I have been called many things in my life—many of them things not to be repeated in a family-friendly publication such as this—but “negative” is not one of them.
Admittedly, at times I can be a bit too optimistic. I still remember those first couple of weeks, then months, then, well, years of the Canadian Covid regime. All the while, I kept saying, “something good is going to happen soon, it will pass soon enough.”
In a sense, I was often wrong; things didn’t really get any better “soon.” However, in the grand scheme of history and the timeline of a civilization, a few months, even a few years, is not all that long. If I was to compare the plight of Canadians under our Cuban Princess, it does not hold a candle to the hundreds of years that the Israelites lived under Pharaoh.
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In any case, a little time and perspective has led me to cogitate on the times in which we live. These are some of the darkest times in human history, this is to be sure. Other times have been more violent—although this is debatable considering the worldwide reality of abortion—but our time is darker still than those of the World Wars and the collapse of civilizations.
I say this because our time is a time of unmitigated moral depravity. If we were at war in the traditional sense, we would be a more moral society, even if we were killing each other. A society at war with another is a society that believes in right and wrong; even if the society is wrong about who is right and who is wrong.
Ours is an age that believes not in right and wrong, unless of course someone suggests that there is a right and a wrong, which, of course, would be the wrong opinion in the age where there is no wrong.
There is no such thing as a hard and fast gender in our age, that is unless you are changing genders. Then the fluid-nature genders that are amorphous become as solid as the reality of x and y chromosomes—which obviously have nothing to do with the solid yet mirky reality of gender in the mind of the educated class of our day.
Women, we are told, are the most powerful entities on the planet. They can do everything a man can do, and they can even do those things better! However, they are also oppressed by men, who in their weakness and inferiority to the strong woman are somehow superior at the art of oppressing those superior to them.
Our age is insane, our elites are out of their minds, and our world is in the proverbial handbasket on the way to Hell.
However, optimistic I remain.
Why?
If God has allowed us to live in such a time and has allowed our society to descend into such a pit of stupidity and unreality, there must be a reason for it.
For one, we probably deserve it—if there are worse sinners than I, then we deserve much worse.
In addition, society has abandoned God, thus God has allowed the would-be prodigal son to go into the city as if God has abandoned him.
But, in this march through history that is long and travels a winding path, God works all evil for the good, and good people are formed in evil times. To cite St. Paul, where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more (Romans 5:20).
If we live in an age of moral depravity, it is because He expects moral clarity from His saints.
If we live in an age where the culture views children and their innocence like sacrificial offerings to Moloch, then parents are called to respond and ensure they do not trust the culture and the system the way their parents did.
In short, if God has allowed us to live in this age, then it is because He is raising up—as we speak—Christian heroes and heroism in Christians that is commensurate with the threats we face.
Furthermore, it is my belief that we can see the fruits of God’s intervention already taking place.
Perhaps I read too much C.S. Lewis and Joseph Pearce (is such a thing possible?). And my children and I are a bit obsessed with The Chronicles of Narnia. But it seems to me that Aslan is on the move.
You might remember that scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where the children first hear of the Christ-like Aslan. Mr. Beaver tells them that “Aslan is on the move.”
You undoubtedly remember what happens in that story and, if you have read the others, what happens in subsequent tales.
Aslan, who stands in the story as Christ, dies and resurrects. He returns in subsequent stories to aid a Narnia that has forgotten God and abandoned true religion.
Lewis tells us that Aslan “is not a tame lion” and that he is not “safe but he is good.”
Here we are in a time where the powers of evil and the reach of the White Witch has extended to all corners of the realm. It seems as if our season is one that is ever winter and never Christmas.
However, in the midst of this winter, we have seen the fall of Roe like Lucifer and the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart by the most unlikely of popes.
The fulcrum of good and evil does not tip in a mathematical way. That is to say, it is not as if Heaven and Hell fight with some sort of tally chart, where a score is settled. It cannot be underestimated just how significant it is that these two providential events took place.
Furthermore, Catholic tradition is on a meteoric rise, almost as if grace has prompted a love for the Traditional Mass to grow faster than the changes desired by the churchmen who believe they can suppress God’s liturgical patrimony of twenty centuries.
Like Aslan, God is not tame, and there is a wildness to the manner in which God intervenes in our world. He does not ask permission. He is not bound by your favorite private prophecy, and He does not ask if His actions fit the interpretation you have decided was correct. When He acts, He simply acts, and evil is left to pick up the pieces, dumbfounded and bewildered.
None of this is to say that things are going to get easy, or that our battles even approach an end. Nonetheless, it can be said that in this age of strange and absurd degradation, Aslan is on the move.
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