Yes, no, maybe? Can you repeat the question?
The Human is scarfing down an exceptionally nice lunch/dinner thing with possibly more wine than should be allowed. The dogs are begging treats supplied by an exceptionally nice (and clever) church matron who makes them by hand in her kitchen. A gentle rain is falling, and now the Human is wrapping up lunch/dinner/thing with a final glass of wine and a rich dessert of…yeah…chocolate chips.
A voice from somewhere behind the lowering clouds pierces the sky:
Celestial Voice: What do you think you’re doing?
Human: (choke cough!) Uhmm…eating?
Celestial Voice: You’ve been “eating” for half the afternoon. When exactly do you propose to get any work done?
Human: Work? I’ve already rebuilt a template for hard-copy book formatting today.
Celestial Voice: Very nice. How about you actually do something constructive, like, say, FORMAT a book? And even maybe go so far as to publish the thing?
Human: Gimme a break, Your Vastness! I spent the whole darned evening last night and half this morning singing to your Holy Magnificence and helping to hustle cash to support your devotees.
Celestial Voice: Do I look fat in this radiant gown? It’s my favorite radiant gown!
Human: Oh, no, Your…uhm, Your Radiance! You look absolutely perfect!
Celestial Voice: Naturally. I embody perfection. To the extent that there’s any body to do any embodying.
Human: Well, Your Radiance, don’t you think that since You knocked off on the seventh day, your underlings should be allowed to knock off on Sunday?
Celestial Voice: That’s a cultural construct. How do you know Sunday was Day Seven? Could’ve been Tuesday or Wednesday or whatEVER.
Human: So, does Your Radiance mean I can knock off on Tuesday or Wednesday, too?
Celestial Voice: Surely. Assuming bankruptcy is a goal coveted by your species…
{Sigh} God as academic…
Oh well.
The Entrepreneurial Human is a) too tired to breathe, and b) too depressed by current events to function.
Today is Seabury Sunday in the Episcopal tradition. Under normal circumstances, it’s entertaining: we have a delightful band of Scottish pipers and drummers march us in and out with bagpipes, quite an impressive performance.
But.
You know, we — that would be you and me, my friends — are engaged in a holy war. Most Americans and possibly even most Norteamericanos have yet to notice this, or to fully appreciate its implications. But a holy war is what we have on our hands. We are at war with an evil on a par with Hitler’s Nazism. I grew up with it: Saudi Arabia was my home throughout my childhood, and in those days I had a front-row seat to the growth of a very scary movement.
We are hated by a faction of Evil unlike anything Americans, Canadians, Latin Americans, and Europeans have seen in centuries: Evil allied with religion. Really, it’s beyond our ken. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s an evil that decapitates nine-year-old children, burns caged young men alive, sentences dissenters to thousands of lashes, and murders harmless civilians going about their business. Yesterday’s events in Paris spoke to that.
You understand, bagpipes and drums are tools of war. Take that bit of history, put it inside a church (holy war + holy war: interesting), and combine it with my personal opinion, which is that our only hope is to fully engage the jihadists, NOW not later, with everything we’ve got. And by everything we’ve got, I don’t mean flinging volunteers into the war machine: I believe we need to reinstate the draft so that everyone has a personal stake in what is in fact a menace to Western civilization, and so that everyone can understand on a gut level that we’re facing exactly such a menace.
Yes. I’m retrograde. But I’ll say it anyway:
We are being swept into another world war. The sooner we and our allies grasp that concept, the better our chances of survival. The longer we dawdle about building that understanding and allying ourselves in war with countries that have a vested interest in holding back the forces of darkness, the less likely we will, over the long run, prevail.
At any rate…given the religious overtones of the ISIS attacks on innocent civilians, the presence of a tool of war inside a Christian version of the House of God was, shall we say, disturbing.
So, my friends, if there is a Radiant One, instead of asking “When are you going to get of your duff and get to work,” She may be asking “When are you going to get off your communal duff and bring a stop to this?”