Me too.

I basically don’t watch the news much anymore because I simply don’t want to know. I’ve been reduced to being a child with my head under the covers, hoping the thunderstorm outside will go away and the monsters underneath my bed will sink back into the floor. Imagine, a grown man afraid of the dark.

Except for one thing. There is an out to all of this, a whiff of fresh air that reveals the other end of the tunnel, a little bit of candle that has survived the wind. I despair of the world at times but I remain convinced that Jesus is who he said he was, did what he did, and because of it all there’s a way through.

Now its not an easy way. We, you, I, everyone, have had our selves, body, mind and soul pounded with a pattern of existence that is anti -human, We’ve been, since the earliest moments of our conciousness, afloat in a sea of anti-culture, a way of life torn from sanity where we’ve been reduced to the basic parts of who we are with no greater whole. Your life is this moment. Your senses are deities. Your thoughts are oracles. Your urges are scripture. You are meant by the fates to crawl to the top of this context and achieve whatever you think the promise is. If a little pain comes up along the way, why we have things for that.

If you open your eyes just for a moment, step out of the matrix, you’ll see, maybe for the first time, how pervasive it all is. We’ve been pathological for so long that we think our sickness is health and our madness is sanity. What we presume to be normal is killing us and its hard to find a way out because our anti-culture preserves itself by blocking all the exits like a police officer walking us by a smoking hole filled with bodies and telling us “Move along people, there’s nothing to see here.”

Yet for those brave souls who do risk popping their head above their cubicle a discovery awaits. At first it doesn’t seem real. It’s so different, so unnatural to our conditioning. It is a voice clear and calm, without anger or fear and full of hope. It is a light piercing even if it can be barely seen and purer than the sun. It is a sense that seems like nonsense at first because it varies so greatly from the normal we’ve constructed, but a sense that once let it becomes the most profound wisdom. It is peace in confusion. It is an alternative to everything.

It is Jesus.

Yes, this crazy world with its crazy people, myself included, have somehow managed to mangle our understanding even of Jesus but that doesn’t mean who he is, what he says, and the way he shows to us isn’t truth. The dead ends don’t mean the journey is useless, and the failures, myself included, don’t mean that it doesn’t work. If you want to escape the maze you’ve got to push to get out. You’ve got to be just desperate enough to try, and hopeful enough to see in a way that others may not. You must pass from life to death and sometimes the passage is a traumatic kind of labor.

Yet even if all you can do is just barely see beyond sight, hope beyonf the moment, and reach out beyond yourself God, in love, will reach out as well and slowly but surely lift you up to what you were designed to be, a creature more than a moment, more than an urge, more than what you own, a being created to transform, transcend, and shine, a being whose destiny is to be linked to God.

For such a purpose God came to us, in Christ, breaking in and through our illusions to join with us and help us find our way. In Christ we have a teacher who provides the most excellent guidance. In him we have a physician for our deepest ills. In him we have the opportunity for a kind of existence that flows in and through this reality but points to something higher and better. In following him we become human in the best sense of the word. In him we see unextinguished light. In him we find the very definition of love. We fail but he remains.

The wise will see and understand.

you have to realize something. The way you’ve learned about the world, whether in school, or through the media, or in the discourse of public culture has largely been shaped by the most selfish and self centered generation of human beings ever to breathe air, the Baby Boomers.

Coddled as the children of parents tired of depression and war your teachers, your politicians, your clergy, the cop down the street and the person who writes for TV drank deeply from the well of self centeredness and in turn stained everything they touched with the same. The hippies are now in charge and this is what they have taught you.

There is nothing right or wrong beyond your feelings. Your feelings are the only evidence you need to decipher reality. Evidence is irrelevant, tradition is meaningless, only the moment and your thoughts at the time matter. There is no truth beyond your perception.

The ultimate goal in life is freedom which is defined not as the freedom to act responsibly but rather the elimination of all restraints real or imagined. To be free means that you can do what you want, when you want, and how you want, with the only caveat being that you try not to hurt others in the process. Discipline is repression. Expression of any and all urges, emotions, thoughts, or actions is a social good.

You are the judge and jury of your own world. There is no “our” there is only “me” and people who are like “me”. What the larger world may think is irrelevant as long as “I” think it’s okay. The mantra, “You can’t judge me…”

Now you may wonder why everything seems to be coming apart at the seams these days. The economy is dismal. The culture is crude and getting worse. There are hundreds of tears in the social fabric. Our leaders are emotional and spiritual children. We are in the process of de-evolving into barbarians. Hardly anyone notices because all they live for is the next mobile device, the next “hook up”, or the next party.

Well all those things that you see, the unease that you may feel, the angst at how you are to survive in this brave new world are all because two generations, the teachers and the taught, are trying to live a philosophy of life that is simply unworkable in the real world. The free love, free drugs, free experiences, and free economy of the 60’s didn’t work even in the 60’s, just ask Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, but the illusion has remained, clung to by a group of people who have ridden it to power, economically exploited it, and left all of you with the STD’s, the addictions, and the bill.

Ever notice who has all the money these days? Ever notice the folks who protested the war but now have no problem sending you into the fight? Ever thought about the people who told you that “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with” still can’t admit they were wrong even when people die for practicing what they preach? Isn’t it strange that people who campaigned for free speech are the same ones telling you what can and cannot say, what you can and cannot eat, and how you must think about the world or the success they dangle in front of you will be taken away?

And what’s worse is that long after these people, and I’m on the tail end of the Baby Boom myself, die you will be stuck with the mess. You get the scraps. You get the illness. You and your children and probably their’s as well. You’ve been served, royally, and the only hope is that a few will wake up from this terrible dream, enough to keep the world in some sort of liveable condition.

Turn off your TV, unplug yourself from the electronic nipple, get a life and maybe you will be saved.