Paula Adamick pulls no punches in her assessment of the current state of Canada, and whether we can even still call this conglomeration in any real sense a ‘nation’. For what binds a people together? Tim Horton’s and hockey, loons and lakes, maple trees and, now, marijuana? A Trudeaupian vague sense of shared ‘values’, never really spelled out, except perhaps an even more vague sense of ‘tolerance’, but tolerating what, exactly, and to what end or purpose? Politicians marching in the current ‘Gay Pride’ parade celebrating…well, whatever it is they celebrate.
If only they would cerebrate more, we might all be in better shape, and celebrate what should be so, rather than lamented.
Those of us still on the good side of sanity, however tenuously, should ponder the words from today’s Lauds, from Saint Paul’s letter to the church at Phillipi:
Omnia facite sine mumurationibus et haesitationibus, ut sitis querela et simplices filii Dei, sine reprehensione in medio nationis pravae et perversae, inter quos lucetis luminaria in mundo.
Which the RSV translates as:
Do things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world.
And as the Apostle concludes: Holding fast to the word of life…
Ah, yes, the word of life, which if we reject, will end up in our death, the wages of sin, in ways that we cannot imagine, but against which we are warned.
Tomorrow is the Solemnity of Saint John the Baptist, one of the few feasts to replace a Sunday. Like the two English martyrs yesterday, he paid for the truth with his own head, but gained a far greater reward, which should buoy us up in these strange and dark times, as we look forward to Christ’s glorious and triumphant return.