Wonderful Matters

There are two motion pictures that have half-hour long conclusions that I have seen dozens of times. I don't watch or even remember much of the regular bulk of those films because they are far too crushingly depressing, but that is some of why those particular segments are so transcendently transformative. The films are The Shawshank Redemption  and The Book of Eli . Not going to get into Shawshank  right now, and if you know the film and know the substance of that last half-hour or so, you know. You may be like me with tears flowing from my soul as Red settles into his seat for that bus ride to the border. Same thing with The Book of Eli . When that brand new makeshift printing press on Alcatraz Island is printing up those pages, my soul just streams those tears. But again, it isn't just the divinely powerful redemptive quality of the story, it is the contrast to the pure evil. In and around the completion of Eli's mission there at the end, we see Carnegie consummating his...

"You asked, 'Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?' Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, too wonderful for me to know." This blog effort is titled Wonderful Matters because of the words in the 131st Psalm, but these words from Job apply just as much. Too often we try to figure out things without the full counsel of God, and I am often quite guilty of that. That is Job confessing to God there about something God told Job after he and his friends just spent thirty-plus chapters in the book spouting about things God has not said or done. Oh they got some of it right. Job and his friends do bring up a few things that are legitimate concerns about life and reasonable thoughts about the way things are. But for the most part we just don't know what God is doing with whatever it is that is happening out there . The reason I am all about wonderful matters in spite of that truth, is that even though: God has indeed let us in on many of His w...

"All who hate [wisdom], love death." I couldn't find a more striking, more succinct, more revelatory bit of literature than that little piece right there to describe the World right now. Or ever . It is the 36th verse in the eighth chapter of Proverbs, by the way, and the only reason I bring it up is because I want to blog very briefly right now about something I heard today that was pretty astounding. Even though the principles are timeless and wise people live by them, I just thought it was quite profound. I listen to Rush Limbaugh every once in a while, very infrequently in fact, but I do like him and his courage to say things straight up. I don't agree with everything he says, but I'm not getting into that. I do actually see that most of what he shares is indeed insightful, compelling, and yes, extraordinarily reflective of truthful things . Since I've been home doing my teaching with an online platform, I listened to a very small segment of his in w...

In the twentieth chapter of the book of Luke, the powerful political authorities ask Jesus a very important question. These authorities were the hifalutin religious elders, priests, teachers, but they were political, just like they are today . If you don't know that, you aren't paying attention. Well, sadly it is likely the same scant attention most people pay to this passage. Jesus is asked, "By whose authority are you doing all of this Kingdom stuff?" [His powerful words, His miraculous deeds, you know...] Jesus then asks them, "What do you think, John's baptism, was it from heaven or from some human origin?" These dudes knew what Jesus was doing: exposing their sanctimonious hypocrisy . They knew that if they answered from heaven Jesus would ask them why they don't give up their institutionalized pretense and follow Him. They also knew that if they answered from men, then the people would remonstrate because many whom those dudes needed for supp...

As we get closer to a supposedly extremely important election this upcoming Tuesday, there is one thing that resounds through all the hype. Fear . Everyone is fearful of everyone and everything. In some way or another, the expressions of rage and disgust broadcast from all sides really amount to a whole lot of fear. You can cut it with a knife it is so thick. And yet in the national psyche there is a palpable desire to seethe and holler and scratch and claw about the favored cause -- it is so righteous! And it feels sooo good. The most typical is "Trump is a Nazi!" accompanied by the contrasting "Trump is making the country great!" Oh that these seasoned Catholicists would see the oppressive fear the authorized World Ops are interminably generating and turn authentically to The One Who Frees From All That. I don't have much time to blog, I just have so much to do with family and work, I think I've reminded my readers of this a number of times. Oh t...

I saw two movies the other night. My son and my wife picked up two movies from Red Box I actually wanted to see, and so I watched them. The first was War Room, the second was Mad Max: Fury Road . I'd recently seen that Mad Max  got an Oscar nomination for best picture. Hmm, maybe it's pretty good. So I watched them. War Room  was a powerful, engaging, touching, compelling drama about the beauty and wonder of prayer and fostering a relationship with a God who heals and saves. Yes it was predictable and melodramatic, yes. But it was a wonderful film that addressed real life concerns in a profoundly moving way. Mad Max , on the other hand, was a bloated, contrived, ridiculous waste of time. In the interest of trying to come up with the grandest hyperkinetic mega-dystopian thrill ride you'd ever see, you got a gruesome, psychotic, completely uninteresting pile of pap. 87% of it featured big bad-ass kick-ass-looking vehicles doing battle in the desert showcasing the wildes...

Just feel like blogging a bit of eschatology here. I just feel like it. I'm not a date-predictor by any means. But among the very last words in the very last couples of verses of the Bible are "Come quickly Lord Jesus." What a wonderful matter that will be. Thing is, here's what I see right now. I see Russia and China both moving big-time on a thoroughly destabilized Syria. I seem to remember some Christians with some reasonable eschatological sentiments saying that Russia is the "Gog/Magog" of Ezekiel and China represents the "Kings of the East." Israel has a powerful army and terrific security unit, and they are now mobilizing big-time in response to this. Some eschatological minds have thunk that the reason the U.S. does not play a part in last days prophecy is because it just isn't there . With a completely arrogant, incompetent president and a stunningly spineless, impotent Congress I'm beginning to see some truth there. I seem...

So many things continue to happen out there and all around that beg for worship of those who rule the Catholicist Nation. It's 2015, but nothing is new about how the City Builder seeks more souls to put on the value extraction altar. Thought I'd write about a few here, but this'll be more like a mention just to introduce my latest home page piece . I recently looked at a bit more about that Stephen Colbert finale, something I wrote about in the piece. Along with all those who showed up to send Colbert off -- those whose voices get to be shoved into the authorized World mouthpiece -- there was a bit of an apotheosis for Colbert. Apparently he killed death, declared himself immortal, and rode a sleigh into the heavens with Santa Claus, Abraham Lincoln, and Alex Trebek. Yes, this is a typical Colbert tack making fun of people who have idols, that's fine. Great amusement. Except that Colbert's approach to everything still conveys the idea that anyone who believes in...

Tomorrow it will be ten years to the day that I opened my webzine The Catholicist Nation . It is a somewhat bittersweet note to make here, and I am making it today instead of tomorrow because I have a full day of worship and family activities in store. Still, the completion of this day makes it a full ten years of webzine ministry. The bittersweet part about all this is that even much earlier in that ten year time period I'd thought there'd be far more people in the mix of engaging conversation and vibrant interaction about it, and perhaps even committed action on the principles elucidated there. Alas, I haven't seen it. There are a few who see it, read it, send me a note about it. But not many. I'd like to think much of it is because I just haven't taken the time to put together a more comprehensive and expansive web design and marketing program. Most of that is just that I don't have the time or money to do that. I do believe most of it is simply that peop...

I saw a film called Snowpiercers  last night. I'd seen some thing about it, then saw that the reviews were pretty good -- it was said to be a science fiction and political film, perfect, I love that stuff. While it was kind of goofy and very preposterous at times, it did a decent job of keeping my suspension of disbelief intact. It was also extraordinarily violent, but then, when you make a metaphor of the earth out of a train, there's bound to be some bloodshed. A lot of bloodshed. And in this instance, the bloodletting is in tight cramped quarters. Especially grisly. Anyway, just wanted to mention it was quite the bright elucidation of the World. To wit: - Human sacrifice is arranged and augmented by the System and for an ordained purpose, one that is indeed, quite spiritual in nature. - People are deliberately moved to live in benighted indigence to keep them in a simmering state of protracted rebellion, providing the necessary legitimacy to a System required to crac...

Had an interesting thing happen tonight. Was relaxing, channel surfing, and came across the film V for Vendetta . Thought I'd tune in to it, there in the middle of the film somewhere, see a bit of it. About 14 seconds after I tuned into it, that one scene came up -- the scene I found the most fascinating, the one that gave meaning to the whole thing. I'd even referenced it in a webzine home page piece a number of years ago. Here it is , by the way, there on YouTube. I'd made a point about unavoidable government identification, but as I watched it, I thought about all the applications to my current webzine home page piece . We're all in tribes, all segmented by authoritative segmenters, and we're segmented in ways we can't even see. From those tribes we seethe and rage and simmer and rail and hate and fear and hate-and-fear some more, all the while hoping that our tribal rent-seeking is successful enough to keep our raging crusades justified and our cushy li...

My niece has been over this weekend, and she's exactly the same age as my daughter. It was a great opportunity to see Wreck-It Ralph , and it was a terrific movie. It was actually kind of slow to start, and I started to see some of the same formulaic plot devices that you see in all the Pixar movies. But the key message is one I want to share with you here because it relates exactly with the subject of my latest home page piece . I want to start by sharing with you something you may already know. I am a rabid San Francisco Giants fan. So it may go without saying that when they won their second World Series title in three years last Sunday night, I was ecstatic. But I realized something a while ago that is quite profound about this ecstasy, and it is one of the most perverse facts of life that there is. For you see, the splendidly wonderful wonderfulness of that whole thing wouldn't mean a thing if there weren't The Los Angeles Dodgers . And not just the Dodgers, b...

I've recently taken a visceral hold on a particular verse in the book of Acts, chapter eight. Verse 31, to be specific. It is right in the middle of the interaction between the Ethiopian eunuch and Philip, the man God told to go to meet for the very purpose of sharing the beautiful news of Christ. After reading a bit of Isaiah, the eunuch confesses that he needs someone to explain it to him , and he invites Philip to sit with him. Philip is not as much The Evangelist, as many call him. He's really just plain Philip the Explainer . Tupper Saussy was one such explainer. I'd grown up with all the accoutrements of genteel Christian comportment, but never really knew what it was like to live vibrantly in Christ. This was simply because I was so caught up in the crusade of making everyone around me into my image. It was only until I read Saussy's Rulers of Evil that I'd actually understood how much I was entangled-- wrapped and twisted in the midst of The War. The hyperv...

Shortly after I wrote my last blog post, we left for my sister-in-law's for Thanksgiving. Driving our van on the way there, I had a thought that I'd had before in some form, one I'm certain that others have also had. Here's Thanksgiving, the time when we are supposed to give thanks. The question is, to whom are you giving thanks? I mean, really, what do atheists do when they give thanks? What do Eastern mysticists or even devout Catholicists do? Who exactly do they give thanks to? Atheists may say that they are "thankful." I'm sorry but that is completely meaningless. Thankfulness implies that you are feeling good about something and you are appreciative in some sense for that. But why would you have anything good to begin with? From where did it come?! The Eastern mysticist is what many today would call a "New Ager." Convinced all is illusion, or that we are all just part of the Great Cosmic Oneness, who exactly does one address when saying tha...

My stepbrother has resigned himself to his death in six months. This is abjectly flooring news, just how brazenly mortality whacks one upside the head. And for him, literally. He's been fighting a brain tumor for about a year. He had chemo, and it was thought that he'd beaten it. But his eyesight was still failing terribly, and at his latest testing they found that his tumor had been as insidious as they had thought all along. It was growing back. The guy's got a wife and two bright young near-teenage boys. He's got everything to live for and he knows it. He's even blogged quite eloquently about the ordeal, being open and honest in the most visceral terms while displaying that resolved grace you like to see in one with whom you're acquainted. Still... Death is death . Not like the more widely marketed media death. Recently O.J. Simpson was going to exploit his notoriety by writing a book "How I Would've Killed My Wife," something like that, and doi...

My 10 year-old son went off to camp today, where he'll be for four days. But this morning before he went, I promised him I'd play him in Monopoly, his favorite board game. The full game, an hour-and-a-half long. We put the game together, set the timer, and off we went. Usually he beats the tar out of me. Seriously, he has this knack for rolling past my house-laden properties and lands on "Free Parking" way more than he should (yes, we play with that kitty in the middle). But today, I was the one getting the rolls he's always gotten . About an hour into the game I'd already landed on "Free Parking" five times to his none (maybe John Rawls was right!) I'd bought four properties he couldn't afford, and at the height of my power I had hotels on each property of three different color groupings, three of the railroads and both utilities (hey, those guys can get you some sweet cash). The notable thing is that because my son loves to play this game s...

I noticed that tonight there is yet another episode of "To Catch a Predator" on NBC's Dateline . I'd written a blog post about the practice of television network shaming a couple months ago, and I'd like to address a few other things in light of NBC's programming approach here. First of all, is it the thinking of NBC execs that doing this on a regular basis would actually put a dent in criminal molestation? That by sending correspondent Chris Hansen out to bait more of these guys, many of them would stop for fear of walking into the trap? I mean, I really don't know the answer to that question. I do know that unless any given individual does not allow Christ to take out his sin, he is always prone to do all kinds of wretched things. A proficiently wide-spread "Scarlet Lettering" can't change that. Any one molester who Chris Hansen can't stop will still destroy the life of someone. Furthermore, what will NBC execs do when enough people who...