If the LORD does not build the house,
in vain do its builders labor;
If the LORD does not watch over the city,
in vain does the watchman keep vigil. (Psalm 127 verse 1)
For over sixty years America has been turning away from God. We once saw ourselves as the new Israel, brought by Got our from the bondage of tyrannical monarchy into a land of freedom, flowing with milk and honey. Americans knew that they were imperfect, and strove to perfect themselves by mastering the land, guided, however imperfectly, by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As with Israel of old, we increasingly gave ourselves over the the worship of foreign gods: Marxism, Consumerism, Self Indulgence, Radical Individualism.
All these found the constraints of Christianity and Christian morality so odious that we passed laws punishing any reminders of what we had cast aside or objections to the new moral so called realities. We have built wide, straight and smooth roads to the future, and done almost everything possible to block off access to the narrow, steep and difficult road, mocked any who sought to travel it, and attempted to efface any memory or awareness of its existence.
The wide, level and smooth road leads to Hell, it is only the narrow, steep and hard road that leads to Salvation. And there is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ and His Gospel, outside His Church (no my friend, being a ‘good person’ is not enough). The Christian churches whose charge it is to proclaim this fact have failed. Christian pastors have too often been seduced by fashionable doctrines, battening on Christ’s flock. The prophet Isaiah knew in his time which we see in our own:
All you beasts of the field, come to devour, all you beasts in the forest.
His watchmen are blind, they are all without knowledge;
they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark;
dreaming, lying down, loving to slumber.
The dogs have a mighty appetite; they never have enough.
The shepherds also have no understanding; they have all turned to their own way, each to his own gain, one and all.
“Come,” they say, “let us get wine, let us fill ourselves with strong drink;
and tomorrow will be like this day, great beyond measure.” (Isaiah 56 verses 9 to 12)
America has traded the God of Glory for the empty promises of the Prince of this world, the shepherds of God’s flock no less than the rest.
Your Irascible Correspondent, that’s me, does not find this acceptable. America will not survive, much less be restored to greatness, unless and until America repents and believes the Gospel again. Never mind the MAGA thing, never mind the results of the any election, never mind any of that, it is nothing but smoke in the wind without a national return to God.
Its sackcloth and ashes time. It’s confession with tears and penance time. Its crying out to God for mercy time. Its begging the Holy Spirit for courage and guidance time. Its casting off all the obstacles to holiness time. Its time to renounce the soft and pleasant lies and amend our lives. Its time and past time to put on the mind of Christ and approach God with humbled and contrite hearts.
That’s the cross. The cross we are enjoined by the LORD to take up and carry daily.
Your Irascible Correspondent is Catholic and will be approaching things from that perspective. I realize that there those who still cling to the anti Catholic canards of centuries past. This we can discuss in Christian charity. I say, get over it. Jesus’ last prayer before going out from the Last Supper to the Garden of Olives and Calvary was for the unity of those who believe in His name. Get. Over. It. The whole Body of Christ must work together else we all descend into catastrophic, savage barbarism for who knows how long.
Granted that over the centuries Christians have endured the collapse of more than one civilization. Civilizations rise and fall. I say, “Not on my watch.”
We have work to do, so let’s put on the armor of God and be about it, in the name of Jesus the LORD.
