Home from work, he took off his boots and turned on the radio. Mozart came on first, but he changed it to Bach. Mozart, while beautiful, riled the soul. Bach soothed. He poured himself a small glass of vermouth. He sat in his chair and picked up the newspaper with his left hand and his bible with his right.
“Watch and beware. You can be assured that when darkness falls there will be difficult men making preparations for the desolations. You know how it is – dangerous things begin with subtlety and end with cruelty. The first hurt forgotten, a second abuse is assured.”
A dry awareness settled over him. The days these days were all heavy. ‘Perhaps I am overdoing it,’ he thought to himself.
“No distance. No empathy. No call. People will follow a selfish lack of civility and a verbal, mental, emotional immaturity. They will devote themselves to crude language leadership. Boastful, arrogant, preening, rude. Empty challenges and vulgar displays, boasting proud.”
He saw in the news that Pope Leo had been diagnosed with lung cancer. ‘It would be terrible if the Pope died now,’ he thought.
“It will be a noble display of honor inside a body of lies. All extravagance. All exploitation. All lies. Irreligious except for their devotion to mammon, they will be cavalier lovers of stolen money.”
He smirked a little and sipped a little. ‘The subtle materialist atheism of the capitalist is more a threat to Christianity than the atheism of the socialist,’ he thought again. He’d been saying something like that again and again for years.
“No subtlety now. No secret small thing. “No one but me. I am the greatest. Beyond the boundaries of humanity. Blind, unfettered power.” Disobedient children grown up to be unthankful impatient adults – dressed for church.”
He yawned and stretched. Looked at the photos of his wife and children on the wall. He smiled and returned to his reading.
“This trajectory takes us past heartless to intractable. Slanderers will abound. Profligate with the same savageries they condemn in the rest of the world. They are enemies of everything good. Untoward men and perverse women.”
He put his reading down and tried to remember something. Who was it? Who said, ‘I always pray for the sick, the poor, the journalists, authorities of the state and church – in that order. Journalists form public opinion.’
“There is no safety here, only thunderstrike explosions of treachery of a corrupted society demented by pride. They keep the outward presentation – Sunday fine – but have rejected the inner power. No inner light.”
‘Have we forgotten the message?’ he wondered.
“Keep away from them. All of them.”
‘Amen,’ he thought. Then, after a pause, ‘And God have mercy.’ He closed the book and the paper.
2 Timothy 3:1-5
