End of Days

I have never been to the Vatican, nor have I stayed at a well-known motel chain, but I know my way around the Stations of the Cross and the Lives of the Saints. I'm always amazed at the number of people who think Christmas is the origin of Christianity-others consider the beginnings to be Easter Sunday.

If the former is The Promise and the latter The Promise Fulfilled-today, Holy Saturday, is the act of faith and hope that defines you as a Christian. The belief in the Resurrection which the New Testament portrays as  the reward for the faithful is never so near and yet so far as it is today.

The earliest disciples had nothing to go on, unlike we of the Brave New World Order. They had witnessed a crucifixion-one of the most egregiously horrific forms of death sentence at its time. Cowering in an upstairs room, huddled together fearing any sound and every footfall was possibly a signal someone was coming for them, they had no way to see the glory of Easter Sunday. All they could do was believe.

For them to believe as devoutly as they did between the worst day in the history of the world and its greatest day, remains, for me-loyal son of Holy Mother Church, but a FARC for more years than I care to recall-the day which created the Christian religion, today.

From childhood on, I struggled against the suffocation that surrender to the traditions and rites seemed to signify. I took no solace in unquestioning and unswerving belief-preferring what I understood the path of Thomas to be and, finding no one who could answer my questions, absenting myself from the body of believers. How odd that this declaration of freedom has never created a sense of being free.

Not that I don't envy those of faith and think about the comfort that comes from that, especially anytime I read another account of another servicemember lost in the flood that has been our facsimile of a Middle Eastern foreign policy for almsot two decades. 

We've lost two sons of Norwich in those years, but at the risk of being thought cynical, it's always the same movie, with a different cast. And if the cost of what we are doing, or failing to do, hasn't come to your corner and village or city yet, give it time as we war over horribly unremarkable places of a nation we have carried with us as a coward does an abscess for all these years, unable or unwilling (I can never tell which) to do that which we know we must to conclude that which we can no longer control. 

Faith is a wonderful thing, this from a man with very little; blind faith, however, is not.
-bill kenny