The Heavens Howl

The heavens howl. The ocean is frothy like a Starbuck's mocha latte. The coast is stoic. It receives the wind's wrath calmly. The rock is unperturbed. The angry air rushes over the water as a calvary charging across liquid plains. I hear the wind's curses as they snag themselves on the crags. What language! It is graphic in its gusts.

The Vain Hope for a Miami Winter

This just goes to show one should never hope for a Miami winter when one is just a notch a two in latitude below Newfoundland. It is a mistake when one is within a day's driving distance from the outer edges of the Arctic Circle to hope for the kind of temps that a palm tree would find comfortable.

The State of the Union

To discover this I didn't watch the President. Instead I thought about the evolution of our entertainment. Movies:. "You Can't Take it With You" in the thirties about the triumph of those things that transcend material gain. "It's a Wonderful Life" about the triumph of a life when it discovers through the help of heaven (the angel, Clarence) the effect it had on so many other lives for the good; "Shane", "High Noon", "A Man for All Seasons", "Chariots of Fire", and countless other films that aren't shy about the wholesome ideal, and the foundations of faith. And then to our own current times. Now I am at a loss. Or perhaps it should be counted as gain that I am ignorant of the current movies, TV programming, the seductive advertisements. Maybe it is our entertainment that is the real litmus of the state of the union.

Be Angry and Sin Not

Today at men's group it was an unusual subject. Bill Rosser was the speaker and he used as his platform an article in The Oxford Review on anger. The unusual part of it was that it was for and not against. So often in our current pacifist perpsective we are continually looking at any bit of anger as requiring psyciatric intervention. Anger management for any that even raise an eyebrow at least on the conservative or religious side of things. We fear becoming Crusaders, Inquis...itioners, fundamentalists, religiious ranters who would, if given leave, not think twice about putting dissenters on the rack. And thus have we become rather a soft receiver of calumny against Christ in all its manifestations in our culture. We have taken for instance the blatent loss of our freedoms even down to the simple act of baking a cake, or in more virule ways of the crude mocking of our Lord in publically funded 'art', or the smearing of the loveliest of the world's femininity in the mocking of Mary and motherhood. We have largely taken it. And yes, there is an aspect of our religion which does take it. But there is also a place to 'be angry and sin not' as St Paul admonishes us. In our culture we are made to feel guilty, to feel that we do deserve the monica of 'hater' if we feel the least bit of ruffling of our religious feathers. But this is an unbalanced view. Christ called the pharisees a brood of vipers and was a wrath to be reckoned with in the Temple. Tables were thrown over and a flagelium was premeditatively made. John the baptist had shouted his own Herod down. One imagines David facing Goliath made use of a righteous wrath over his own subjugation under the Philistines when he faced a giant in hand to hand combat. One sees the righteous indignation of the prophets. One sees Moses breaking the tablet of the law when finding the general person in the pew worshipping the revived god of Egypt. Yes, as some ages maybe have erred in being angry and sinning, we I think in our present age of niceness have erred in holding up niceness as the primary virtue. No, Alsan is not a tame lion as the Beaver says.

The Short-circuiting of Reason

What makes one automatically assume when he sees a house a carpenter, when one sees a bridge a bridge builder, when one sees an ant hill an ant architect, when one sees a bee hive a bee builder....yet at the prospect of a universe that operates under natural laws and where the mechanisms of its management are in perfect mesh...how is it at this the mind has abandoned itself to this madness of disbelief in a Maker?

The Much Much Younger Children

I wonder if the President while he was quite soft-hearted about Sandy Hook was also thinking of the much younger children, much much younger children that never make it alive out of our fearsome PP clinics where forceps and suction instruments are the real modern assault weapons. And as far as I know those are not covered by the second ammendment.

The President's Tear Ducts

I must confess to a stone cold heart. Yes, I watched the President's tear ducts well up and overflow over the fact that fundamentalist gun owners are still out there and that those metal objects that have been known to cause death are so able to be secured. I must confess to dry tear ducts when I watched him. I did try and arouse my emotional solidarity with the fact that guns are still hiding behind the second ammedment. I guess it just proves my callousness that no matter how hard my effort to manufacture in myself the same heartfelt compassion as the President---to the point of even slicing an onion just below my desert eyes---it was to no avail. There was no sign of rain. Not even a cloud.

Yet Another Executive Order

And yet now another executive order. The Congress might as well go home and watch sit coms. They aren't needed anymore for legislation. And with this new move to the confiscation of guns I wonder if this will include the Secret Service. If it doesn't I wonder why Mr. Obama is so loath to confiscate guns so close to him. Because we all know by now that it isn't criminals or ISIS that kill: it is those metal objects that hold pernicious projectiles of malevolent millimeters that we need to fear.