God is holy and sovereign, it is true, but he also created us, so he knows us better than we know ourselves.  Therefore, if in a moment of weakness, you throw a fit at God for not responding when you need him too, there are two things to remember.  First, often that is between you and him - many of us do that in the privacy of our personal prayers and no one else will know about it, nor do they need to.  Secondly, like any relationship, once you cool off you will understand you had a weak moment, and if you are like me, you profusely apologize to God for getting angry with him, and he forgives us.  Then, we get up, dust the dirt off our knees, and move forward.  One thing I have also noticed as well is that once it gets to the point where one snaps, God is on the threshold of giving the breakthrough we seek, and in a way that may be a good thing then.  Anyway, hope that is encouraging to someone - you are not alone if that is you. 

Thank you for allowing me to share today again, and remember, God understands us better than we do ourselves, even with our weaknesses (which we all have). 

Reflection on Recollection

 My last couple of reflections have to do with recollection of my own story, and that seems to continue.  This week, I was working on a comprehensive family tree with Geneanet.com, which is similar to Ancestry but does offer more benefits. One of the benefits it offers is to print and publish a family tree up to 50 generations.  The only problem with this, like many of these genealogical sites, is that people do make dumb mistakes when they input information, so you have to comb through a lot of inconsistencies to sort out things.  One is birthdates of ancestors - some of the dingdongs who post the information have weird dates - people having kids before they were born, people having kids or getting married when they are under 10 years old, etc.  When I transferred my Gedcom from Ancestry to Geneanet to work on getting the book printed, I had over 300 of these crazy inconsistencies in my tree, and the easiest resolution for many of them is to just take out birthdates or death dates (some of the inconsistencies even had people being buried before they died!  Talk about a horrible way to go, right?) as the names are probably right but the data is screwed up. Other problems included having baptism information long after a person's death - being that both Ancestry and Geneanet both rely on Mormon archive sources, that may actually not be a mistake as Mormons do practice baptism in proxy of dead ancestors, which is weird and heretical, but it is a thing for them.  So, an ancestor who died in 1500 has a baptism date of 1875 - that would be due to the fact that said ancestor probably had a Mormon descendant who undertook this.  For Mormons, it is a weird evangelistic thing, which is why they started collecting genealogical data to begin with, and thankfully the positive fruit of that is they have perhaps one of the most comprehensive genealogical archives in the world.  So, if you are doing your own family tree and notice weird baptism dates centuries after an ancestor died, that may be the reason for that.  

My own family tree now encompasses about 1500 years, and it contains pretty much a complete family history that includes everything from Roman emperors to Black slaves, and it covers practically every ethnicity in the Western world as well as at least 4 Native American tribes.  It also makes me distantly related to several others who share my heritage - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Robert E. Lee, George Washington, Barack Obama, the Hapsburgs, the Windsors, and others.  I often joke that my own veins are a history of Western Civilization, and to be honest that may be truer than I even know.  Reflecting on one's heritage is an important part of one's "story," and thus it does make you appreciate better the person who you are.  After all, you are not a random accident of nature - God gave you the genetics and other distinctions you have because you are uniquely created in his image.  The modernist secularism which denigrates personhood also is iconoclastic when it comes to history, and and as a result people don't value themselves, much less anyone else.  And, that is what will be the backdrop of a little discussion I want to have today. 

I am going back to my education in Philosophy I had at Franciscan University of Steubenville, and my professor there, Dr. John Crosby, wrote an amazing book entitled The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).  Crosby deals a lot with the topic of personal recollection, and in doing so he connects it to another concept called subjectivity.  Subjectivity, as he defines it on pages 83-91 as being comprised of two things - self-presence and self-determination.  The first is defined on page 83 as a person acting through themselves in such a way that it entails the utilization of distinguishing between cognition and volition.  What that means is that knowledge and will must be differentiated, and that one can easily overcome the other if not balanced.  The second one is defined as the subjective freedom of the person to act - it doesn't matter if the choice of the person is good or bad, but personhood grants liberty to exercise that choice. On the downside of this however, is that a choice will always have a consequence, and the wrong choice could result in the loss of exercise of will and even one's freedom.  Also, when one exercises will over another to subject them to their whims, that violates the gift of personhood.  This is also why subjectivity is not the same as subjectivism. Now that we have established that, Crosby later goes into why this is integral to understanding our own individuality.  For this, on pages 248 -280, he gives several signs as to why the personhood of human beings is finite, and thus should be cherished as such:

1. The plurality of persons and in particular a certain partiality of each individual.

2. The individual's relation to time.

3. The suspension of the individual between potentiality and actuality - we have the potential to be or do certain things, but our choices actualize that. 

4. The unity of "person" and "nature" in every individual person - personhood is a gift of God, and thus we also inherit a nature that channels our individuality.

5. Discrepancies between being and consciousness

6. The endangered condition of individual freedom - the choices we make could subject us to the control of other things.

7. The unity of belonging to oneself and receiving oneself as a gift - "created in the image of God" is a precious attribute of personhood, in other words. 

8. Selfhood awakens in the human person as a result of self-transcendance - or, making potentiality an actuality.  This goes in line with a saying I heard years ago - "your present position does not determine your future potential."  

9. Finally, the finite personhood of human beings revealed in their moral existence. 

What we are talking about, in plain language, is not letting circumstance and the opposition of others dictate to you who you really are.  I am not into the Joel Osteen "positivity" crap or anything like that I will assure you, but there is a certain validity in being able to recognize one's self-worth, but doing so realistically and honestly.  We all should know we all fall short of perfection, and that even includes what we think is perfection.  This has nothing to do with that - rather, it is using assets you may already possess inside you to reach whatever potential you have capabilities for.  In some cases it will not be easy - it takes work to get to a certain goal for sure, but if you have what you need within yourself and also have the willpower to commit to the goal, it can be achieved.  It also helps when you have people along the way who believe in you, as well as putting as much distance as possible between those who want to drag you down and condemn you.  They don't see the full picture, and therefore their opinion in regard to your personal development is worthless.  You should be aware of your own potential, know your own limitations, and not let circumstances or the opinions of others discourage you.  No doubt, you will be gossipped about, laughed at, condemned, criticized, and dismissed, but don't worry about that.  You can just tell such detractors - even if they are family - to screw off and your duty is to focus on your objective.  Recollection entails all of that.  And, it will also be integral to network with others who share similar convictions or who do actually give you encouragement - you will need that as well. This need to have like-minded or encouraging people around you is essentially a component of subjectivity.  Critics, gossips, and detractors on the other hand are subjectivist, and that is an important difference to understand.  And, if you stay the course, what is sure to happen one day is that those who set themselves up as your critics and detractors will either be humbled by your success or they will be apologizing to you.  If they apologize, always forgive, but make them understand as well that their behavior can be toxic and they need to do self-examination.  All this now leads to the second aspect of my discussion today. 

In his seminal book Leisure, the Basis of Culture (New York: Random House, 1963), Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper expands further on this by noting something on page 44 in the definition of a Latin word, acedia.  Pieper notes that the term could be specifically translated as "despair from weakness," and it is associated with the denial of a person to give the consent of his will to his own being.  This is one aspect today we see in corporate culture in many companies - let me get into that a little bit.  Big corporations are about one thing - their bottom line.  This means that philosophical principles of personhood are irrelevant to them.  I turn again to the whole Dhar Mann phenomenon which has taken social media by storm.  In one of his videos, Dhar creates this story of a woman who misses many important things in her own daughter's life because her boss thinks she is a robot.  It is causing friction at home for her, but the boss doesn't care - all he wants is a huge account to be acquired, and the personhood of his subordinates is seen as a hindrance to that goal. The lady in question is a hard worker - she gives a lot to the company, but whatever she gives is never enough. So, on the day of a family vacation that her young daughter was looking forward to, she gets a call from this jackass boss of hers demanding she comes in for a meeting with a high-profile client despite the fact at this point she and her family were just about to take off for their vacation together.  Under much duress and protest, the lady relents and goes to the business luncheon.  During the course of the meeting, she gets a call from her husband, who had taken the daughter ahead of time for the vacation in which she would join them later, and the call is bad news that her little daughter had sustained an injury and was in the hospital. She has to immediately leave, but the boorish boss follows her out and berates her over it, and finally she has had enough and promptly quits.  Later, she and a former co-worker actually go into their own business together and set up their own firm, and it begins to take clients away from her former boss.  Irritated by this, the former boss storms into her office and is short of threatening legal action when one of his former clients who now signed with her comes in and talks about the success of a new work/life model adopted by their company she initiated, and finally the former boss gets it.  The lesson here is that one cannot enslave themselves to money and corporate servitude, as that is the form of acedia Pieper defines.  Let's add a few other observations here. 

Many people these days feel stuck in dead-end jobs - they may earn a good paycheck, and they may have a level of success, but they miss something.  I know, because I was there myself some years ago. The demands of such jobs often become an idol to the person stuck in them, and everything ends up being sacrificed to the company for a bit of convenient material stability.  There is nothing wrong with having a few bucks in the bank, and to be honest even the Bible does not condemn financial success - what the Bible actually condemns is the idolatry that financial success causes one to risk, and in the corporate world it is an imposed idolatry on people.  And, many feel this too - that is why movies such as Office Space became cult classics in all honesty.  And, what is worse is that the "security" such a job brings is extremely temporary and vulnerable.  Companies do not prioritize personhood, and the average employee is a means unto an end for the company.  If a situation renders an employee unable to do what the company is expecting of them, they are easily replaced like a used tampon.  God never intended human beings to live and exist like that, and in the process of acquiring a nice salary and some impressive benefits, a person has to put themselves on hold and many of their passions and dreams are forgotten.  Pieper actually presents the concept of leisure in a way that it is seen as a virtue, and sometimes time alone to reflect and organize one's thoughts is essential.  However, crony corporatism is a jealous god, and when something else starts to garner a worker's attention in some way, the wrath of the corporate "god" is meted out without mercy. It is truly sad that so many don't have the benefit of living life the way they are supposed to because some corporate executive holds their future over their heads.  That is what needs reform.  This is also a major reason why many of these corporate moguls are atheists - or, I should say they profess atheism.  In reality, they see themselves as gods and want to exert their power over everything, and there is no better example of this than those wannabe antichrists that control the World Economic Forum - Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and company want to control you by making you live in a dystopian caste system of their creation, but they see themselves as above what they expect of you.  This is the true goal of social Darwinism and every other adverse political system in the world - communism, fascism, Nazism, and corporatism are all variations of the same species of dehumanizing demagogery.  None of this was God's plan for humanity, and therefore it should be condemned at all opportunity.   Now for some closing thoughts.

Recollection, reflection, and leisure are all vital components of the human experience, and God hardwired them into us from our creation. We risk peril if we deny ourselves those things, or if we allow others to deny them to us - they are fundamental to our existence, and without them we lose the essence of who God created us uniquely to be.  Thank you for allowing me to share, and I will surely have more to say on this later. 

Rediscovering Old Sentiments

 This is a series of thoughts I am publishing earlier than anticipated as last night I was watching something that sort of ignited something inside, and I wanted to spend a bit of time reflecting on it today.  

In the past year or so, I have really gotten into watching these Dhar Mann videos. In case you haven't seen those, they are short inspirational films produced and created by a billionaire Indian American businessman named Dhar Mann, and many of them went viral.  They deal with situations in life where a lesson is conveyed via what is a normal life situation.  In doing so, the videos deal with a lot of life and social issues - bullying, divorce, workplace discrimination, etc.  The typical formula of such videos is that a situation happens where a person is misjudged by someone, and as it turns out not everything is as it seems - for instance, in several videos, a manager of a store is rude to a customer, only to find out later that the person the manager was rude to ends up being someone significant - their boss, a friend of their boss, and in some cases even another person who ends up being more important than their appearance would suggest.  At some point in the story, the individual tries to tell their situation, and their account ends with the words "so you see," which has become one of Dhar's trademark phrases.  While there are occasional political/social takes in these I disagree with, overall, the videos do convey some solid messages, and they also serve as an inspiration for perserverance in the face of seemingly overwhelming adversity.  In that, they are actually not only entertaining to watch, but they aid in helping someone see their own value as an individual. Last night, I was watching a new one of these that really got my attention, and I want to talk about that briefly here before sharing some thoughts of my own.

In the story, there are a group of directionless street kids who ended up homeless due to unfortunate situations in their families, and to survive these kids resorted to petty theft.  Their ringleader, Daniel, has been in and out of jail many times.  When they have time to just relax, they play a form of street soccer, and that gets the attention of an elderly Black man who is a soccer coach himself.  The old man sees a potential in these boys, and he eventually forms them into their own soccer team to compete in tournaments.  The old man, however, has another dimension - he was once one of those street urchins, and he understands them in a way no one else can.  This causes him to make a connection with them.  At first, the boys are skeptical as they think he is either an undercover narc or just a crazy old man.  However, after the guy is fired from his original team he coached by a manager who is more interested in money than this guy's passion for helping kids, he finds the kids in an alley and goes to visit them.  He brings them a new soccer ball, and he then convinces them of his genuinity by offering them food - many of these kids haven't had a decent meal in days, so they have ravenous appetites. In time, he forms the kids into a team, and he especially becomes a mentor to young Daniel.  Daniel, at this point, was facing a long jail sentence if he didn't show up for court, and on one of the initial soccer practices he forgot his court date and the cops show up, apprehend him, and take him in.  The judge pronounces sentence - Daniel has to serve one month behind bars for his offenses.  The old man comes into the courtroom though and begs the judge for mercy - although the judge cannot reverse the sentence, she does allow Daniel to play the tournament, which they win.  A month passes, and by this time the poor coach and his wife are in bad financial straits - little income, and the bills are piling up. Then, one day he gets a knock on the door, and Daniel is there.  Daniel surprises the coach with a check for $10K and asks him to be the manager, as Daniel was discovered by a scout and recruited for a team after serving his jail time. The happy ending of this was quite inspirational, and it was a happy ending for both Daniel and his coach.  For some reason, that story sparked a few things in me, and that is what I want to talk about now.

Many of you who have either followed me for some time or know my story will remember my own upbringing - I spent a large part of my later childhood in very abject poverty in a small West Virginia town called Kirby.  My single mother at the time was a chronic alcoholic, and there were days we didn't have much to eat in the house - I remember many times surviving on buttered toast for dinner on some nights, or even raiding the neighbors' gardens for vegetables so we could have something like corn on the cob, fried squash or cucumbers, and drop biscuits I learned quickly to mix up myself.  When we had a little more money, a bag of Doritos or a piece of longhorn cheese from the local store was a huge luxury at some parts of our lives then.  Many of the neighbor kids were in the same situation, and we had an unspoken code between us - sure, we had squabbles and disputes, but everyone knew who everyone else was and we all respected each other.  I had no criminal tendencies or anything, as I had other things to divert my attention, but some of the neighbor kids were not as lucky.  Some of them suffered abuse, one girl in our community was being trafficked for money as a sex slave by her own father, and later many of the neighbor kids I knew ended up being involved in crimes, drugs, and other bad situations.  Fortunately for me, my life turned around when I was 15, and I got out of the community and my high school years were much more stable as my mom ended up being a live-in caretaker for an elderly lady whose family practically adopted us as their own.  But, even before that, my diversions were reading, listening to vintage big band music, and either fishing in the creek or collecting wild plants in the nearby woods - teaberries, wild garlic, wild berries, and also an occasional unique flower like a lady's slipper or Jack-in-the-pulpit that grew on the ridge that loomed in front of our house.  Those pursuits gave me not only a vivid imagination, but also helped to educate me so I did very well in school and was able to in time go off to college after high school and live a somewhat stable life.  Also, finding Christ at age 16 - a time which was filled with a lot of adjustments and transitions for me - helped a lot, as church gave me an outlet for doing something constructive too.  Any rate, as I watched that Dhar Mann video, a lot of that was brought back to me, and it led to a few other thoughts as I began to reflect on it. 

To begin, I want to talk about mentorship.  Fortunately for me, when I was young I had many good mentors in my life that helped guide me  - pastors, good neighbors, teachers, a couple of more sound relatives, etc.  Mentoring is important, and although anyone can display empathy, what really gives a sort of "street cred" is if a potential mentor comes from where you come from - that means they have been there and they know what you are facing.  The problem with a lot of counseling and social programs today is that they are made up of essentially educated idiots who have no clue as to what the people they are supposed to be helping are going through.  Often they are rich White college kids who grew up in stable households, and they don't share the values of their clientele.  They are always trying to psychoanalyze their "subjects," and they can get a little too patronizing.  This is particularly true of political liberals who decide they want to be "social justice warriors" and don't know a damn thing about life.  This is why nowadays the Democrats are so out of touch with the groups they consider their target constituencies, and it is also unfortunately a reason why many of my fellow conservatives also miss the boat on this stuff too.  Let me get into that now. 

Many poor people - be they Black inner-city kids in Baltimore or rural White Appalachians from my home state of West Virginia - are by default socially conservative.  Yet, mainstream conservatism has ignored them for so long that they vote for Democrats as a matter of survival.  The thing is however is that conservative neglect and Democrat patronization are both detrimental to these communities, and therefore something different is needed.  I want to first address where conservatives got things wrong, and then I will focus on Democrats.

I am a very staunch conservative myself, both socially and fiscally.  I believe strongly in conserving traditional values, I want small government, and there is a sort of social inequality that has plagued this country for 60 years at least or more.  But, at times many conservatives can also be clueless to real needs and issues in certain demographics, and when I hear someone I would otherwise agree with disparage poor people, it bugs me. Despite how "pro-life" many self-professed conservatives claim to be, it has glaring inconsistencies when you actually hear what they really think.  I remember a few years back in Florida when I went to church with this guy named Bob and his wife Carol.  Bob was a man of some means, and he retired part-time in Florida as a "snowbird."  He claimed to be "pro-life," but what happened in the course of conversation was him saying something to this effect - he thought that poor people were hopeless, and therefore any programs or incentives to help them out of their poverty was a waste of resources because to him they chose to be that way.  He essentially more or less expressed support for constructing an economic caste system, he was open to eugenics measures, and he also even had a bit of overt racism in his tone as he elaborated upon his views.  To me, this was anything but "conservative," and I have learned over the years that just because someone is registered "Republican" on their voter ID does not necessarily make them "conservative."  Bob was raised in a rather wealthy home, he had never experienced the challenges of just struggling to make ends meet, and his comments displayed a sickening ignorance of real life.  And, this is unfortunately what wins Democrats elections in many cases, or at least it used to (more on that shortly).  Bob is one of many who share these attitudes, as even high-profile "conservatives" such as the late Pat Robertson and Bill O'Reilly have even supported eugenics programs against poor Appalachian populations and Black segments in cities.  This is a huge reason why I never supported the Republicans and have always remained an independent conservative - I cannot bring myself to support Republicans who talk and act like this.  Fortunately, in recent years there has been a grassroots shift, as many elitists are thankfully now being outshadowed by more common-sense people, and that is due in part to individuals such as Donald Trump.  Trump is not perfect, and as a billionaire businessman himself he hasn't experienced the hardships many people struggle with everyday either.  But, the difference is that he is not claiming to - he is in support of many measures that would benefit poorer segments of the citizenry, and for that I support him although I will never be a Republican. For other self-styled "conservatives" like Bob though, I am convinced they are elitists who live in their own self-constructed ivory towers, and I want nothing to do with them.  At some point, I want to do my own manifesto on this from a political perspective, but that is for another time.  Let's attack Democrats now.

Like elitists self-styled "conservatives" such as Bob, the Democrats as a whole are outright aloof to real problems too.  While many of them want big government spending and more weird handouts that look good in principle, the reality is that Democrats are just as elitist if not more so, and they always have been.  Unlike the Bobs of the world, the Democrats do not dismiss the plight of poor Americans, but rather they exploit it to gain power for themselves, which means they go to the other extreme.  They thing they can buy and bribe votes from targeted populations by promising a virtual goody-bag of entitlements, but they don't deliver and usually those entitlement programs are failures.  In the past ten years or so, the real face of the Democratic agenda has come to light, and what it really is basically is a group of career politicians who will do literally anything to secure power for themselves - many are financed by megalomaniacal billionaires like the Despots of Davos (Soros, Schwab, Gates, and company), and they exploit the poor to gain more power for themselves.  They would love to implement programs that would even defy the scenario Aldous Huxley created in Brave New World, and they would be happy if 80% of the population was impoverished and died off so they could completely dominate the planet.  This too is wrong and needs to be stopped as well.  Again, I will save more detail on that for another time. 

Whether the elitist denotes himself as a "conservative" or a "liberal," the bottom line is that they are still elitists.  Each wants to eradicate people who don't meet their standard, and neither has the common good at heart.  An elitist is an elitist, and like a zebra, it cannot change its stripes.  The time has come for an alternative to both of these honestly, and surprisingly many others are thinking the same thing - this is why Donald Trump is doing so well, and why Robert Kennedy Jr. is also gaining a lot of attention. Both Trump and RFK resonate with a wider audience than the Establishment does, and the Establishment hates this.  On that ground, there are really two sides to the whole issue that no one focuses on - Establishment vs. Anti-establishment.  The average guy on the street - who now has to worry about whether to eat or pay his rent due to inflation and other crazy nonsense - is sick of the Establishment, and the new movement is more commonsense, and it is also diverse - more Latinos and Blacks are embracing it, as they are populations often spurned by this Establishment.  This change is good, as it means that finally people are coming to their senses.  Let's hope that continues.

I got off on all that to say this.  Our young people in particular need mentors, but they need mentors who can relate to their experience, and not some dumbass psych major from Harvard.  The young people in question are not the blue-haired freaks blocking traffic and burning down cities either - those are the rich White offspring for the most part of the elitists, and they are the Establishment's "Storm Troopers" for maintaining power. No, the young people I am speaking of are the poor Black inner-city kid who shows intelligence and just needs guidance to channel it into something better.  It is the poor Appalachian kid who goes to school with holes in their shoes but also has a knack for algebra and thus raw potential that needs to be cultivated.  It is the Puerto Rican kid in Harlem who maybe displays a talent for playing the saxophone and thus has the basic tools to turn that passion into a success.  These are the true future of America, and we need to pay attention to them.  I was musing that it would be nice to mentor a group of 5-6 mountain kids who are being raised like I was, and maybe turn them into potential leaders - everyone deserves a leg-up, but the right people who care need to help those who deserve it based on their individual God-given talents, and there is a reason for that.  Many of these kids are disregarded by their own families in many cases - they have a passion, but they are either threatened when they show an interest in it, or their folks just plain don't care.  They also face adversity in school - many of them are bullied, targeted for bad treatment by bad teachers who have no place in a school, and many are forced to settle for less.  They feel alone, and that no one cares about them, and as a result, they often are lost in bad behavior that will eventually kill them (Fentanyl addiction is on the rise not only in the inner cities, but like a bad virus it now infects rural areas and small towns too).  That needs to be remedied.  I speak as a kid myself who grew up like this, and by God's grace I was protected from a lot of the negative influences, but I was also forced to live with many adversities too.  It is time that changes for good.  

Thank you for allowing me to share today, and while there is much more that could be said on this, I have to streamline and organize my thoughts on it so I can at a later time.  Have a good remainder of your week, and will see you next time.  

Conservative Drama - It Needs to Stop

 Over the past few weeks, a drama has been unfolding on one of the most visible and largest conservative platforms on social media, the Daily Wire.  The Daily Wire is the home of Ben Shapiro, a capable and quick-witted political commentator who I have watched for several years on a frequent basis.  Ben has good insights on things, and although I don't see eye-to-eye with him on everything, overall he has some good content.  However, in the past couple of years or so there have been some rather silly kerfuffles going on, and for some reason Shapiro seems to be in the middle of them.  Recently, a new one has raised its head and it involved another conservative political figure, Candace Owens.

Candace Owens, a Black lady who is also a highly capable conservative speaker, was one of the main people who was involved with a movement called Blexit - this movement reflects a justifiable and very welcome discontent from many Black Americans who are disillusioned with Democrat politics and want alternatives, and many of them have become staunch conservatives.  Among some of them are Joel Patrick, C.J. Pearson, Dr. Carol Swain, media personalities Diamond and Silk, economist Charles Payne, Baltimore area political figure Kimberly Klacik (more on her momentarily), and so many others.  These are decent people who are seeing through the "plantation pimp" facade the Democrats have held over much of the Black community since LBJ's Presidency, and it's a positive development.  Candace has been a powerhouse for this movement, and she is also a very good asset for conservatives in general. It also represents a common-sense shift in the political landscape as the masks of the Leftist elitist hacks are coming off and many regular people are seeing what those demons really are.  This is a long-overdue movement, and it also demonstrates that true Conservatism is a diverse and very inclusive (in the right context) movement that relates to the Joe Schmo on the street better than do the elitist hacks who run our government. But, if our own human concupiscence has taught us everything, nothing is perfect, and this latest scuffle between two capable conservative figures (Shapiro and Owens) is a reminder.  So, let's get into that. 

As we all know, on October 7 of last year a very heinous and horrible terrorist attack occurred in Israel when a group of demonic-driven terrorists called Hamas attacked and killed over 1200 people (mostly Jewish Israelis but there were others too) and then they took several hostages.  This led to a justifiable retaliation on the part of Israel against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and as is usually the case in these situations, it got very murky from there.  Hamas is known, for instance, for the use of civilians as human shields, and will often base its activities in hospitals or other humanitarian locations - they do that for a reason.  Hamas wants to amplify the destruction by hiding behind civilians who are often innocent, and as a result when such a place is targeted by the IDF, Hamas then will use its propaganda mechanism to promote "genocide' accusations against Israel due to innocent civilian casualties. But, Israel is not totally without fault either.  While Israel is a very legitimate nation, and its people do have a birthright to the land there, not all is perfect in that either.  While there have been some noble measures on the part of Israel to minimize collateral damage, unfortunately a lot of times civilians get targeted anyway despite the fact they are innocents, and that never looks good.  Many indigenous Christians of the region are often unfortunately caught up in the crosshairs of the conflict, and their deaths are oftentimes used as justification to brand Israel as some sort of South African or Third Reich reincarnation (which it is not).  Then, when you have some radically ultra-Orthodox Jewish factions there being openly hostile to Armenian and other Christians, it does little for Israel's image.  In all fairness, the radicals on both sides do not represent the totality, but it is hard to see beyond that for many.  As a result, many indigenous Christian communities of the region, who should be natural allies of Israel, are often made very anti-Israel and some will even support terrorists who would kill them in a minute. This whole situation is unfortunate, and it strikes a personal nerve with me that I want to talk about now.

I was raised with a strong love for the nation of Israel and for the Jewish people in general. In part, it is because I myself do have ancestors who were Conversos, so I feel a connection.  On another level, I also used to be a Pentecostal dispensationalist, and like many of them I saw Israel's existence as a prophetic miracle and thus I could have been considered at one time a "Christian Zionist." However, this caused a huge crisis of faith for me later as I became Catholic in that "Christian Zionism" is rejected soundly by the Catholic Church.  Also, my advocacy for many years for Middle Eastern Christian minorities such as the Armenians and Assyrians began to challenge my former "Christian Zionist" ideas, and as I learned more, I began to realize some things.  I will share a story of that later, but sufficive to say,  I have come to an understanding that one can love and support Israel without making Israel perfect and believing any action of Israel as a nation is divinely-guided.  Jews are not Christians, and many of them do not accept the Lordship of Jesus, and some are even openly hostile to Christians.  In time, the Church does believe there will be a mass conversion of the Jewish people to the Gospel, and as a spoiler to my future story on this, I think their assemblage in modern Israel may be a step toward that.  And, there are other complexities I would have to share in a separate story later, but summarily my own support for the state of Israel is much more nuanced than it used to be.  And, that was a painful growth experience too. Now, with that background, let us get back to the original discussion.

Ben Shapiro, as a devout Orthodox Jew, is passionate about Israel and he is also proud of his heritage.  I totally appreciate that, and he should be as he does have a rich legacy of both faith and family that God gave him.  However, in recent broadcasts of his show on Daily Wire, Ben has been almost obsessed with the topic of October 7, so much so that he has even resorted to the tactics of Leftist race-baiters like Al Sharpton in labeling anyone who disagrees with him as an "antisemite."  This led to a very bitter feud with Candace Owens, who merely pointed out that she disagreed with some of the strategy of Israel in this conflict, and her concerns were justifiable - many conservatives, like myself even, have learned to become more nuanced in our support of Israel, and it doesn't mean that these conservatives like Owens are "antisemites" for doing so.  So, last week, Candace resigned from the Daily Wire, and she has launched her own platform.  Ben's attitude is an unfortunate tragedy, and as a result he may be actually aiding actual antisemites who show up in conservative circles (one notable one who has been a huge disappointment in recent years is Mark Dice - I used to like Mark Dice until he did actually launch antisemitic attacks against Ben and others, and to be honest, I have no time for that).  Ben would do well to understand that just because Candace Owens may disagree with him on a minor issue, it does not make her "antisemitic" and to be honest I don't even think it makes her anti-Israel.  We need to be careful of where we place accusations in other words.

This recent incident is by no means the only conservative struggle - Ben has had a feud with Steven Crowder, the conservative comedian/commentator, and Candace has her own beef with Baltimore politician Kimberly Klacik.  I refuse to take sides in any of these silly struggles, as I actually like all the people involved and they need to sort it out and realize we have something much bigger to stand against than each other. It is time conservatives grow up, lest we snatch defeat from the hand of victory and lose America as a nation while a bunch of high-profile figures in our movement make asses of themselves by having petty squabbles.  So to Ben and Candace I say this - both of you need to grow up, shut up, and get back to what is important. Enough is enough, as our nation is facing several things that threaten to destroy our society.  Time to use common sense people. 

That was today's soapbox, and the bottom line is this - I want what is best for America, and despite minor personal differences we have with others who may have the same concerns we do, we need to man it up, work together, and let's restore decency and order to our nation.  Save the crazy interpersonal squabbles for another time, as they could destroy us if you don't, Ben and Candace.  Thank you. 

Recovering Lost Passion

 This week's reflections are composed of things that have been on my mind for the past week or so, as circumstances have compelled me to re-examine some things in my own life.  The events of the past four years which have occurred in my own life specifically have more or less plunged me into a transitional time in which I had to revisit and evaluate many things.  A lot has changed in the past few years, and it has led me to a few small conclusions which I want to address today.  First though, I wanted to mention a couple of housekeeping items which will impact my future posts. 

This year marks 14 years since I began publishing a series of blog posts, and in that 14 years I have managed to channel a lot of ideas into these, and it has been rewarding.  I have also been able to sort of make my own archive of these posts in that I publish them in bound form every couple of years - it used to be every year, but in the past few years I have not written as frequently.  Up to that point, I was essentially printing those out and keeping them in binders, but at times printing multi-page blog articles can be challenging as it does expend a lot of resources.  However, when I published my first books 10 years ago, I came across a service called Lulu Publishing, and they have been a huge asset with getting things printed in a nice format and fashion.  So, I have not printed out blogs in several years, as I just wait and have them all published into book form myself.  If any of you are interested in getting printed editions of these blogs, please feel free to reach out and I will be glad to accommodate you.  I will ask for a small charge though to help my own income as well as covering the price of printing and production via Lulu, but if you enjoyed any content by all means feel free to ask and we can work out a deal.  That now leads to my second item of discussion before I get into today's reflections for the week. 

Since 2011, I have maintained three blog pages.  The oldest, Sacramental Present Truths, mainly addressed theological as well as some social/political issues.  The second, David's Mountain Memories, is this one - it primarily initially served as a platform to discuss a whole lot of topics of interest, and had a more light-hearted tone.  The third, David's Culinary Page, is my food blog - it contains restaurant reviews, recipes, and other culinary material.  Given that my doctoral dissertation has taken up much of my time in the past year in particular, I haven't been able to devote as much time to writing freelance like this, so after some thought I have come to a decision.  Effective immediately, I will no longer be publishing anything on SPT, and instead this page will incorporate both that content as well as the other content I put on here.  In time, I may also incorporate the culinary material into this blog as well, and I am actually thinking of leaving Blogspot, which hosts this, and consolidating all my writings on a new platform - I am looking into things such as Wordpress and some others to see what can be offered, and once I have the opportunity to plan it out, I may do that later. But, for my regular readers, don't fret just yet - that could be a couple of years away, so you can still enjoy content here for a while longer.  Also, as I am now 54 years old, and also am devoting much time to other pursuits, I am also planning on revisiting retiring the blogs completely when I reach my 60th birthday.  Over the next few years, as I contemplate my postdoctoral future, I am planning on devoting more writing to actual books, and won't have the time to maintain a blog at some point.  Any rate, I will keep you posted of any developments here. 

Writing has been a strength I have had since I was very young - it is the perfect way to organize my thoughts and express myself.  My writing legacy has undergone an evolution over several years in all honesty, as originally it started out with journaling 28 years ago.  Being frustrated as a young man with no creative outlet, my ex-wife Barbara then suggested I keep a journal, and it was a good idea.  Not long after starting journaling in August of 1996, one day I was talking to my mother about our old dog Jill we had when I was a kid, and that discussion made a bit of a lightbulb pop in my head - it was the genesis of the extended life story project I have been working on.  The life story began as just reflections in my journal, and that initial draft took over 2 years to document.  Later, I decided to incorporate it into its own book, and I have a series of notebooks now documenting my whole life story from as far back as I could remember to the present - I update it every year as well now.  After my doctorate program is complete and I get to a place where I have the time to do it, my plans are to typeset the whole manuscript, edit it, add facts I was unclear on or may have omitted due to not recalling them, and then I want to get that bound in book form.  It will never be available for public sale though, as I only plan on printing a limited number of them and those will go to my potential descendants as well as a copy being donated to my hometown library as a resource for researching local history.  I am doing this to safeguard against any liabilities that may potentially be risked, in that I am very candid and detailed in everything within that manuscript, even down to names.  It is important to not have that widely circulated until at least after my passing.  If all works out, I want to publish that in two large volumes - the first is a genealogy of my complete family tree, which is quite extensive.  It will contain all the pedigree charts as well as some stories of certain ancestors of mine who are of special interest to me.  The second volume then will be all my story from about the time of my birth until my 60th birthday - yes, this like the blogs will be a project I conclude when I am 60, and I have reasons for that timeline as well. Before I get into what I actually wanted to talk about, I wanted to share a bit of wisdom based on this for especially younger people. 

There is no dispute that the times we live in right now are crazy - just turn on any news broadcast and you will see it.  Much of that is due to a general issue in our society, where a sort of postmodern iconoclasm has reached epidemic proportions in our society.  It is commonplace now for historical revisionism to take over the academy, and the destruction of statues, important art work, and even literature seems to be what the psychopaths who embrace such iconoclasm are championing.  From a purely spiritual perspective, I believe this is all demonic activity.  The ugly, the deceptive, and the evil have overtaken society in many places, and they have uprooted what are traditionally believed to be divinely given transcendental properties of our being, namely three - beauty, truth, and goodness. While there is always hope, and indeed it will reverse course in due time, it is vital at the present time that as much of one's personal legacy should be preserved as is possible.  This is why I strongly advocate for journaling and documenting even the most minute aspects of one's life in a tangible form, and then safeguarding it.  A form of detailed personal expression may be what saves Western civilization from cannibalizing itself, and I especially encourage young people to get into the habit of journaling.  Besides, journaling is a way to challenge ideas and other things into an expressive form to produce other work, such as books and other productions.  Creativity is an attribute of God, and it must be appreciated and valued.  We each have a degree of this within us as well, and it is our individual expression of it that makes it important to our society.  The so-called "cancel culture" of the epidemic disease of "wokeness" wants to sacrifice that in order to enforce a totalitarian groupthink upon every person on earth, and it is aided by billionaire oligarchs who meet every year in a town in Switzerland and attempt to conspire to control every aspect of individual lives, even down to the very thoughts an individual has.  It is important to resist this totalitarian BS that the elites try to push on us, and if we do so, we do as James 5 challenges us - resist the devil (and these oligarchs are controlled by him, no doubt!) and he will flee from you.  The greatest fear of any totalitarian demagogue is that people think for themselves, and if they can see through the smokescreen, it will threaten their control over the world.  Many will dismiss that as "conspiracy" or something dredged up by Alex Jones or something but examine the facts for yourself - we saw it with Hitler, with Stalin, and even as far back as Robespierre during the French Revolution.  Totalitarianism in any form, whether practiced by Hitler or by Bill Gates, is demonic at its origin and it goes against the nature God gave us.  Therefore, it needs to be resisted.  The resistance does not have to be violent or revolutionary - it can be expressed as easily as keeping a personal journal to preserve the real story in a time of oppression.  And our youngest people need to be the torch for this, but anyone can do that as well.  Anyway, enough said on that. 

Now that I got that off my proverbial chest, let me get into what I wanted to talk about.  This past week, two very important reminders were planted in my soul that made me begin to think about something - what happened to the passion I once had in certain areas?  The first of those reminders came from my parish priest, Fr. Timothy Grassi.  In his Easter homily this past Sunday at my parish (St. James the Greater in Charles Town, WV), Fr. Grassi said something that got my attention.  While focusing on Christ's Passion on Good Friday leading to the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, Fr. Grassi notes that we find hope in that - in many ways, we all experience a Good Friday episode at some point in our lives, where we feel like we too are dying inside.  But, hope should not be lost, in that a resurrection is coming.  I have felt like I was laying in a tomb myself over the past couple of years, much like Jesus did on the Holy Saturday before Easter.  I am in no way comparing myself to Jesus, as I am not even close - the analogy refers to how he chose to redeem us by taking on our sufferings.  However, in my particular case, a series of circumstances that have transpired over the past four years - a divorce, the deaths of both my parents and my last surviving grandparent, economic challenges which almost threatened even my home, and other things - have gotten me off course concerning things I used to enjoy and would get excited about.  I have felt like something was really missing in my life, even I could say like a fish out of water.  Transitions in life are never easy though, and when going through those it is easy to feel like you just exist and have no real purpose.  The uncertainty haunts and plagues you every morning as you wake up, and that at times can really cause problems.  As another example, you feel like you are set adrift in a small boat on a large ocean with no paddle or rudder, and it makes one lose perspective. That has been me the past several years.  All that has happened to me has shaken me up somewhat, and to be honest it has led to shouting matches with God, and days where I just don't feel much of anything.  Call it a "funk," or the spiritual "dark night of the soul," but it is not a good place to be.  That then reminded me of a couple of other things that started to come to mind I wanted to reflect on with you today.

Back in my early 20s, I was caught up in the Pentecostal movement and was part of a denomination called the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.  That all culminated after an event that occurred on June 19, 1989. I was fresh out of high school, and was getting prepared to go off to college that Fall. So, I stayed with my dad in Brunswick, GA that summer, and just prior to that I received a graduation gift of some money and invested it in a new book that came out a year earlier, Gary McGee's Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements.  To this point, I had belonged to a small Southern Baptist church in my town of Terra Alta, WV, and was part of that from the time I was baptized on February 9, 1986, in another Baptist church in Kingwood, WV.  Due to some bad experiences and faulty theology my mother had, I became very ambivalent to Pentecostalism after my own conversion, and wanted nothing to do with that.  But, Dr. McGee's book changed me, and as I started warming up to Pentecostalism again, during my summer while I was at my dad's I began visiting a small Pentecostal Holiness church in Brunswick that today is called the Potter's Wheel Church, and the lady pastor, Sister Mayfield, was very helpful for me during that time.  That June, the church had this revival and an evangelist from Michigan was preaching, and during one sermon I felt like he was speaking directly to me, and I felt this urge to get this "baptism of the Holy Spirit."  So, at the altar call, I went forward, and a group of very devout old Pentecostal ladies of that church - they had long dresses, "glory buns" and all - were surrounding me and praying over me.  At that point, I felt in my gut this bubbling feeling, and next thing I knew I was saying things I didn't understand!  I had at that point received what was called Spirit baptism, and what I was doing was speaking in unknown tongues. It was actually quite a powerful experience in all honesty, and I do not doubt that it was something real.  So, I go off to Bible college that fall - at a Baptist school! - and within a year I had left the Southern Baptists and joined a local Foursquare congregation in nearby Midland City, AL.  I chose Foursquare mainly because at that time I was a big disciple of the guy who was perhaps their best-known minister, Dr. Jack Hayford.  The experience in that particular church would not prove to be great (it was actually a traumatic experience of spiritual abuse later), and that story is for another time, but it galvanized my own newfound Pentecostal experience and led to being introduced to other things, such as personal prophecy, and that is where I want to go next with this because it is the second important thing that came to mind this week. 

At the Foursquare church in Alabama I attended, in late 1990 a guy started attending who talked a lot about the restoration of "prophets and apostles" in the Church, and he was associated with a nondenominational Charismatic organization in Destin, FL, called Christian International Ministries.  CI, as it was abbreviated, was founded by a former Pentecostal minister named Bill Hamon, and it was associated with this new emphasis on modern-day prophets and apostles that was starting to catch on in Pentecostal circles then. At that time, they had these Friday night "Schools of the Prophets" down there, and given it was about 60 miles away from us, my future wife Barbara, a friend from school, and myself visited down there.  The church at that time was just getting off the ground, but it had a small sanctuary which was packed to capacity.  On this particular night, they had a speaker there named Tom Nicholson, and as was practice at the end of these meetings there was a sort of altar call for people to be prophesied over.  When it came my turn, Tom began to pray over me, and the prophecy he gave me was quite interesting (I still have this on tape too) - he said he saw me at the bottom of a deep well, and I was feeling like no one was there to help me out, but then the Lord appeared himself and delivered me.  There were other details that are not relevant to the story that I now believe pointed to my eventual reception into the Catholic Church, but that prophecy came to mind this week as I began to reflect on things.  I want to first give some clarification and then I want to get into that part of the story.

I am no longer a Pentecostal, nor do I identify as one. Many of the practices of self-proclaimed "prophets" and "apostles" are just ridiculous, if not downright manipulative or even heretical.  I still very much believe that prophecy can happen, and that God does show us things, but over the years thankfully the Church has helped me to mature.  So, despite my own story, please do not think that I am in any way endorsing non-Catholic Pentecostal "prophets" or anything like that - far from it actually.  However, just like in Numbers when God used a jackass to speak to Balaam, I believe God can use some things, despite their flaws, to give one insight.  While some of what the person may be shown may not be evident for years after the fact, God allows it to give us perspective on situations we may find ourselves thrust into.  That is how I view many earlier experiences when I was a young Christian, and I think it is justified to say that my Christianity didn't begin when I became a Catholic - I knew I was a Christian long before I took that step, but the Catholic Church helped complete that work.  So, at the risk of stirring up controversy with some of my more traditionalist friends, I do believe Protestants are Christians, and have no doubt many of them do have a sincere faith in Christ.  I just see the Catholic faith as completing that work, that is all. 

That experience of being given that word from Tom Nicholson brought to mind my journey.  I mentioned many times before that I came into the Catholic Church as a process, and that process started many years before in a similar way that other people found their way home.  In the early 1990s a movement called "Convergence" began to attract many of us who identified as Pentecostals.  I explained this movement as being a way to integrate "three streams" of Christian expression - Evangelical, Charismatic, Liturgical - into a new thing which would restore Christianity to its fullness.  This movement, as I noted in earlier posts you can refer back to, had its roots in a meeting in 1977 in Chicago in which Dr. Robert Webber, Fr. Peter Gillquist, and other former Protestants began to articulate a need to revive ancient faith by integrating it with the positive aspects of their respective denominational traditions.  This "convergence" of different streams of Christian expression was seen as restorative in that many denominational traditions often emphasized one while eschewing the others, and thus an incomplete Christianity emerged.  One of the groups that grew out of this was comprised of a number of former Pentecostals and nondenominational Charismatics who embraced the Anglican liturgical tradition and thus formed the Charismatic Episcopal Church as early as 1992 I believe.  A very prominent nondenominational Charismatic minister, Malcolm Smith, later joined the CEC and became eventually a bishop.  He has perhaps one of the most insightful liturgical studies ever produced called The Power of the Holy Spirit in Liturgy, and in all honesty, I need to listen to those again.  Bishop Smith though is important here in this discussion for another reason.  In one of his teachings from some years back, he was discussing 2 Corinthians 5:17, which says this - "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away, and all things have become new."  It is the last part of that verse which Smith focused on, and he proposed something very radical that makes a lot of sense.  I want to now talk a bit about that, as it relates to my whole experience recently. 

There are two parts to this discussion I am going to deal with, one being theological and the other personal.  The theological aspect must rest on one principle - all Scripture is the inspired Word of God, and no passage in Scripture can contradict another.  It is the same message throughout, and thus consistent.  Context here means everything.  So, the first thing we note in Genesis is that as God created the heavens and earth in that 7-day period, he would conclude each segment of the creation with the words "it is good."  Let's start there, and then we move onto Psalm 24:1, which proclaims "the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof, the world and all who dwell therein."  It is one reason as well why the Church as a whole has always taught the importance of the transcendental properties of being - Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.  What God creates is good, and therefore it should be accepted with joy as a blessing from him.  However, in parallel movements both among Protestant Evangelical/Fundamentalists and the postmodern crazies that want to destroy statues and paintings, there is this quasi-Gnostic mentality that all matter is somehow evil and thus is not worthy of preservation and love.  I remember hearing ad nauseum from televangelists and preachers in pulpits in some Pentecostal churches as a younger man such crazy phrases as "in the natural," "it's the flesh talking," and other BS.  Coupled with that was their treating of the concept of tradition as if it were the F-bomb, and even the mention of the word by someone would call into question their very salvation.  I always thought this was insane, and in reality what they were proposing could not be implemented in practice, due to the fact our own human nature does have an aesthetic dimension and we are - God forgive me for paraphrasing Madonna! - "material people in a material world."  It is not our fault - God created this world, and he created us to live in it.  So, what thankfully Bishop Smith understood about the verse in 2 Corinthians was absolutely truthful - God doesn't replace Creation, but he can renew it.  This in turn would be in line with what both Bonaventure and Aquinas taught about supernatural grace - it elevates, heals, and renews nature, because Nature is a "book" authored by God Himself just like "Revelation" is. It doesn't mean we worship nature or anything about it, but it does mean we appreciate it and always see God's creative hand in it.  That alone dispels a lot of bad theology that has been mouthed from pulpits for years by well-meaning but ignorant Pentecostal, Evangelical, and Fundamentalist ministers.  Likewise, it exposes the demonic irrationality of the "woke" mobs who are making news by trying to destroy anything that "offends" them.  This is a lesson that needs to be taught more, and I may revisit it later myself in a future post here.  

On a more personal dimension regarding Malcolm Smith's insights on this verse, I want to begin by explaining the analogy of a structure - let's say, a house.  Every house has a foundation, walls, ceilings, etc., and as often happens, with the passage of time some components of that structure do deteriorate.  A brick in the foundation may crumble, the cement which bonds the bricks together may not have been mixed right, or something that enhances the structure may drop off or be lost in some way.  If a brick is faulty in a house, you don't just tear down the whole house - no, you repair the brick by replacing it with a new brick that will strengthen the integrity of the foundation.  Same principle if a part of the house that may be aesthetic or is integral to the overall design - if it gets stolen, damaged by elements and falls off, or is just lost, you don't want to necessarily replace it with something that is unrelated to the original, do you?  Of course not!  You reconstruct and restore that missing component as close as the original, but maybe with some improvements to prevent damage or loss.  In the same way, one's life may be in need of a little renovation, but you don't necessarily replace it with something totally different, do you?  There is an epidemic of self-denial among many Evangelical and Fundamentalist traditions in regard to the past - they want to throw out anything that does not align with their worldview, and they compel their members to do this as well.  Recently, I have been reading Jeri Massi's experiences with Baptist Fundamentalism, and she wrote an excellent book about it entitled Bitter Root: Atheistic Practices Embedded in Christian Fundamentalism (Jupiter Rising Books, 2013).  On page 59 of this book, Massi notes that many Fundamentalists base their mentality not only on a quasi-Gnostic understanding of nature, but upon even modern (and abhorrent) psychological theories such as those of B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov - the elimination of belief in conscience, in human will, and in human self-determination.  In doing this, it is easy to see why they would eschew the past, even for many people as individuals, and they will even go as far as to say that embracing the good aspects of one's past is a bad thing.  Why??  Thankfully, the teaching of the Catholic Church is a lot more logical and charitable in that it encourages embracing the good of one's past while also learning from the bad.  The misunderstanding in regard to that later aspect is that many people think that you should totally suppress the negative aspects of one's past.  This is not healthy, but it also is not a way for someone to be honest with themselves.  Scars will remain, and on occasion someone will initiate looking at that scar - maybe they are going through something that caused your scar, and your experience could help them, which is why God allowed the scar in the first place.  This is what makes Malcolm Smith's insight so relevant - God is not trying to destroy anything to replace it with something foreign, but rather he restores us by leading us to embrace those things which helped us grow, and a few blemishes are left on our structure to remind us that we overcame hurts and challenges and grew beyond them without denying they happened.  That being established, let me now tell you what I got from that this week.

I remember as a young man, and even fairly recently, being passionate about certain things and I derived a sense of purpose from all that which really excited me and motivated me to do many things.  However, in the past several years, life smothered much of that passion, and I almost forgot what it was about.  I had this urge to reflect upon some things about my own faith journey this past week, which is why Malcolm Smith came to my attention - he was a very influential voice in my own spiritual journey, and I owe becoming Catholic in part to him.  When I read that statement of his, it really touched the core of my being, and it was one of those "aha!" moments in my life where I realized I was missing something.  We have all felt a little "off" at some point in our lives - uncertainty, lack of direction, etc.  So, we cry out to God to give us that, and what he sometimes says is "look within yourself."  Of course, once that realization hits, then comes the next step - where do I take this now? How do I recover my old passion for this or that?  I am still figuring this out even as I write this, but one of the inspirations I did get from it was to actually write more in my blogs again.  And, more than likely, God has it orchestrated for this to maybe touch and impact someone else.  If that is you, I challenge you today to look within yourself, ask "what am I missing?" and then definitely keep your journal - if you don't have one already, start one.  The more self-discovery you begin to do, the more it will help you.  It is another way to say that at times the answer to our individual dilemma may be right in front of us, or in this case inside us.  Time to draw it out and reflect upon it if that is the case. 

I know I had a lengthy missive this week, but I am attempting to relaunch myself as I seek to get back in touch with the person I am as well. Please pray for me, and may God's guidance be with you as well.  See you next time.