Hope in the Future

"Now in these dread latter days of the old beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunting death dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pine trees and the question came to me: has it happened at last?" Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins: the adventures of a bad Catholic at a time near the end.

I have been reading this book at the rate of about two pages a week. It is what I call bathroom reading, something you pick up and read every time nature calls. It is a zany, Southern character filled, novel that touches on a lot of things about existence, good and evil, God and society's ills. Anyway I have considered myself lately somewhat of a prophet. I don't mean it like most people interpret it, that somehow I can see into the future. The Prophets of the Old Testament, were very much concerned with the people of the times they lived in, however if those times included people who turned away from God, well, it is rather easy to predict the outcome. I began this blog by stating that I felt as though I had become a stranger in the world I lived in. Not that I am some kind of special person who is immune from the goings on. No I'm a late bloomer, well actually I'm someone who returned to the path I was following up until my adolescence. The Church and Catholicism was very much a part of my life, (secondary to baseball, my first love). I have traversed rather rapidly with the grace of God and the Holy Spirit. It as though I have been in a coma. When did society become so anti-religious, so anti-God? There is nothing sacred now -the Church is the same as a Wal-Mart or the shopping mall, a place where you might spend some time there if necessary. America has "dumbed down" quite a ways. Education is about learning disorders and medications. Reading has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Schools now want a curriculum that more and more prepares you to be a little worker in the capitalist clog. Anything thing outside of that is useless. Try finding a philosophy program at a major university, hell,try finding a philosophy course. Many Catholic universities don't even offer theology degrees, business is far more important. The values and principles that guided us through the infancy of our nation to the civil war, past two world wars, the cold war and to some extent 9-11 has been discarded. America is a hedonistic, greedy, materialistic nation, that pays lip service to religion at best and persecutes it at worst. People care far more about American Idol than Jesus Christ. The national debt is a disgrace and is going to collapse America one day. I have already cashed my chips in on America, sorry but I believe the future is bleak, not just economically, but more importantly spiritually. Please understand this: I am not in a state of despair. I am in a state of hope, because historically people will seek God when all else fails. My vocation is to bring that hope now, to equip people with the Everlasting Man, the Love that does not fail, The Way, The Truth and the Life. So when the seas get rough they will get to know the one as described in Mark 4:41 "“Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”