There Is Only 'Now'

“They used to say about Abba Joseph that when he was about to die, and the old men were sitting about him, he looked at the window and saw Satan sitting there; and he cried out to his disciple and said, ‘Bring me a stick here, for this devil thinks that I have become old, and that I am no longer able to stand up against him.’ And as soon as he grasped the stick in his hand, Satan, in the form of a dog, threw himself from the window, and the old man saw him taking to flight.”[1]

The world around us is a mess and growing more so of one. The Church is a mess, too, with the development and advance of modern liberalism as it works to insidiously rewrite the standards of morality that God long ago set into place.

I am the first to admit that I cannot save either of them. For one thing, I left my messiah-complex out on the prairie a few months after the turn of the Millennium at the last Protestant church that I attempted to pastor. For another thing, it is enough for me to stay focused on saving myself. At this point in the development of things, maybe regression of things would be more apt, it is enough for me to seriously take to heart the words of Saint Peter as he testified and exhorted those First Century hearers saying to them, Save yourselves from this perverse generation. [Acts 2:40]

Nor will ecumenism save the world or rescue the Church. Ecumenism is a 20th Century man-made ideal that is easier to say than it is to achieve. Ecumenism is an illusion.

Worse, ecumenism is a delusion. Perhaps a well-intentioned delusional illusion but still something contrived by man in the post-modern era as some kind of wound covering to hide the ugliness of the still bleeding wounds of the Great Schism, the Reformation, and the multiplied reformational divisions that followed on the heels of Luther nailing his thesis to the door of Castle Church at Wittenberg.

The only way to achieve a real working ecumenism in such a denominationally divided atmosphere is to so thoroughly compromise on both the subtle and significant differences that create the existing divisions between Catholicism and Protestantism that all dogmatic and doctrinal distinctives are completely masked. Once masked, all involved parties enter into and live in some kind of a limbo-land charade where an impotent hybrid-type of correctness replaces the correctness created by the authority of plain Biblical Truth and Apostolic Tradition. The neutering compromises that a real working ecumenism require simply are not worth making.

I am presented a personal dilemma ... this living in something of a no-man’s land as a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism. Protestants generally view me as some kind of Benedict Arnold that fled and pledged allegiance to an enemy camp. Most Cradle Catholics don’t know what to do with me because I point to the Scriptures and make reference to the Catechisms … not just the new one endorsed with Pope John Paul II’s autograph but the old ones as well. It would be different if I didn't care about all of it.

But I do. I do care. I care about people and their spiritual condition. Jesus did say, after all, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. [Mark 12:31]

I care deeply. I care deeply enough that I cannot stop being vocal about Christ and what it means to earnestly walk in his sandal prints as one of his followers. I care deeply enough that I cannot help but to point out obvious errors and departures from the historical Truths and Traditions that are part of the Deposit of Faith given to the Twelve Apostles by Christ. I cannot help that the world is full of people that deny the historic faith of Christians and take exception to these things. I cannot help it that there professing Christian people who take exception to Catholicism and invest their lives in divisive sectarianism.

Regardless of what others think, do, or say, I must continue to follow the sandal prints that refuse to be filled in by sand being blown about by the contrary winds.

We are now only hours away from marking five months [150 days] since we initiated our self-sequester because of the Covid-19 virus. Life, for us, has a generous measure of surrealness to it. There is no ‘redo’ button that will take us ‘back to normal’. There is only this ‘now’ … a ‘now’ replete with the anxieties created by dealing with the Covid-19 virus and all the exacerbated craziness and social upheavals that characterize this already too fractious 2020 election year. Add to the mix of multiplied unpleasant uncertainties and anxieties this untimely necessity of having to relocate. Now here we are in this 'now' having to say farewell, at a distance, to Shirli’s mom who died alone in a Florida ICU unit because of the Covid-19 virus.

There is no ‘redo’. There is only ‘now’. At this stage of the development of ‘now’, being wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove necessarily means moving deeper into the proverbial desert and keeping a stick in hand to keep the devil from hanging around.

[1] The Sayings of the Holy Desert Fathers