Good-bye to 2009

The end of the year always comes as a surprise to me, and I'm not sure why. It really shouldn't. After all, I can interpret a calendar as well as the next person, and I'm well aware that January follows December. And yet here we are, on the 27th of December, and I find it hard to believe that 2010 is about to begin. Maybe it's simply a symptom of advancing age and the seeming compression of time that accompanies it. As a child, anticipated events never came as a surprise; rather they crept out of the future at an agonizingly slow pace. Just as those school-less summer days would pass in warm, glorious slow motion, so too did the long winter months with their cold days marked by early darkness and nightly hours of repetitive and usually meaningless homework. Ugh -- a memory worth forgetting.

Anyway, here we are about to wrap up one year and begin another and, for whatever reason, I'm simply not ready for the transition. So rather than review the past year or make predictions about the next, I think I'll just share a few thoughts that have been percolating in my aging brain these past few days.

My first observation relates to civil government and religion. I am truly amazed at how many Christians place almost total trust in government to accomplish virtually any task, provide any service, ensure justice for all, and achieve and maintain peace on earth. It's as if the modern Christian, in the face of thousands of years of consistently contrary evidence, has decided the city of man must assume a place of precedence over the City of God.

Of course St. Augustine would not agree with this modern tendency to place so much trust in government. He considered those who ruled over men to be no better than a gang of thieves and robbers. (Just a cursory glance at our own Congress should be sufficient to confirm the timelessness of Augustine's observation.) Augustine was pretty clear about this when he wrote, "...what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed upon" [City of God, Book 4, Chapter 4].

We seem to have forgotten that justice does not come from the world; it is not a gift of man, but is a gift from God Himself. As I mentioned above, the world provides its own convicting evidence. Whenever justice is placed solely in the hands of men, it becomes distorted by man's pride, his sinfulness, and eventually dissolves into something far removed from God's perfect justice. This doesn't mean we abandon our efforts to bring His justice to the world. On the contrary, doing so is part and parcel of the Christian life. But we must also realize that any attempt to achieve justice without reference to God is doomed to failure.

The current political brouhaha over health care reform is a rather nice example. The deals that had to be made with individual senators to ensure their votes call to mind Augustine's prescient comment that "the booty is divided by the law agreed upon." And, of course, no health care reform can be truly just unless it protects the most innocent and vulnerable among us. For almost 40 years God's justice has been abandoned and the world's idea of justice has reigned supreme in our nation and led to the premeditated killing of ten of millions of unborn human beings. Ironically, those politicians who are guilty of this horrendous crime against humanity are inevitably the same politicians who hypocritically apply the mantra "It's for the children" to justify so much of their intrusive legislation.

Observing my countrymen during these difficult times, I'm reminded of Walker Percy's comment in his novel, The Second Coming: "Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about  their ears."

I took this photo during a general audience in Nov 2005

The year 2009 provided another scary moment during this its final week when dear Pope Benedict XVI was assaulted as he processed to the altar for midnight Mass at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Fortunately the pope was not injured and the young woman who assaulted him was apparently unarmed. She reportedly suffers from mental illness and had actually attempted to assault the pope once before. This, of course, leads one to wonder about how well the pope is protected from attacks not only by the mentally unbalanced, but also by those with the training and skill to carry out their evil intent. At the same time, however, I would hate to see the Holy Father placed inside the kind of isolating protective bubble that surrounds the American president. I am reminded of the time Diane and I sat only about 30 feet from Pope Benedict during an outdoor audience in 2005. What a privilege that was, and what a joy! I would hope that people could continue to share that experience. I have a feeling that this pope will trust in God and not allow the Vatican's protective services to isolate him from the faithful.

2009 also offers some good advice for parents. The Tiger Woods scandal should convince parents that celebrities do not make good role models for their children. Indeed, I am always amazed when parents hold up professional athletes as heroic figures worthy of emulation. After all, most professional athletes are simply people with extraordinary eye-hand coordination, unique physical skills, and a singleness of purpose in which their profession assumes an exaggerated importance. Much better for Christian parents to encourage their children to emulate the saints.

Although I stated above that I would avoid predictions, permit me to offer one or two. First of all, I predict that the world will not end during 2010. I make this prediction every year and so far I'm batting 1.000. Should the world actually come to an end this year, my average will still be remarkably high, and anyway, none of us will care.

And lastly, I predict that the Middle East, from Lebanon to Pakistan, will only experience more violence, more terrorism, and more insanity throughout 2010. In other words, if you think things are bad now in that part of the world, a year from now you'll think of 2009 as the good old days. Peace there will be a long time coming, if indeed it ever comes. And we must realize that peace isn't always better than war. For example, the peace offered by the world easily evolves into the peace of totalitarianism and slavery. General Sherman's comment that "War is hell," was incomplete because the world's peace can be just as hellish.

Pray for the only true peace, the peace beyond all understanding, the peace of Jesus Christ.