The New Year

The concept 'new year' is artificial, remarkably so, for the desired result, it would seem, is an excuse for another party - something like feudal times in Europe when serfs and peasants of all description were run on the squirrel cage until they dropped, simply attempting to eek out a too modest living on a plot of overplanted  soil that had not been rested since the time their own fathers had run a rude stick down a wriggling furrow, spread a few seeds, and slowly starved into disease and the ultimate experience; and still they were given more so-called festival days per year than are enjoyed by 21st-Century humankind in the (similarly) so-called "developed nations."  What a gift!

Death.

If you too have wondered (in the full implications of that word) why folks throw their too easily earned and too easily flowing dollars into the coarse experience of horror cinema, KISS, Marion Manson, adoration of Charles Manson and his ilk, and fulltime partying, here is the answer: people are inured to the simply comfortable life and looking, searching, delving for that 'something more' to stir their deadened passions, their overwhelmed senses.  Curiously, they do so by attempting to top the last touch, kiss, smell, taste, until "society," as they like to say, creates a Richard Dahlmer who can eat his read meat rare.

They are on the wrong track and it is the wider We who have brought them to this juncture in what so many are wont to call 'human development.'  What is missing is the obvious: a sense of awe -- that kind of 'over the top' -- for something yet greater, something larger, something truly better.  What that might be is not really so difficult to figure out: should you think that "what we have is..." something not so sweet and good as justice, then you might have already found and grasped the opposite - reverence and veneration of the something greater, something larger -- larger than everything else and everywhere -- God.

What a quaint thought.

Perhaps...indeed, perhaps, if you comprehend also the origins of that word: knowing also odd, perhaps because bothering to know anything well and deeply in our time is become so petty and laughable as to garner only ridicule.  Let us make it our hope in the New Year that change is our personal purpose and that by such change a greater good will come to prevail over the giddy chaos that now threatens to overwhelm our country, our communities, families, our children and selves, and our sanity.

Pray for this in praise of the only truth that is God.