The Shining Factor, Part III
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I'd previously remarked that anyone can have this ability, in the Christian sense it is discernment, simply identifying what is righteous out there as opposed to, yes, I am not ashamed to say it, as opposed to the stupid. As I wrote in my home page piece this season, I wrestle with calling anyone a fool because in the fifth chapter of Matthew Jesus warns against it. I do believe, however, that he was distinctly warning against calling someone a fool when you yourself are just as much of a fool, and often by doing so you are simply stirring dissension and not working to come to understand, both of you, what goodness and meaning and charity and responsibility and righteousness really are.
Still, as so many places in Scripture share with us, there are some very stupid people out there doing very stupid things to wreck many, many lives.
Furthermore, you can see them and their lethal activity if you look.
Victor Davis Hanson is someone who does a lot of looking, and his weekly pieces are pretty much just rote catalogues of the latest in rank stupidity. This recent one, aptly titled "Life Among the Ruins," is actually very good because he adds, as he does sometimes, some fine elucidation of the profound impact that stupidity has on our lives and livelihoods.
I'd been thinking about how anyone can use their "shining" to see the evil that continues to metastasize when people mindlessly allow the World System to continue doing all it does to destabilize things in their efforts to laboriously legitimize its authority. Again this is what it does, you can do nothing but enter into that maelstrom by embracing it on one hand or "resisting" it on the other -- or you can leave it be and dwell in the Kingdom.
If you do the latter you may still see it for what it is.
I first thought, huh, you can easily see the evil in what people do to destroy their own bodies by what they ingest, whether is is illicit drugs, alcohol, tobacco products, excessive prescription medications or just far too much sugar and preservative-filled processed foods. Illness and obesity are things you can easily see but very few see those things as evidences of evil in people's lives. Ahem. Look at what the Covid hysteria exposed. While the whole Covid thing was a wildly propagandized farce employed for political purposes, it did very much lay out before our eyes the standard-issue evil that afflicts so many.
I must be careful not to sound uncharitable regarding people who struggle with chronic conditions or immunocompromised situations or being overweight. But that is largely the point -- I'm not leaving them be by saying any of that is just whatever-whatever, I agree it'd be really good to work to find things we may industriously and charitably do, yes, to address the evil that enables those things to persist.
In that I must also be careful with using language that makes it seem like people have excuses. While they are powerfully influenced to commit evil acts, they are still subject to judgment. Yes we are asked to forgive, yes our battle is with powers and principalities -- but that's precisely what makes forgiveness and mercy and restoration meaningful. People commit horrifically sinful acts and are accountable for those things.
At the very end of The Revelation, when it is all said & done and God has been the most merciful in waiting for people to come to repentance and enjoy a deep abiding faith on Him by His Son, there will be no other opportunities to enter into His domain. He says there in verse eight of chapter 21, "The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters, the liars, -- they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death."
I think about what is happening right now in the financial world. Yet again the liars who have the value registration of our monetary units in their hands are at it again. It has been that way for millennia and millennia, even though right now extraordinarily stupid people at every one of the highest levels of government, finance, and commercial activity are showing how foolishly evil they are.
A bank in northern California in the heart of the tech sector -- The tech sector! With all the great grand rich smart saviors of everything! -- that bank discovered it simply could not stay afloat holding Treasuries they acquired, as all banks did years ago in order to do an end-run around post-2008 relief efforts, and is now tanking and indeed threatening the whole global financial system (hoo-boy here we go again) because of interest rate hikes resulting from the mind-bendingly stupidity of the government policies driven largely by the gargantuously stupid Modern Monetary Theory-oriented philosophies themselves derived from, from...
Huh.
Do you know where those ideas came from?
Oh yes they did originally originate from Hell, yes, but there are places here on earth, with real live (but spiritually very dead) people in legitimate positions of very authoritative authority to make all of this happen. Can you see who they are and what they are sworn to do? Things you can do nothing about except rage and rail and roil against them if you want, :;pshaw:: -- just fuel for their conflagration, you know.
What you can do is share all of this with others so they can have "the shining" -- and please, again, this is merely employing the most basic wisdom and discernment, and if you don't think you can be as wise and discerning as you'd like then by all means get into Scripture and prayerfully ask Christ to give it to you because He will.
But you've got to ask Him.
I have to add a couple things, this being a simple blog post and all.
I caught this Twitter post from Jason Whitlock, who I like a lot. He's a sports guy but he talks about other things too and he is a confessed follower of Christ as well. He too goes a bit deep into doing "the shining" thing, shining light on the stupid evil in a number of different places. Here he asks a simple question, you can see it there in the post. At the time of my screenshot you may see that over 500 people put in answers, and most every single one of those answers is a definitively, phenomenally stupid thing that has infected the organized sports world today.
I've seen it there for years. I've not paid attention to sports things for over 20 years now, and while I do confess I still watch my Kansas City Chiefs games, yes I still indulge myself with that, forgive me, and because I can't help that my mental radar regularly picks up any number of other sports-oriented things, I very much concur with those hundreds of commenters responding to Mr. Whitlock's question. If you were to look at those answers, you'd see there are a few people who see it. All the stunningly wicked racialist stuff that just gushes out of the sports world today like a broken sewer line, the ugliest sodomist stuff from all the horrifically evil LGBTQ-oriented pusillanimity that vomits on to playing fields, courts, tracks, and pools.
I am still stunned that so many are still so unwilling to do a very simple thing:
Make your own sports leagues.
If the reigning sports Poobah Organization or whatever major official league there is will not stop permitting men proclaiming to be women to compete against real women, then get your precious daughters out of that hellscape and form your own competitive community.
Thing is, how many would do that? That there aren't too many who would do that shows that there is still a pretty good critical mass of very good wholesome Catholicists who just can't see the World System for what it is. Or really, they do and they like it. In fact that is precisely why the System thrives. People without Christ love the darkness more than the light.
I must add that one of the profound reasons there isn't enough courage to break away from the World stupidity, something Hanson mentions in his cited piece, is that there simply are not enough men who've left adolescence and firmly rejected the feminization they're told they must adopt, and resolutely become strong community leaders, not too mention solid abiding husbands and fathers and homekeepers and all of those things we desperately need men to do. Once again, however, much of why that is happening is because we've done too much allowing Hell's instructions of living and working and "lifestyle choice maintenance," if you will, to weave their way into every community through far too receptive hearts and minds.
One more thing, and wow, I have thought of dozens of things upon which to shine His light. The only, the only reason any of this is addressed for anyone who happens to come across it is to direct one's attention to The Light.
In my latest home page piece, I wrote a bit about The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis. I simply have to add this note from that book, a note about the very end of that wonderful story.
Not only is Lewis a terrific apologist for the Christian faith, but he also gets the stupidity. And here, believe it or not, he gets the stupidity of those mandarins in official positions of power. It isn't as if The Silver Chair is the only place he's written things like this, but this passage in particular is so exquisite. I only wish I could be as eloquent at the task of so graciously -- really: calling out the stupid. This is why Lewis is one of the most renowned literary figures in history and I'm just a piddly little blogger.
Anyway, at the very end of The Silver Chair Eustace and Jill return from their adventure in Narnia to the real Earth world from which they came, yet Aslan and Caspian join them. They are situated just on the other side of a wall outside the school, a large part of which is destroyed. The head mistress of the school and others see them through that gap, yet Aslan has his back turned. They do recognize him as a lion however, and notice Caspian and the children wielding swords.
I cannot do justice to how Lewis himself describes it all, here it is:
"All the bullies were running like mad, crying out, 'Murder! Fascists! Lions! It isn't fair.' And then the Head (who was, by the way, a woman) came running out to see what was happening. And when she saw the lion and the broken wall and Caspian and Jill and Eustace (whom she quite failed to recognize) she had hysterics and went back to the house and began ringing up the police with stories about a lion escaped from a circus, and escaped convicts who broke down walls and carried drawn swords. In the midst of all this fuss Jill and Eustace slipped quietly indoors and changed out of their bright clothes into ordinary things, and Caspian went back into his own world. And the wall, at Aslan's word, was made whole again. When the police arrived and found no lion, no broken wall, and no convicts, and the Head behaving like a lunatic, there was an inquiry into the whole thing. And in the inquiry all sorts of things about Experiment House came out, and about ten people got expelled. After that, the Head's friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Head's. And when they found she wasn't much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after."
Oh my, in one single paragraph, a splendid description of exactly what the Catholicist nation is like, among both the powerful and the subjected -- what a pathetically benighted existence. And I do mean pathos, the sincerely visceral sympathy one must have for those living so abysmally in the darkness.
There is grace, and mercy, and joy that can be had in the Kingdom.
Anyone with His "shining" to share that bright, beautiful light with them?
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Here's a home page piece I wrote just a couple months before the whole Stupid financial thing collapsed in the fall of 2008. Here's a page with a series of blog posts I made during that time. I have others, I encourage you to peruse my webzine to perhaps further move you to go to Scripture and seek His wisdom, discernment, and righteousness that can only be had in Christ. All I can really do here is just draw attention to a bit of the world's stupidity (which can indeed be pretty massive) but if you don't see it, well...
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