God the Father by Cima da Conegliano, c. 1515
MEDICAL doctors who are honest and upfront about possibly terminal illness are generally not hated for the news they deliver. Those who speak about spiritual ailments, however, are greatly disliked.
Please pause a moment and have sympathy for the messenger before reading this post. This is not fun, but since you have kindly granted this sympathy to me, I hereby grant you permission to hate my guts. Please know, however, that everything I say is not said on my own authority. It is said on the authority of those greatly superior to myself, whose words and teachings I have studied and to which I am bound.
If you are guilty of any errors mentioned below, I do not revel in your error or condemn you as a person. It is the awareness of my own mistakes and sins that motivates me. I want to spare you my wrongs.
Now for my subject:
In all the posts I did about “the pandemic,” I never lamented the fact that people were forced to stay home from church. Yes, the unconstitutional orders that closed those churches were wrong and treasonous. Yes, all congregations and ministers should have resisted those orders and kept their churches open.
But it was not a bad thing in itself that people were staying home and not going to church. There were potential gains in this.
Now that the churches are open let me outrageously say this: they should all be closed. Yes, every single church should shut down or revert to a place of authentic communal prayer (mentioned below) with no priests or ministers until the real crisis we are in passes.
This is an audacious and arrogant thing to say, or so it seems. In response, I remind you of these words of Christ:
But yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth? (Luke: 18:8)
Given this prophecy of near-universal apostasy, and many other prophecies; given also the state of the world, you should at least admit the possibility that we are in the midst of that near-universal apostasy. Given that we live in a world so steeped in irrationality that the ineffectiveness of a new medicine is being blamed on the people who don’t take it, you should at least admit the possibility that there is a near-universal collapse in discernment and rational thought.
Could it be that we hear today of so much fakeness, so much fake news, so many lies, because the very thing that must be real, the reality on which all else depends, has been rendered fake?
Jesus goes on in Luke 18 to speak of the Pharisee and the publican:
The Pharisee standing, prayed thus with himself: O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican. I fast twice in a week: I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not so much as lift up his eyes towards heaven; but struck his breast, saying: O God, be merciful to me a sinner. [emphasis mine]
Such important words for us to ponder! Read More »